InfoCompanions » Innovation

Don Tapscott on Gen-Y

admin — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:25:56 +0000

The leading business strategy authority brings fresh focus to Gen-Y through the story of one over-achieving millenial who doesn’t read books (and it’s ok).

Greg Matthews on power of social media as a tool for innovation

admin — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:23:10 +0000

With cool project work to back him up, Humana’s Director of Innovation demonstrates the power of social media as a tool for innovation.

Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain’s secrets

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:45:07 +0000

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Deloitte Innovation elevator campaign

admin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:13:04 +0000

Deloitte Netherlands launched a new business unit – Deloitte Innovation, which focuses on developing new business ideas. As part of the campaign, several Deloitte offices had their elevators transformed into showers. Because after all, the best ideas are born in the shower.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model

admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:36:05 +0000

Am not a great fan of “concept cars”, but BMW Gina deserves special attention for completely rethinking out of the box. Check out the cool premiere video below, where Chris Bangle, Director of Design, BMW Group, describes the thought process that went behind this cool pair of wheels. No wonder GM and Ford are struggling just to survive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Simon Whatley has some interesting pics. Also check out TechFresh.net for related pics.

Google Wave – another masterpiece from Google

admin — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:03:34 +0000

Which one of the following communication mediums do you use the most? Email? Video Conference? Instant Messaging? Blogging? Bulletin Boards? Social Network? And if you said yes to at least 2 of the mediums above, am sure you have wished for a product that helps blur the boundaries between these products.

Wait no more, Google unveils Google Wave, an open source, personal communication and collaboration tool – all within a browser, using HTML 5 (dubbed as the Microsoft killer). Simply defined, Google Wave combines the best of worlds from plain vanilla email, hosted conversations, bulletin boards, combined with the power of instant messaging and social network applications like Orkut. Connect the concept with the possibilities at workplace – shared meeting minutes, with REAL TIME view as content is created (yup, real time – meaning text shows up in your browser as your colleague types), real time deliverables and content creation etc.

Lisa Hoover from “Computer World” defines Google Wave as:

“Wave is an elaborate mashup of collaboration, documentation, and real-time messaging that Google hopes will make people finally sever ties with AOL, Microsoft, and other online services. Its function is similar to what would happen if you linked your team’s computer desktops together, then put a giant virtual whiteboard in front of everyone.
…
I think it’s a safe bet Wave will fly in enterprise. If nothing else, the magic words “improved workflow” will entice companies to at least try it. There’s no question that freelancers, telecommuters, and anyone who relies on remote collaboration will jump on Wave the day it’s available, and stick with it if it helps save time and money.”

What’s more – Google Wave comes with a cool set of APIs, opening up a world of possibilities and opportunities to develop extensions. Drooling.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out Ben’s latest blog post on Mashable.com for a deep dive

RepRap – the self replicating machine

admin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:26:18 +0000

Ever wished that your new iPod could somehow self-replicate into two iPods every night? Or maybe every other hour? Christmas would be so much more fun… and less expensive Adrian Bowyer is thinking on somewhat similar lines. A senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath, Adrian is credited with the invention of the revolutionary RepRap Project – an open-source self-replicating 3D printer. As per The Guardian, “[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment…”.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. Adrian defines it as a practical self-copying 3D printer that builds the parts up in layers of plastics – in essence, a self-replicating machine. Not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 60% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere.

This is an interesting coincidence: we can make 60% of our proteins; the other parts are evolved to be cheaply available everywhere. In this respect, RepRap machines could/would follow Darwin’s theory of evolution. And with the project now available in Open Source domain, natural selection seems all the more logical growth route.

Imagine the potential impact of this “magical wand”! Will this “demonetize money”? Check out the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vision of One Laptop Per Child

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:00:51 +0000

Check out this cool animation highlighting the “Vision” of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program. I love the simplicity in the messaging and design of this video. All major projects and initiatives SHOULD start with a clear statement and “visualization” of the vision, such as this… and can help engage your stakeholders, users and other community members alike.

Also check out the other blog post pointing to some potentially troublesome future for the OLPC program.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One Laptop Per Child – On Life Support?

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:00:29 +0000

Am sure you are already aware about Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” program, (also check out the cool “vision” video here)which over the last few years has gained considerable momentum and accolades… in addition to a healthy amount of criticism. Back in business school, many times I have scratched my head to the financial viability of a program like this… in addition to the long term sustainability. Sure there are some generous souls out there and would love to spend/donate/give-away… but even the noblest of all ideas need a “realistic” financial plan. Four decades of global charitable contributions have poured trillions/pentillions of dollars into Africa… and failed to produce any comparable returns – forget about long lasting effects. The continent if at all, is in even more dire need of resources and funds. How many case studies do we need before we learn our lesson?

