Archive for Innovation Edge, LLC
Innovation Trends: Smartphones and Agriculture
One of the interesting trends in emerging nations is the rapid spread of mobile phones without first moving to landlines. Millions of people who don’t have landlines and may not have the infrastructure for them are able to benefit from cell phones. As cell phones increasingly become smart, offering a variety of apps and services, their smartphones can change the way people work and live. That includes the way they farm, including they way they apply pesticides, apply water, manage the soil, and harvest crops. Look to agriculture and the related fields of water and soil management for added value in coming years.
Lindsay Corporation (no relation) recently announced a new cell phone application to help farmers track and control their automated irrigation systems such as the Zimmatic® system. Here’s an excerpt:
Lindsay Corporation, maker of Zimmatic® irrigation systems, announces the introduction of FieldNET Mobile—pivot control for smartphones. The new feature allows growers to fully control and monitor their irrigation pivots anywhere through the convenience of smartphones.
“FieldNET Mobile provides a labor-saving innovation with the convenience of web-enabled phones,” says Reece Andrews, GrowSmart™ product manager at Lindsay. “With full control and monitoring from anywhere, growers are more efficient with their time and always know the status of their irrigation systems.”
FieldNET Mobile’s graphical interface supports most industry-leading smartphones, including the iPhone®, Droid® and BlackBerry®, according to Andrews.
FieldNET is an award-winning web-based irrigation management system. With the addition of FieldNET Mobile, growers can view the current status of all their pivots in one list, receive system alerts, arrange pivots by predefined groups, view water usage reports and receive a history of pivot runtimes.
Innovators are already considering many other smartphone-enabled opportunities for improving the way we farm and manage water around the world. We look forward to seeing what we can do to further improve the quality of life through better agriculture practices enabled by the power of smartphones. Stay tuned!
What do you see as future applications of smartphones in agriculture? Interested in working with us to explore the IP landscape and innovation opportunities here? Give us a call!
Related reading:
The Circuit of Innovation™
The Circuit of Innovation™ from Innovationedge
This image from Innovationedge is used in our book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, to describe the relationship that needs to exist between intellectual assets and the marketing plan to complete the circuit that connects the power of the market to inventors. Leave out either a sound IA strategy (holistic or 360 IA™) or the marketing plan, and you’ve short-circuited your chances for success. Ideally, your intellectual assets are in synch with your marketing plan, meaning they reinforce the marketing story and tell a marketable story of their own, in harmony with the marketing plan. The strengths you sell to the market had better be reflected in some way in the intellectual assets (think more broadly than patents alone, of course). This will be part of our conversation tonight on Brian Fried’s hit radio show, GotInvention radio at GotInvention.com, broadcast at 7 pm Central Time.
Be sure to tune in next week on March 25 to hear Cheryl Perkins, CEO of Innovationedge, share more about what it takes to achieve innovation success.
Smart Signs and Smart Innovation: Are You Preparing Now? Let Us Help
One of the most exciting opportunity areas for targeted innovation is in the display of digital information.
The information-rich world of the film Minority Report is becoming closer to reality each day, with some practical twists. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to provide smart digital displays in retail stores that can look back at the viewer, identify gender and other information using cameras and image processing, and then automatically offer information about products that may be of interest to the viewer, including instant coupons, directions to the product in the store, etc. The article, “Intel, Microsoft Offer Smart-Sign technology” by Don Clark and Nick Wingfield (p. B6, Jan. 12, 2010), describes smart-signs as a way for retailers to fight back against online sellers. The technology builds upon the embedded computing capabilities that Microsoft and Intel have applied to point-of-sale systems, office equipment, car entertainment, and other systems. They are now collaborating to specify hardware and software components that could become a standard platform for other developers. They will seek to offer features similar to those provided by Amazon.com, which can identify returning customers and tailor promotions to them based on their history. It’s all about personalizing the shopping experience–but doing that without infringing upon consumer privacy may be a complex issue. A spokesman stated that the current technology does not identify individuals, only gender. Perhaps the future may involve an opt-in system for those who want to be identified and receive discounts or other benefits in return.
Meanwhile, a variety of companies are developing flexible thin-film displays. One interesting technology space is electronic paper, which reflects light like ordinary printed paper to create images or text. Rigid versions of electronic paper are in use in some popular portable readers, while flexible versions are being developed by companies like E-Ink. A variety of technologies that have been used for electronic paper are summarized at Wikipedia, including electrophoresis, electrowetting, and electrofluidic displays.
