The Open Sourced Car

Here's a very interesting application of opensource technology - the open sourced car.

Here's a brief description from an eNewsletter I get called Innovation:

OPEN SOURCE CAR
Automobile enthusiast Markus Merz is on a mission -- to design and produce a car based on the anarchic principles of open source. Merz is relying on a small army of volunteer car designers, 60% of whom are moonlighting from day jobs in the auto industry. Decisions are based on the democratic system and everyone -- including designers, corporations, academic institutions and other groups -- can participate. (Sign up at www.theoscarproject.org.)

OScar, as the car is known, uses a modular concept borrowed from computer manufacture and is composed of six discrete modules: drivetrain, engine, power, body, and safety and information systems. The idea is that the modules could be mixed and matched with other modular components, enabling manufacturers to swap parts as needed. In performance terms, OScar will focus on functionality, topping out at about 90 mph. There are still barriers to overcome, admits Merz, who notes that one of the biggest problems could be legal. "If someone is, for instance, a drivetrain engineer working at, say, Mercedes Benz and they are working anonymously on our platform, it could conflict with their working contract because of the knowledge they put in to the project." But Merz sees the concept as beneficial to auto production in the developing world, where manufacturers would be freed up from paying licensing fees to produce the design. (The Guardian 12 Apr 2007)

An Interesting Microsoft Product

Microsoft just announced a new "coffee-table" PC called "Surface" - that is an actual coffee table. The table top is a screen that is touch sensitive and also responds to bar codes on products. It seems that T-Mobile likes them enough to order some for their retail stores - at between $5000 and $10,000 per table. Microsoft will have a limited number of software applications to go with the table.

Here's an article that also has some embedded videos of the table in use:

Microsoft Surface brings computing to the table
Self-contained unit works without mouse, keyboard
By TODD BISHOP; P-I REPORTER
One of Microsoft Corp.'s biggest secrets looks like a normal coffee table. Until it's switched on.

Here's a video from Popular Mechanics that shows the Surface computer as well as Jeff Han's wall sized version.

Thoughts (in French) on Creating the Future

If you happen to speak (& read) French then you will probably be interested in a pair of books by a trio of highly respected French innovation consultants. "Fabriquer le futur" and "Fabriquer le futur 2" which in English is something like "Creating the Future," are books about the the role of imagination in the innovation process, and include contributions by numerous people from across the innovation spectrum (including myself).

How To Save Time

Innovation consultant and TRIZ expert Jack Hipple recently sent me a great presentation called "How Are You Going to Survive as an Innovation Champion?," which he delivered in 2004 at the American Creativity Association.

The highlight for me was this quote: “Six months in the lab will save at least an hour in the library."

When I asked Jack to explain, this is what he told me: "Early in my career with Dow, I was asked to do process optimization of a bromine recovery plant. Being 'only' a BS Chemical Engineer, my first thought was to go to the library and see if there was already some work (maybe even answers!) in the published literature. To my surprise, the Russian Journal of Applied Chemistry had just begun to be translated into English (this was 1967, by the way!) and I ran across an article entitled "Theory and Calculations Relating to the Recovery of Bromine from Natural Brines." After reading it for 30 minutes I totally understood why our towers worked the way they did, and how to improve them. I then showed the article to the PhD modeling engineer who had been trying for many months to model the tower mathematically..... and then came the quote. This information then became the basis for Dow's further modeling and design of its bromine recovery units."

Sometimes we get so locked into doing it one way that another, far better solution lies next to us, untapped. But remember, this was before the internet. Now they both probably would have gone straight to Google, and gotten 60 million hits. So would that hour in the library have turned into 6 months sorting out the mess we got by going online?

Hence the question, How can we engage the insights and creativity of the broader world to help us sort through the mountain of information? The insight embedded in that question leads us to look for a way to tap into the global online community of researchers for help.

And voila! There is an online research community called Innocentive, a system through which companies may post technical problems to be solved by any researcher, anywhere.

How to save time? Get the community to do it with you! (Tom Sawyer and the immortal bucket of whitewash live on.)

Thanks, Jack!

(Jack Hipple, Innovation-TRIZ, http://www.innovation-triz.com/ 813-994-9999)

Innovation in Community (Bookshelf Part 2)

Many of us imagine that innovation happens because of solitary geniuses - the mythic images of Edison, Ford, or Einstein toiling in isolation are modern icons. The truth is often quite different - Edison was part of a team of sophisticated thinkers, one of whom, Charles Batchelor, was Edison's 50-50 partner in profits and stock in spin-off companies. This argument is made quite cogently by Andrew Hargadon in his book How Breakthroughs Happen.