Anyways, back to the OLPC topic – The original goal of the project was to reduce the cost to market to about $100 per unit. However, insufficient volume and configuration changes have ensured that dream remains elusive, and cost to market to about $188 per unit. What’s worse – a series of reorganizations in the recent few years have alienated several key contributors. OLPC Director of Security, Ivan Krstic, left the program earlier this year, complaining that, “the internal restructuring reflected a fundamental change of vision that he couldn’t accept”. Ivan continues to blast the program on his personal blog. Ranting of a not-so-happy-ex-employee? Not so fast. Ivan points to several key issues, including infrastructure. He wrote:

“We have no real support infrastructure for these rollouts, our development process is not allocating any time for dealing with critical deployment issues that (will inevitably) come up, and we have no process for managing the crises that will ensue”.

Another key excerpt from his personal blog:

“Put differently, OLPC can’t claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot.”

A “big enough” population out there thinks that Nicholas is insane, even adding that he is a “terrible manager and leader”. A case in point – on May 20, 2008, at the recent OLPC Country Workshop, Nicholas said that the OLPC mission statement “has not changed one ounce”. And the very next minute, he introduced a fourth version of the mission statement, entirely different from the previous three reported on OLPC News not long ago. Hmmm… The original Five Core Principles were:
1. Child Ownership
2. Low Ages
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and Open Source
Then how does XO (the Microsoft Windows version) fit in this vision?

Bottom line – The OLPC project is now struggling to sustain momentum, and might end up on life support if its leadership can’t turn things around.

But hold on… this blog post isn’t all about bashing the OLPC program… it’s to celebrate the success, even if limited, of the program, including 600,000 units sold in the first six months, for more than $200 million. And how can you forget that this program helped create a new market segment, ultra-low-cost laptops, where there is more Linux than Windows on offer. So check out the video below – OLPC program distributes 650 laptops in a remote school on Cambodia… and the reaction from a grateful community. Do you find it interesting that in Cambodia, the Defense Minister if the “official cheerleader” for the program? Hmmm… wonder what happened to the Ministry of Education.

Also check out my previous post about Nicholas reporting on the OLPC program.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Toys that blend Beauty and Magic

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:00:40 +0000

Remember Pleo, the animatronic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus. The creator, Caleb Chung is a very funny man, who interestingly is also the co-creator of the Furby. In this video, Caleb walks us through the intimate design routine and countless hours that went into conceptualizing, building and perfecting both Furby and Pleo. He tells us the philosophy is to blend art and science, “beauty and magic”… and wrap the whole package in a thick layer of business logic. We see his philosophy in all his “life-like creations” from Furby, which sold over 50 million units worldwide, generating over $1.2 billion in sales, to Pleo.

Look out for instances in this video where Chung quickly walks through toy successes and failures in the past. I think it requires a great sense of humor and self confidence to be able to discuss your past failures. On a related note, check out this cool blog post- “You Must Fail – Six lessons from Michael Jordon”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Innovation at Procter & Gamble

admin — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO, Procter & Gamble, and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets. In this interview, A.G. Lafley talks about how innovation is at the core of P&G’s business strategy, and how P&G makes innovation an everyday practice in their organization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About A.G. Lafley:
As the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley is a world renowned leader in innovation. He began at Proctor and Gamble in 1977, and was chosen as CEO in 2000. He inherited a struggling company that was then and still is adapting to a new global business unit. He saw one of the only ways to get out of trouble was to focus on innovation in his company. A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan have co-written “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation”.

Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit – And You Should Too

admin — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Zappos, the Nevada-based online shoe and accessories retailer, has an interesting twist on new-hire bonuses. After applying and being chosen for a job, employees get a month of paid training. Then they’re offered $1,000 to leave. It’s a test of commitment, meant to see if money is what matters to workers. The amount offered has risen from an initial $100 and could grow even more. Only 1 in 10 take the offer, according to CEO Tony Hsieh, and the company now employs approximately 1,600 who passed the test.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About William C. Taylor:
William C. Taylor is an agenda-setting thinker, writer, and entrepreneur. His new book, Mavericks at Work, has been a New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller. As cofounder of Fast Company, he launched a magazine that earned a passionate following among executives and entrepreneurs. He is an adjunct professor at Babson College and a former associate editor of Harvard Business Review.

Yes, You Can Innovate Like Google

admin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 06:00:00 +0000

The words “Google” and “Innovation” have been used numerous times in the last few years… and all of us undoubtedly admire “The Google Way”, their talent acquisition, management and retention strategies etc. However, we usually shy away from adoting a subset of those ideas, with the usual answer - “we’re different”. In this video, Tom Davenport describes how Google uses chaos to quickly move from prototype to finished product, tolerates a high failure rate in order to ensure bigger success, and gets the most from knowledge workers. He also asserts that more companies can, and should, borrow elements of Google’s innovative approach to business.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Tom Davenport:
Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the Process Management and Working Knowledge Research Centers. His books and articles on business process reengineering, knowledge management, attention management, knowledge worker productivity, and analytical competition helped to establish each of those business ideas. His website is tomdavenport.com.

Green City

admin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:00:00 +0000

San Francisco has made great progress towards becoming a “Green City”. Voluntary programs like “Green Business” that encourage businesses to take proactive actions that are good for their bottomline and the environment, is just another example of the city’s innovative approaches towards greening. Mayor Gavin Newsom talks with Dana Goodyear on what it means to be green in politics and in the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Gavin Newsom:
Gavin Newsom was born October 10, 1967 to the Honorable Judge William Newsom and Tessa Newsom. He grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Santa Clara University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 2005, Newsom earned an honorable mention as one of Time Magazine’s Best Big City Mayors and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

As San Francisco’s youngest mayor in 100 years, Gavin Newsom has brought fresh ideas and renewed energy to the City and County. He has earned a reputation as an innovator on issues ranging from homelessness to the environment, healthcare to education.

