Sony launches crowdfunding site for employees' business ideas. Peter Guber sur Twitter : "RT @HarvardBiz Innovation happens when people are inspired... Living Systems and The Information First Company. A map tracing the information flows within Uber’s San Francisco market. One of the great joys of my career is the chance to speak at gatherings of interesting people. Sometimes it’s an unscripted, wide ranging conversation (like during Advertising Week, for example), but other times it’s a formal presentation, which means many hours of preparation and reportage. These more formal presentations are opportunities to consolidate new thinking and try it out in front of a demanding audience. Last month I was invited to speak in front of group of senior executives at a major bank, including the CEO and all his direct reports.
I was asked to focus my remarks on how new kinds of companies were threatening traditional incumbents – with a focus on the financial services industry, as you might imagine. So preparing for this talk forced me to do exactly the kind of hard work any writer both fears and relishes – coming up with something original to say. Or let’s look at another market: hospitality. Super Normal. I regularly get asked the question: What do you think of <insert social app here>?
This question is usually followed up by another question which goes something like: How would you design a great social app? Usually I answer this question by telling the story of “Super Normal,” one of my favorite Japanese design philosophies. When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it Super Normal. For example, imagine that you are an innovator in the world of simple tools for around the home. Today you are interested in creating a new and innovative version of the everyday metal bucket. Imagine a basic metal bucket in your mind. To apply Super Normal thinking we start by looking at what is normal and then ask the question: What are the key problems? The same rules apply to design and innovation in social software. The lab or the factory. You work at one, or the other. At the lab, the pressure is to keep searching for a breakthrough, a new way to do things.
And it's accepted that the cost of this insight is failure, finding out what doesn't work on your way to figuring out what does. The lab doesn't worry so much about exploiting all the value of what it produces--they're too busy working on the next thing. To work in the lab is to embrace the idea that what you're working on might not work. Not to merely tolerate this feeling, but to seek it out. The factory, on the other hand, prizes reliability and productivity. The factory wants no surprises, it wants what it did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Some charities are labs, in search of the new thing, while others are factories, grinding out what's needed today. Hard, really hard, to do both simultaneously. [DRAFT] Stanford d.school bootcamp notes from July 2012 1 - Weblog - Between Creativity & Pragmatism | Joseph Rueter.
D.school July 2012 - Expanded Notesd.thinking Modes: Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. I attended d.school at Stanford for their July bootcamp. It was a fantastic experience because of the richness of the ideas that formed over such a short period of time as well as for an introduction to a really solid and approachable process, Design Thinking, for generating viable product and experience design opportunities. I'm writing this for my benefit. The Design Thinking process includes the following "modes:" Empathize. So… on with the show. Design Thinking seems like a practice.
Empathize I was struck by the contrast between the rigor of Stanford, an institution (e.g. brand) of the "mind," you might say, powerfully championing deep interest in other humans. It's simple. The tricky part about Empathize is that you have to take your face and your body and go meet a stranger and be genuinely curious in them and what they are doing and felling. So… Empathizing… just do it. Define Ideate Test. McKinney Incubator, TenPercent, Launches Dognition - Cat: Creativity and Technology. How does your dog think? Dognition, an innovative new startup backed by North Carolina agency McKinney and its incubator, McKinney Ten Percent, is out to unlock the mysteries of your pooch's brain.
The paid service, which went live earlier this month, lets dog owners put their pets through a series of brain puzzles that will help them understand how their pet thinks, and also, for the first time, pave the way for data that will unlock the mysteries behind cognitive traits of different breeds. For example, a sample game/puzzle asks you to lay down two treats at arm's length from yourself, then point to one. Depending on which treat is eaten first, your dog may be an independent thinker or a collaborative one. The startup went from conception to launch in just five months, and was developed around the fundamentals of canine cognition research, via partnerships with professors like Duke University's Dr. 7 tactics lean startups need to build great products. If you’re running a lean startup, “launch and learn” is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that’s a potentially make-or-break issue.