Hargadon uses this concept to propose that innovators who are successful rely on connections to succeed - it's networks of people and ideas that enable innovations to emerge, because it is through such networks that change becomes possible. Ideas, products, and services that take hold do so because communities form around whatever that idea, product, or service means, and whatever value it provides.

In today's world, the character of these networks is largely being shaped by the internet. Web 2.0 companies such as MySpace, YouTube, and Second Life are examples of networks that are also communities, communities in and through which innovation happens and spreads.

An archetypical example of this is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. From the wiki idea and the amazing success of Wikipedia comes the concept of Wikinomics, the title of Don Tapscott's most recent book. Wikinomics examines the emerging principles of online communities and charts their impact on the business world and society at large. This impact is already great, and it promises to become even more significant as the principles of internet communities are further developed and embodied in new software tools and new ventures.

For would-be innovators, then, mashing Hargadon's work with Tapscott's yields a hybrid that may become, for the astute, a compelling set of guidelines to the emerging markets.

Inside-Out or Outside-In? (Bookshelf Part 1)

Successful businesses inevitably must confront the paradox that the qualities which make them successful in the first place are often progressively squeezed out as they grow. Acute sensitivity to the needs of individual customers that is the cornerstone of a new firm is gradually displaced by attention to the aggregate of thousands or millions of customers; business structures that are "close to the customer" recede into regional management bureaucracies; frugality and careful spending choices are replaced by annual budget cycles. The list is endless, of course.

And perhaps worst of all, the next big idea, which was sitting right next to you all the time, is suddenly seized upon by a smaller, more nimble competitor; small firms so often see what big ones are blind to. You ask yourself, "Why didn't we think of that?"

The reason is that we're looking from the inside-out, while they're looking from the outside-in. Or, stated differently, they saw what to us was hidden in plain sight.

That's the premise behind Erich Joachimsthaler new book (and it's the title, too), and although the book is about 80 pages longer than it needed to be, the underlying topic is really important: How do we retain our ability to see? Joachimsthaler describes a model focused on first of all understanding demand, and the book has the virtue of a lot of big-company stories to illustrate its major ideas.

I found out about the book because the publisher sent me a copy, I suppose in the hope that I would mention it here. So that worked. I bring this up because it speaks to the nature of what makes a book successful: The way to succeed in publishing is to get people to talk favorably about your stuff - and that's true whether you're Nike, Ford, or Joe's Diner, or a political candidate, or a religion ....

Because while a product or an ideology or a philosophy may appeal to an individual consumer, it is eventually the action or inaction of a "community" that determines how successful a product is going to be. Hence, MySpace, Google, and Amazon ratings are all aggregate expressions of a community's values, derived not so much from opinion leaders as from opinionated people.

This is an interesting shift, as we used to refer to these aggregates as "markets." With the advent of the internet, though, and the emergence of Web 2.0, the term "communities" gives a better feel for what's going on. Why? Because the internet is a "many-to-many" medium of mass communication; in fact, the first such medium ever to exist.

Learning to understand the needs, behaviors, and expressions of such communities is a critical part of learning to see, and of turning what you see into what makes a difference.

In Bookshelf Part 2, tomorrow, I'll take a look at a couple books that address this very issue head on: Wikinomics and How Breakthroughs Happen.

Information Sharing by Google

A small gem of information in obscure middle paragraph in a long article in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

ABC News has an information-sharing agreement with Google, through which Google informs ABC of the fastest-rising web searches, i.e., the web search terms that are suddenly increasing in freqency. "Recently the network was told of a web search that was the fastest-rising search of the past year by a factor of 10." The story: Anna Nicole Smith's death.

It's fascinating on 2 counts: The fast that Google's mere existence can create this type of information is amazing. The internet not only enables us to access a universe of information, but here it also enables new types of information to exist. There's a strangly self-referential aspect to this, a form of positive feedback; there's also a compelling way to learn what people are thinking about.

On the other hand, the fact that so many people were interested in Anna Nicole Smith's death is, well, discouraging.

(I resisted the opportunity to put a provocative photo here in the blog...)

Large Scale Innovation: Grove's Dilemma

Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO and Chairman has taken an interest in the US health care crisis, and has developed a number of proposals to address the issues. Although he's been able to present his ideas to many leaders in Washington DC, he says he is not optimistic about having any of them enacted.

"Why the hell should I be optimistic about solving this problem? To solve a problem this big, you would need a a war or a depression or some other cataclysm." (Here's the full article.)

This is an interesting comment about how change happens on the large scale, and it is as relevant for innovation as it is for social issues. How does large scale innovation happen?

