Category — innovation

Nice to see that my (extended) team builds not entirely useless stuff.

Google Docs is the single platform that enabled Obama's effective organization an historic fundraising success. The Obama campaign was aware that this had become a major player in the grassroots space, sparking a revolution in the way people self-organize and conduct grassroots efforts and political campaigns. Since a campaign is constantly on a quest for money and voters, Obama's grassroots organization valued agility over hierarchy; online collaboration became a necessity.

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Time was — and is — important. Being able to access something where and when you want to is even more important. Google understands that collaboration will save time, but not cut corners. Google recognizes political campaigns spend more time away from their computers and out on the political campaign trail. Knocking on doors with a mobile device in hand, pulling information in real time from a Google Doc is the future for all successful campaigns. Probably not Facebook.

Eric Kuhn: The 2008 Google Docs Campaign

Design should be mastered as a liberal art before it is considered as a business tool. Great design comes from an artistic or cultural impulse, not from a focus group. Great design starts by creating meaningful stories with a POV, not by building a bulletproof business case. Great design creates new culture, not just clever new utilities. Great Design is about meaning first, the market second.

Scott Klinker in Design vs Innovation, The Cranbook / IIT Debate (via Bruce Sterling)

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Unlike many Rube Goldberg machines, the goal wasn’t to turn on the lights or pour a glass of milk. Instead, Jon wanted to get people psyched about IDEO’s engineering capabilities and to broadcast the distributed contraption live for all to see. Of course, getting a hot dog in the Chicago office to dial a cell phone in Palo Alto for the sole purpose of pumping helium into a bucket of soap and water for a three-foot cylinder of bubbles did plenty to get people excited. When the Chicago team added flames to the mix, Jon didn’t flinch.

The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience

Jesús Díaz posted last Friday an article on Gizmodo that has been making the rounds on the TechMemes and Diggs of this world. In A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture, Díaz writes:

I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

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Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Essentially, Díaz proposes that we shed any vestigial sense of responsibility, and blame it all on the greedy companies and the lazy engineers. Because all those (free) beta web apps twisted our fingers to use them. Because Steve Jobs chased us into Apple stores and forced us to buy his iPhones and iPods.

It sounds like Díaz would benefit from having a look at Bruce Sterling’s proposed ethos for the early adopter.

I have a very different model of how innovation, at least in software, actually works. One of its premises can be expressed by what I shall now dub the Iron Law of Software R&D: If you are a programmer developing innovative software, the odds that you will be permitted to finish it and it will actually be deplayed are, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the product of your depth of innovation and your job security.

That is, the cushier your corporate sinecure is, the less likely it is that you will make a difference. The more innovative your software is, the less likely it is that you will actually be supported all the way to deployment.

The reason for this is dead simple. Corporations exist to mitigate investment risk. The large and more stable a corporation is, the more resistant it is to disruption in its practices and business model including the unavoidable short-term disruptions from what might be long-term innovative gain. Net-present-value accounting therefore almost always leads to the conclusion that innovation is a mistake.

esr – Open Source — Can It Innovate?

90% of creativity is misunderstanding, I sometimes think. Some the best ideas come when you hear something and think, wow, that's brilliant and later it turns out that they meant something else, but it was still a good idea. I think it works because your brain had been working on something similar and seeing it in print, it makes it go click, even if it is about something else.

Douwe Osinga’s Blog: Death and Taxes. Correlated.

The Economist’s editorial on Bill Gates, The meaning of Bill Gates, is one of those thoughtful big-picture pieces that keep me hooked to the publication. You might agree or not with what they write, but they sure provide some perspective and good food for thought.

Some snippets to whet your appetite:

Mr Gates has revelled in the day-to-day details of running his firm. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.

But Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it.

You can read the full article online.

Pretty funny (and effective!) pre-internet form of advert targetting:

This ad was published in a local Zurich newspaper, and the copy roughly says:

Hello, Google Zurich! Forget for a moment wellness lounges, freshly squeezed fruit juices, slides, grounded space capsules and all the other perks you provide to your employees. An evening at the Zurich opera house offers experiences that push the boundaries and strengthens team spirit. We’ll take you backstage, too.

Opernhaus Zurich, you got our attention!

Reading stuff out there on the seedy internet one gets the feeling that “20% time”, the practice of encouraging employees to work on their pet projects on company time, is some wondrous innovative idea invented by the GOOG.

People blog in hushed tones about “Google’s famed 20% time” and wonder aloud about the real benefits of such a scheme. Some even decide to try it on their own employees.

I am no innovation management expert, but even I know that 20% time is not a new concept.

Permitted bootlegging is an idea older than Google. Established companies such as 3M, Novell or HP have encouraged this work-on-your-wacky-stuff-on-company-time approach since time immemorial (i.e. from before the 80s). The term bootlegging was introduced into the innovation literature as long ago as 1967. The most famous product to come out of a permitted bootlegging effort is not GMail, but the post-it note.

Granted, Google is one of the few companies to put “innovation time off” into employee’s contracts, and they do deserve credit for that. [1] But it is not exactly like they invented the wheel of innovation management.

As for the benefits of 20% time, these are largely more indirect than the pundits would have you believe, and they are hard to measure. A 1998 Wired article explained it best:

3M’s 15 percent time is valuable simply because it “makes it OK to daydream — and I don’t think you can put that in a box and make it a two-hour slot in your day.”

[Disclaimer: As of this writing, I am a full-time employee of Google. I am also a joyful user of 20% time. The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not in any way represent those of my employer. Etcetera.]

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[1] Does anybody know if 3M ever put their 15 percent Rule on paper?

Often we hear that research boosts innovation, yet look at the following two maps (click on the thumbnails to see full-size images).

Star Scientists:

Innovation:

Now, I don’t know what is definition of “star scientist” or “innovation” used to compile the data for these maps. But even if the definitions are only broadly reasonable, the huge spike of Japanese innovation seems rather surprising, given the conspicuous absence of a corresponding spike in renowned scientists.

So what makes the Japanese so innovative? Or do they just look innovative to Westerners because their way of thinking is different from ours?

(Maps taken from the website for Richard’s Florida new book, Who’s Your City?.)

Catching up with my overdue feed-reading I come upon this pearl of modern patent-making:

Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including “displaying and mixing competitively branded food products” and adding “a third portion of liquid.” If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereality would have a complete monopoly on cereal bar business–just for being the first to put together the legalese necessary to describe mixing breakfast cereal.

I wonder why we still haven’t seen anyone trying to patent burgers. Now that would be a profitable one!

(via Boing Boing: Putting-milk-in-cereal patent-application: kill business-method patents now!)

Article at BBC News:

A US inventor has come up with a hi-tech way of allowing the deceased to talk from beyond the grave – by fixing video screens to their tombstones. [...] …messages could include telling life stories or having the final say on a disagreement.

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Mr Barrows, of Burlingame, California, has filed a patent application for his design of a tombstone that can accommodate video equipment operated by a remote control.

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The tombstone could be coin-operated or swiped with a credit card. “Cemeteries could basically one day charge fees to rent the headsets you need to listen to [the messages],” he added.

I just wonder, how long before someone proposes webcams inside the coffins?

“So if you hear a loud explosion this July 4 weekend, it may not be a firework. It may simply be Coca Cola marketing people dueling it with the USAF.” (from The Register’s “Wireless cola gives USAF target practice”)