Innovation
Two articles, taken together, are great reading material and food for thought. The first one is about rethinking innovation and new product development. The second article, even larger, is about production processes that are becoming – paradoxically perhaps – more efficient and more flexible.
Excellent article in the Economist magazine about innovation coming from smaller or larger companies. Also a fine example of concise analysis/ synthesis of a given issue.
Always great to be able to catch up on reading, or almost, and here are a few articles that caught our attention – along with two book lists bound to make us fall behind in our reading again.
Buysiders.com is about the work done by all of us at IP, but this is a personal note – instead of the normal “we”, this post is about something I’ve watched today: a 1987 “product concept” video that’s simply impressive, not just because the “Knowledge Navigator” is a wonderful vision, but also because we’re not that far away from something like this. Think iPad + the Siri app. Sure enough, the 1987 video was Apple’s. Prof. Sasser’s point: seeing things that others didn’t was nice, but seeing it through and changing the world was Steve Jobs’ genius.
The London Business School has made all of the presentations and panels from the 2011 Global Leadership Summit available (if you complete a free registration form). It’s their flagship annual conference and the theme this year is “innovation”. So far it’s been great to watch, starting with 3M’s CEO George Buckley on the first video – and not just because of the pretty decent joke about “3M’s greatest marketing mistake”: the company should have branded “3M” in Neil Armstrong’s boots that landed on the moon…
We’ve stumbled upon a series of videos by Bloomberg Television on Game Changers, and the first episode we saw is fantastic and profiles Steve Jobs. There are many interesting moments and lessons, but one that stuck with us concerns the power of ideas and the inspiration/ motivation they bring – not just to potential customers but, in Apple’s case at a time when morale was at the lowest point, also internally. That’s when the team finally “awoke” and all that brilliance in engineering/ product design/ marketing was brought together to create, as a VC says in the video, “the greatest comeback in corporate history”.
We highlight a very interesting article called “How Aha! Really Happens”. In it, the author argues that the notion of the brain’s two hemispheres being extremely specialized – “left” being rational/ analytical, “right” creative/ intuitive – has been proven inadequate since 1998, which means that companies focusing on “right-side brainstorming” exercises to foster innovation are not doing themselves many favors. The main point is this: “(…) our most-accepted approach to problem solving is grounded in an incorrect premise about the source of creativity in the brain.” The implications are very interesting.
David Pogue’s presentation at TED in 2006 was pretty funny and carried an important message for designers: simplicity sells. The iPhone wasn’t even out, but the trend is clearer than ever. The talk starts slowly but quickly builds momentum. As we always stress: view it critically, play with the idea, try to contradict it or apply it in some other field(s).