One way is that when the stakes get high enough someone figures out how to make it pay. For example, the accelerating development of non-fossil fuel sources is being driven largely by the increasing cost of oil, which makes other sources such as wind and solar economically competitive.

Another way is when technological breakthrough changes the basic economics of the situation. Ford's $400 Model T was a productivity enhancement that any farmer could understand; Ford understood its significance because he had been one of those farmers.

Business leaders can sometimes provoke change even when things seem to be going well. In the 1990s General Electric was transformed, largely because of the vision of Jack Welch. Formerly an industrial firm, Welch oversaw the transition of GE into a global banking powerhouse.

But what about issues, such as the massively complex health care system, that seem to be so deeply embedded in the organization of society? Will new technologies and entrepreneurial thinking be able to chip away at the massive scope of the problem? Will Congress intervene? Does it take a committed and powerful President? Is the system even comprehensible enough so that someone, or some team, could figure out what to do?

In many instances, difficult situations at this scale are successfully addressed only when many different elements converge: public awareness and intent; political will; innovations large and small; and financial capital must come together. Frequently their convergence is catalyzed by crisis, by a cataclysm of some sort. Roosevelt's response to the Depression and Johnson's response to the Civil Rights Movement are two examples.

So let's look at Grove's dilemma. Will the health care problem be addressed in the absence of a crisis? Perhaps not. As a visionary who can see some of the deeper hidden patterns in this crisis, it must be terribly frustrating to confront a system so deeply resistant to change. But crisis should not be underestimated as a source of creativity, and as the critical context for innovation. It's probably just be a matter of timing.

Grove's friend Gordon Moore articulated what we now know as Moore's Law, which describes the increasing power of computer chips. Perhaps Grove could now work out Grove's Law, which would describe the emergence and progressive worsening of a crisis as a catalyst for change.

Crowdsourcing

You've heard of outsourcing. You've heard of the concept of opensource for things like software development (the browser - Firefox - and the operating system I'm using - OSX - to write this post are both opensource). Now, there is a developing movement called Crowdsourcing (which is still emerging and being defined). The general idea is that a 'crowd' of generalists can make better decisions than a single expert.

Some companies are using crowdsourcing as a way to engage large groups of people in the innovation process.

The following model is being developed by Sami Viitamaki from Finland. It is an attempt to explain the idea of crowdsourcing from the point of view of a company that wants to engage in collaboration with customers or customer collectives.


Most of the models evolving around crowdsourcing involve digital and/or virtual interactions - to engage people from disparate parts of the world in what we call 'different time, different place' collaboration. A good example of a company doing this is Cambrian House. Cambrian House defines Crowdsourcing as:

Crowdsourcing is when people gather via the Internet to create something and share in the profit – often without ever meeting each other in person. The products of these collaborations are referred to as crowdsourced.

In our work we still recommend and use 'same time, same place' collaboration for groups of up to 100s of people. This intensive, face-to-face collaboration can accelerate the interactions and solutions generated by a group.

In Sami's model he refers to the need for specific facilities where the collaboration can takes place. He is referring to virtual facilities. We also see the need for specific facilities where collaboration can take place. The following is an example of a physical environment designed specifically for high level collaboration.

If we combine the power of the internet and virtual collaboration with the power of live, face-to-face collaboration in specifically designed interactions and engagements the potential for developing breakthrough products and services is enormous.

To read about Sami's model in more detail click here.

The Nature of Insight

The great British general Wellington offered this concise and charming description of the nature of insight:

"There is a curious thing that one feels sometimes. When you are considering a subject, suddenly a whole train of reasoning comes before you like a flash of light. You see it all. Yet it takes you perhaps 2 hours to put on paper all that has occurred to your mind in an instant. Every part of the subject, the bearings of all its parts upon each other, and all the consequences are there before you."

This wonderfully captures the working of the mind, wherein whole concepts of incredible complexity are revealed at those pristine moments of clarity.

This flash of light is precisely what innovators search for, the moment when new possibilities become clear. From there, insight leads to ideas, which may eventually become completed innovations, these being new concepts, products, and/or services that add value for an organization and its customers.

Another example of this ultra-compressed nature of human thought is held in the story told by land speed record holder Craig Breedlove. Following an attempt to set the speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats, he described the sequence of his thoughts as he drove his rocket car along the test run; it took more than 2 hours for him to narrate the decision process that he went through during the 8 second speed run.

Insight is often instanteous; our attempts to communicate its nature necessarily take much longer.

(The Wellington quote comes from historian John Keegan's brilliant study of military leadership entitled "The Mask of Command," a book first published 20 years ago, and still well worth careful study.)