Simple designs that could save millions of lives

admin — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Amy Smith:
Mechanical engineer Amy Smith’s approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith, working with her students at MIT, has come up with several useful tools, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity, a simple grain mill, and a tool that converts farm waste into cleaner-burning charcoal.

The inventions have earned Smith three prestigious prizes: the B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, the MIT-Lemelson Prize, and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Her course, “Design for Developing Countries,” is a pioneer in bringing humanitarian design into the curriculum of major institutions. Going forward, the former Peace Corps volunteer strives to do much more, bringing her inventiveness and boundless energy to bear on some of the world’s most persistent problems.

Innovation at Google

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Innovation for its own sake is useless. Period. And no one knows this better than the company who redefined the rules of information search. In this interesting 50 minute presentation, Google CIO Douglas Merrill tells us about innovation at Google. He highlights the importance of speed, the user experience, machine translation, defining innovation, relevance and more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Douglas Merrill:
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. Dr. Eric Schmidt joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001.

Formerly a senior vice president at Charles Schwab; worked at Price Waterhouse and the RAND Corp.; ran a small consulting company in Southwest Asia; taught at Northwestern; has a doctorate in psychology at Princeton.

Cars off the road, data into the skies

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Robin Chase rose to fame by founding Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business, but that was one of her smaller ideas. In this presentation she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a no-fee mesh network as sprawling as the United States Interstate highway system. But how could you build a free wireless system that vast and pervasive? Chase finds the answer in a few short lines from The Graduate. And it has nothing to do with plastic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Robin Chase:
If she weren’t a proven start-up entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, some dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. Or if she weren’t such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a businesswoman only. Ultimately, the best way to understand Chase is simply as a remarkable innovator.

Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on founding Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key system and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one. The idea is at once ordinary and highly sophisticated, with powerful technologies applied to tasks as prosaic as grocery shopping. But the result couldn’t be more straightforward: fewer cars, less carbon.

Since its founding, Zipcar has doubled in size every year, making Chase’s biggest ideas and her latest company, GoLoco, look mighty promising.

Journey to the center of the Earth … and beyond!

admin — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth’s deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that’s not enough, he’s also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Bill Stone:
Engineer and daredevil explorer Bill Stone is obsessed with discovery. After years of crawling through the deepest unexplored caves on the planet, he’s building robots to go where he can’t. His company Stone Aerospace built DepthX, an autonomous robot, which descended 1,099 feet down Mexico’s deepest watery sinkhole. By 2008 he’ll send an enhanced machine through the ice of Lake Bonney in the Antarctic. But that’s just a test for the real mission, building a probe with Nasa to bore through miles of ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa, then swim through the buried Europan sea in search of alien life.

He’s also hoping to singlehandedly jump-start commercial human space exploration by offering spacefarers affordable fuels and consumables extracted from the moon. His new Shackleton Energy Company, or SEC, intends to raise $15 billion (as he points out, this is about the cost of a North Sea oil production platform complex) to mine ice thought to be trapped on the moon’s southern pole at Shackleton Crater, and to sell derived products (including propellants and other consumables) on the moon and in low earth orbit (LEO) to international consumers. If all goes well, SEC will be open for business as early as 2015 as an international energy company.

Journey to the center of your mind

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:00:00 +0000

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Vilayanur Ramachandran:
V.S. Ramachandran is a mesmerizing speaker, able to concretely and simply describe the most complicated inner workings of the brain. His investigations into phantom limb pain, synesthesia and other brain disorders allow him to explore (and begin to answer) the most basic philosophical questions about the nature of self and human consciousness.

Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He is the author of Phantoms in the Brain, the basis for a Nova special, and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness; his next book, due out in January 2008, is called The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain.

Why can’t we “grow” new energy?

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Juan Enriquez offers a glimpse of some ground-breaking research to explore the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat? (Less than a month after this talk, his company announced a process to do just that.).

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Juan Enriquez:
A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business and society, Juan Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. The founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, Enriquez has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter’s marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world’s oceans.

Formerly CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation and chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state, Enriquez played a role in reforming Mexico’s domestic policy and helped negotiate a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He is chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomics firms. The Untied States of America, his latest book, looks at the forces threatening America’s future as a unified country.

InfoCompanions » Innovation

Don Tapscott on Gen-Y

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Greg Matthews on power of social media as a tool for innovation

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Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain’s secrets

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BMW GINA Light Visionary Model

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Google Wave – another masterpiece from Google

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RepRap – the self replicating machine

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Vision of One Laptop Per Child

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One Laptop Per Child – On Life Support?

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Yes, You Can Innovate Like Google

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Green City

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Cars off the road, data into the skies

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Journey to the center of the Earth … and beyond!

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Journey to the center of your mind

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