Our design studio works with dozens of startups each year to help teams define their products and features. Through the process of doing this over and over again, we’ve collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier and then adapt their plans more nimbly. The result is almost always that they ship better products and do so even faster. Clickable mockups Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. At first I thought these prototypes would be too rough to be useful. Customer interviews Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Fake doors Recon Micro-surveys. 4 Innovation Strategies From Big Companies That Act Like Startups. Stodgy. Slow. Bureaucratic. Big companies get a bad rap when it comes to innovation.
It’s easy to focus on the failures: Blockbuster, Borders, Blackberry, and Kodak. It’s also easy to become enamored by the latest fast-acting upstarts like Undrip, Tout, and Glyder. But there’s a quiet revolution happening in corporate America. . • Intuit organizes multi-day "lean start-ins" that gather "intrapreneurs" together from across the company to teach them how to apply rapid experimentation to create new products, services, and business models. • Kimberly-Clark promotes one-day "expert acceleration sessions" that bring hand-picked outside "thought leaders" face to face with business teams to bust mental models and create game-changing strategies. • Whirlpool uses a network of innovation mentors (also called i-mentors), who are loaded with innovation tools and guidance to help business teams focused on challenging market "orthodoxies.
" 1. 2. 3. 4. Newspaper Advertising Collapse. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre Entrepreneurs. [Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written ten books. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. You can follow him on Twitter @jaltucher.] I’m pretty mediocre. Particularly as an entrepreneur. I’m ashamed to admit it. I’ve started a bunch of companies. That said, all entrepreneurs should be so lucky. If you want to get rich, sell your company, have time for your hobbies, raise a halfway decent family (with mediocre children, etc), and enjoy the sunset with your wife on occasion, here are some of my highly effective recommendations. - Procrastination – In between the time I wrote the last sentence and the time I wrote this one I played (and lost) a game of chess.
Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing. Try to figure out why you are procrastinating. It was a $90,000 gig. Loic Le Meur Tells All About Seesmic’s Long And Winding Road To An Exit [TCTV] What is the Future of Storytelling? As consumer technology evolves at an ever-quickening pace, opportunities for new forms of storytelling are emerging. Experimentation is all well and good, but what do audiences actually want? To answer this question, research group Latitude has interviewed 158 early adopters and compiled a report that forms the first phase of its The Future of Storytelling project. Unsurprisingly, these early adopters are keen to take advantage of everything that technology has to offer. Their key demands are summarized in Latitude’s report as ‘The 4 I’s': Immersion, Interactivity, Integration and Impact.
Essentially, they want to be able to explore a story in greater depth, and have it reach out of the confines of a single medium and play out in ‘the real world’. Goodbye, passive consumption? ➤ The Future of Storytelling report (phase one) PDF Header image credit: Pond5, other images Latitude (Creative Commons) How To Thrive In The Free-Product Economy. Building technology has never been cheaper than it is today. Or faster. In the past twelve months, Ruby on Rails programmers built more than a million apps on top of Heroku, a platform that allows coders to save drastic amounts of development time. Historically, the majority of the cost of a typical app comes from maintenance, says Heroku COO Oren Teich; companies like his build layers of technology that deplete those setup and maintenance costs--not to mention experience required--to build software. "Innovation is increasing," Teich says.
Moore's Law says computer processing power gets steadily cheaper and faster to produce. If a product on the market can be monetized by any means other than directly selling it, a comparable version of that product will eventually be offered for free. It's Happened Throughout History Early newspapers cost money; we paid for the product.
It Happens Because Of Networks It's Happening In Enterprise It's Happening With Various Models. Power Index - Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You Either Die A Hero Or You Become The Villain by MG Siegler. Over the past month, I’ve been watching Dalton Caldwell’s App.net experiment with much interest. Essentially, he’s trying to rebuild Twitter from the ground up, only as a fully user and developer-supported network. In other words, he’s pissed off — as many people are — about some of the changes Twitter is undergoing in an apparent attempt to monetize. Caldwell has been trying to crowd-fund $500,000 to build this network, and if he gets it, he promises the service will provide “a different kind of social platform”. I like Dalton.