What could your business model do with flexible smart displays, if they become inexpensive and easy to program or control? What could you do by adding sensors (perhaps sensors that respond to pressure, temperature, or capacitance to detect touch, or micro-electronic devices such as accelerometers or level indicators)? If you could track and interpret the actions a customer takes with a smart tag, for example, could that help you? What could you do if your smart tags or smart panels could communicate with each other and a network?
Will flexible displays become integrated with smart-sign technology to provide, say, magazines that can read you?
There is a growing body of publications and patents addressing creative aspects of what can be done with these emerging technologies. What will it mean for you–or for your competitors? What will these technologies mean for your supply chain? What do they mean for packaging, for shelf management, for inventor management, for market research, or for product safety? Are you aware of the future and how it might impact the business? At Innovationedge, we’re ready to work with you to find these answers for your company and to generate the intellectual assets that you will need to be prepared for a smarter, information-rich future. We’re ready to help you develop strategies and tools to reduce the impact of competitive disruptive innovation, while increasing your own opportunities to create intellectual assets and benefit from the emerging capabilities of the future.
In fact, there is one other very cool technology from Asia that you ought to be thinking about when you start exploring a world with smart, flexible display technology. If that doesn’t ring a bell, maybe you should give us a ring and let us show you how to do targeted innovation to help you go beyond mere brainstorming by generating the intellectual assets you need for the future. We tailor our approaches to each client, but in this case, we are likely to apply some of the insights from our recent book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success, a John Wiley & Sons book by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar. Call us at 920-967-0470.
May your innovations be flexible and smart!
Crisis management often leads to open innovation
Last week I was in Orlando for the Open Innovation Summit. I, along with several other speakers, talked about how innovation is often sparked by a burning platform. In other words, a crisis! The conference chair Michael Arndt wrote an article about it in his Businessweek blog titled Next Innovation Tools & Trends. I highly recommend reading not only this article, but others in his blog.
Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool and others have done some remarkable innovating via strategic alliances in economic downturns, and those case studies are fascinating.
If you missed this year’s inaugural Open Innovation Summit, I encourage you to attend next year! It’s a conference that delivers practical strategies on how to manage Open Innovation initiatives and get the absolute maximum return on your R&D investments.
Innovation: Getting the energy flowing again
I’ve worked with a lot of companies big and small that have been struggling. They’re stymied by the challenges of this economy, and are looking for new ways to achieve growth and customer satisfaction.
But there is hope. Their challenge is to change what the world needs rather than letting the world change them.
That takes innovation.
Whether you work for a large manufacturer or are making it on your own, getting your great idea to customers in the marketplace is not easy. It’s like connecting an electrical circuit with multiple components that all need to be in place and in the right order. Furthermore even if you have the right components, that circuit isn’t very useful unless the energy is flowing.
Many executives wrongly believe that innovation is a formula or a program they need to follow. I like to use the circuit analogy to show them that there is no one-size-fits-all innovation plan. I call it “Connecting the Circuit of Innovation,” an approach that yields a customized roadmap that binds together a strategy for marketing with an encompassing intellectual asset (IA) strategy that goes beyond simply getting a patent. And what’s really interesting about innovation is that no two circuits are alike.
In fact, the more of your company’s unique personality you can deliver to your colleagues and customers, the better-suited you’ll be for delivering successful results and growth.
Every company has its own unique design — its DNA if you will — that when used in the right context can propel that company toward success. Disruptive, true innovation looks at the whole package, from your insights, your mission statement and your corporate culture, to even the trends that will impact your company and your customers in the next three to five years.
I’ve met with a lot of executives to show them how to use their DNA to build a comprehensive roadmap for their innovation plan, and it’s like watching the energy begin to flow and the lightbulbs turn on. Once they allow their corporate DNA to shape their plan, they can plainly see the best pathway to pursue, the segments of the market and distribution channels to follow, the companies to partner with and so forth.
This approach doesn’t have to be expensive. There are low-cost intellectual assets you can use to your advantage right away, such as publications, Internet domain names and even YouTube channels that can create a compelling story for your innovative idea.
Once the energy in your circuit is flowing, with a little luck and plenty of hard work you’ll begin to see growth over time that is sustainable.
Are you connected?
