IdeaFestival

Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

Paying for crowd wisdom

If businesses are going to benefit from crowd wisdom, shouldn't the crowd get paid? Competing with the likes of InnoCentive and Cambrian House, Kluster aims to do just that.

Wayne

"Freeconomics"

Wired: is $0.00 the future of business?

Wayne

The wired, wired rest

How will the Internet of the developing world differ from the wired world experienced by most North Americans? This post from Internet Evolution reminded me of points made by Ethan Zuckerman last July when he talked about the "incremental infrastructure." And as Ethan has pointed out elsewhere, notwithstanding cyberutopian rhetoric, the world is not flat.

The "Internet and the Developing World" is a series with sections on telemedicine, "people power" and microfinance. It also profiles the handset-powered Internet in India and on the African continent.

Wayne

Holography: all the world's a screen

Referencing a piece on All Things Considered, "A Glimpse of Things to Come in which futurist Syd Mead is featured, the blog Business Communicators of Second Life suggests that mainstream holography might be less than 15 years away.

Piffle.

Ray Bradbury's been there, done that.

Wayne
 

Fly high, fail forward

While we're on the subject, what are the metrics for successful innovation? By way of an update on entrepreneur with big ideas, I've got an idea.

Elon Musk gave NASASpaceFlight.com an interview in September. Though the information is a bit dated and much may have changed, Musk says that the next flight of Falcon 1, his orbital lift vehicle, should take place this month or next (watch the curvature of the Earth appear in this on board Falcon 1 video from a launch early last year. It's still really cool). The heavier Falcon 9 (ten ton payload), with which SpaceX has conducted some hold down firings, might fly in late 2008. In the interview Musk also provides a glimpse into his company, saying it plans very substantial employee growth in 2008, is vertically integrated from engine construction to sales to launch and, astonishingly - or maybe not considering Musk's personal wealth - is entirely self funded and has turned down outside investment. Human spaceflight using its Dragon capsule might occur as early as 2011.

In May Wired published this piece on Musk that might interest you. There's a reason why it's called rocket science.

Suitably impressed with all that, Inc. Magazine extended its entrepreneur of the year award to him just last month, citing, among other things, his otherworldly plans. No joke:

The goal of putting people on Mars is no joke. Musk believes that over the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of planet Earth, a dozen or so events have truly mattered. Edging forward in his chair, he ticks off a few: 'There was the advent of single-celled life, multicelled life, the development of plants, then animals,' he says. 'On this time scale, I'd put the extension of life to another planet slightly above the transition from life in the oceans to life on land.' If there's something insane about a CEO who thinks his company's mission is more important than any accomplishment in all of human history--indeed, in all of fish history--there's also something irresistible.

How is innovation measured? Sure it helps to be incredibly wealthy. Still: fly high. Fail forward.

Make it a great 2008.

Wayne

Innovation dies same old way

Citing the survey work of three well known consultancies, BusinessWeek sums up the state of innovation.

There's consensus across industries that innovation is a key growth driver. Unfortunately, the surveys also reflect a broad belief that most companies don't have the leadership, systems, or tools to successfully and consistently innovate.

Implementing innovation isn't as straightforward as running a Six Sigma program, which makes it harder to do and harder to measure.

Bottom line: How one manages innovation is hard. Killing it is easy.

Wayne

Matching museum and method

Business Communicators of Second Life make note of a new museum exhibit in Second Life. What interests me is that instead of simply putting items on display - that is, after all, what museums do in three dimensions pretty well - the post says that the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation wants "to encourage the re-thinking of museums, exhibits and to explore the next iteration of 'the museum'."

That strikes me as a pretty good use of digital space, which makes experimental testing easy because the failures can be identified more speedily. It's a match between museum mission and method.

Business Communicators of Second Life also turned me on to a blog dedicated to describing the application of the digital arts to museum design, Museum 2.0.

Wayne

Odyssey Moon enters Google moon challenge

Space Prizes has some of the best information on the Google Lunar X Prize, including a recent post on a podcast with one of the founders of Odyssey Moon, the first team to officially enter the challenge.

The goal of the Google Lunar X Prize is to put a privately funded robot on the surface of the moon that can meet several objectives, including moving at least 500 meters and sending video back to Earth.

Doing so could potentially, and dramatically, lower the cost of access to the moon and to space in general.

The New York Time's blog TierneyLab and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log have more.

Wayne

Innovation is thinking about the wrong thing at the right time

What are the elements of "strategic intuition," the kind of business insight that doesn't just confer a competitive advantage, but changes the rules of the game for everyone else?

At Innovation Science Brent Edwards interviews William Duggan, the author of a new book entitled Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement. I have not read the book, but any serious attempt to plumb the workings of game-changing insight appeals to me. It is, after all, what the ideaFestival is about.

Edwards:

Duggan starts his book off by differentiating strategic intuition from the expert intuition that Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his bestseller Blink. Duggan goes on to describe how strategic intuition is achieved and how it is necessary for developing creative leaps into unexplored territory. He does so by investigating how strategic ideas get created through an examination of such diverse topics a Napoleon’s wartime strategy, Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific breakthroughs, and Buddha’s enlightenment. Duggan then discusses how strategic intuition has been applied in some well known and not-so well known business and political situations.

Early in the email interview, Duggan further differentiates strategic from expert intuition:

The quick retrieval of the right tactic in the right situation is the essence of expert intuition.  An emergency room nurse is just walking by, glances at a child, and swings into action to save the child’s life. The nurse can act so fast because she has seen that ailment before in some form, and her training or experience told her the right tactic to use. Strategic intuition is different from this in three key ways. First, it applies to new situations. Second, it’s slow.  Third, it brings together many tactics in a new combination.

Much of the remainder of the interview is also spent describing how tactical and strategic innovation differ.

Referring to "countless" cases that he's studied, Duggan, in my favorite quote from the interview, says that "for something complex to work, each piece that makes it up has to have worked before, in some way, sometime, somewhere in the world. Innovators don't dream, they combine."

Give it a read if you get the chance.

Wayne