I’ve known him since the days he was building imeem, through picplz, through the first app.net, and now onto the new version. We meet up and chat from time to time. But here’s the thing: I don’t think App.net will succeed. I hate to be the spoil-sport. App.net is not going to succeed because we don’t really want it to succeed. In other words, to quote Harvey Dent, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
So, Twitter. Kudos. How Alan Turing Set the Rules for Computing. On Saturday, British mathematician Alan Turing would have turned 100 years old. It is barely fathomable to think that none of the computing power surrounding us today was around when he was born. But without Turing's work, computers as we know them today simply would not exist, Robert Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols that run the Internet, said in an interview. Absent Turing, "the computing trajectory would have been entirely different, or at least delayed," he said. For while the idea of a programmable computer has been around since at least 1837 -- when English mathematician Charles Babbage formulated the idea of his analytical engine -- Turing was the first to do the difficult work of mapping out the physics of how the digital universe would operate.
And he did it using a single (theoretical) strip of infinite tape. A polymath of the highest order, Turing left a list of achievements stretching far beyond the realm of computer science. Contemplating Computations. Fancy Turns Impulse Shopping Into An Art. Switchcam Raises $1.2 Million From Mark Cuban, 500 Startups, Turner Media Camp, And Others. San Francisco-based startup Switchcam has created technology that combines videos from multiple sources and allows users to watch concerts, political rallies, conferences, and other events from multiple different points of view.
And it’s attracted investment from one of the biggest names in video, raising $1.2 million in a seed round led by Dallas Mavericks owner, HDNet founder, and billionaire Mark Cuban. But he’s not alone: 500 Startups, Turner MediaCamp, Vikas Gupta, David Beyer, Jeffrey Schox, Niket Desai, and Reed Morse also participated in the round. So far, Switchcam’s killer app seems to be pulling together full concert performances from multiple video sources. The platform collects videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites, determines which order they fit in based on audio recognition, and then stitches them together into one big video timeline.
(A good example is this Lady Gaga performance, which pulls together 15 songs and has 41 different camera angles.) 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature. Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Additional notes from the author: If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life. The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too.
History.com has a great article about Edison and how his douchebaggery had a chokehold on American cinema. Net Neutrality and Economic Equality Are Intertwined. If You're Not Pissing Someone Off, You're Probably Not Innovating - Philip Auerswald. By Philip Auerswald | 9:58 AM May 4, 2012 As the editor of the journal Innovations, I’m asked with some regularity, “So, what is innovation anyhow? How would you…”? (eyebrows usually furrow here) “… define it?” Since I don’t particularly enjoy debating definitions, I usually respond by saying: “That’s a difficult question.
But one thing is for sure: If you’re not pissing someone off, it’s probably not innovation.” I like this response because, if it doesn’t end the conversation, it usually shifts it from definitions to dynamics — which is what innovation is all about, after all. But I also like it because it captures one fundamental obstacle to innovation that all would-be disruptors must be prepared to face: the potentially hostile response of incumbents who don’t want to see their market advantages threatened.
There’s nothing new here. The famed “Attack of the Doughboy” offers one good answer. It was 1987. Ben & Jerry’s response was a definitive moment for the company. Here’s the point. Fourth Wall Studios does the 'Dirty Work' of innovation. Introducing Nike+ Basketball. There’s No Finish Line to Innovation — Amy Jo Martin. API: Three Letters That Change Life, the Universe and Even Detroit | Wired Enterprise. #BIE4001 Chatter. Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy.
Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You. Steve Jobs’s 10 Best Quotes for Advertising Agencies. Ingredients for Innovation — Amy Jo Martin. The Rise of Customer-Driven Innovation. Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success.