It is nearlty impossible to be innovative without relating to people. And social networking is by far the easiest way to keep relationships and connections fresh. So let me ask:
Do you blog? Tweet? Own a Facebook page for your company? I’ve been using social networking for several years, and I can’t imagine not having those connections in both my professional and personal relationships. It wasn’t too long ago that Facebook was considered something for teens and young adults. But did you know that us older folks are one of the fastest-growing demographics for social networking sites? Check out these stats*:
- A whopping 49% of visitors to Twitter, the newest mass-market innovation in social networking, are over 35, including 19% over 50.
- On YouTube, 43% of visitors are over 35.
- 31% of Facebook users are over 35.
- 26% of MySpace visitors are also in that age group.
That tells me that I am in the right place. So which of these would I recommend? I personally like Twitter and LinkedIn, a network for business professionals.(Click on those links to see my pages)
If you Twitter, be sure to do two things: When you see a “tweet” from a friend or colleague that resonates, go ahead and “re-tweet.” It helps spread the word and connect people. And make sure when you post a tweet that you add links from time to time to your company Web site or blog to cross-promote the latest and greatest news.
(*That’s according to market researcher Quantcast)
Innovative technology brings viewers into the cartoon action
Reality television has been around for awhile, but thanks to technology and a strategic partnership viewers will soon get to be a part of television history.
The first interactive cartoon series is set to be launched in the U.S. in the next few months through production company RDF.
RDF is the company behind shows like “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” and “Wife Swap,” and is now partnering with Artificial Life, a new media company. The producers are designing a TV series in which viewers can participate in the onscreen action.
Here’s how it works: In a series called “Sleuths,” viewers can customize their own avatars. These characters will appear onscreen during the show’s live telecast. The competition between the avatars comes through quiz questions that the viewers answer via text message. Those who answer correctly continue to the next round, or be eliminated if they give an incorrect answer.
The technology is called MoPA-TV in the industry, and it means “mobile-participation television.” MoPA is becoming popular in Japan and Europe, so it was only a matter of time before this fun, interactive means of entertainment went global.
It’s all cartoon fun for now, but who knows what innovative solutions this new technology can inspire?
There’s no reason to let “innovation fatigue” get in your way!
We’re incredibly excited about the response to our new book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue: Overcoming Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success.
My colleagues and co-authors Jeff Lindsay of Innovationedge and Mukund Karanjikar PHD of Technology Holding wrote the book for inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers and leaders seeking success through innovation.
We set out to reveal the sometimes hidden “innovation fatigue factors” (there are nine of these barriers we’ve identified), that can block the path to innovation success. Not only do we identify them for the reader, we explain practical ways to overcome them.
We also wanted to personalize this journey by taking a unique look from each of our own perspectives at the challenges innovators face. We draw upon case studies of success and advances in innovation theory and practice to show how innovation can be energized to conquer innovation fatigue.
Check out the book reviews and order a copy for yourself here! Our hope is that the book will show you that understanding and overcoming these barriers is vital not only to you, as an inventor, entrepreneur, or researcher, but also to business leaders, licensing professionals, IP professionals, corporations, and even leaders of nations!
IE and Insight collaborate to launch Inforum
I am excited to launch a new partnership for Innovationedge: Inforum is a way to bring together thought leaders from all across northeast Wisconsin to collaborate on innovative ideas.
For Inforum, we teamed up with Insight on Business Magazine, and one look at this cutting-edge online publication and you’ll see why Insight is an excellent representative of innovation!
Check out the full Inforum here, and browse over to Page 26. You can click on the photos of our thought leaders to hear and see how they responded to this quarter’s topic: How do you Innovate in Challenging Times?
You’ll hear how each leader expounds on the importance of building collaboration with your customers to build value and to strengthen corporate culture.
Our thought leaders come from a wide variety of industries and each are experts in their fields. Future topics will include generational marketing, social media and going green.
The Blog is Back!
We’ve been doing some spring remodeling here at Innovationedge, and I think you’ll like the fresh upgrades. Take a look around and check out the addition of more resources and easy-to-use navigation to help you find what you need!
Our team has been tirelessly working to provide even more of the content and capability today’s innovation leaders can put into practice immediately. We’ve also partnered with others to provide top-notch innovation tools that you can’t do without in today’s global landscape.
Now that the legwork is done and the new site is launched, I have more time to Blog about the up-and-coming trends and tips to stay on top of the latest news and events throughout our industry. And I’m particularly excited as “launch day” draws near for the new book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue that I co-wrote with Jeff Lindsay and Mukund Karanjikar. I’ll write more about the book and the extremely positive responses we’re getting in the days ahead. You can pre-order here, and look for your copy to arrive in July.