Archive for Innovation
Super Computer could save billions on fuel-saving truck
Imagine if every one of the nation’s 1.3 million semi trucks in the U.S. could each save $5 billion in diesel fuel at the pump and cut CO2 emissions by 16 million tons. It’s an idea that’s catching on, thanks to a computer that is 100,000 times more powerful that your laptop.
The Department of Energy is using a unique open innovation model to potentially save billions of gallons of fuel on the highway. The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is working with BMI Corporation to use the department’s Jaguar supercomputer–known as the fastest supercomputer in the United States–to develop a technology that will revolutionize the fuel usage for semi trucks.
This supercomputer is more than 100,000 times more powerful than your laptop. The new design features a SmartTruck UnderTray System to improve the aerodynamics of 18-wheeler trucks.
FastCompany explains how the DOE was able to go from concept to manufacture-ready design in 18 months, a process that would normally take at least three years. Check out the article here.
Innovative mobility through thought control and bionics
The most innovative wheelchairs being developed today are soon going to help the disabled get where they need to go in a new and exciting way: Thought control.
Imagine a wheelchair that can be directed by brain signals detected from a unique cap worn by the user. THis is the work of scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL).
The developers are using this technology to help people control machines via brain signals, which they say will revolutionize the way the paralysed and disabled maneuver.
I find this video demonstration fascinating:
The main focus of bionics to date has been on providing prosthetics for amputees. Prosthetic arms can now be controlled by nerve signals in the remaining arm, which can be picked up by electric sensors on the skin.
Developers say the next innovation may be bionic limbs which are able to “feel.”
Valentine’s Day rendezvous for NASA
Want a unique and innovative way to spend Valentine’s day with your sweetheart? Gather your favorite people around the computer or the NASA channel to see something historical.
Monday the NASA’s Stardust spacecraft will fire up its camera as it comes face-to-face with a crater that was created six years ago by a NASA space probe. In 2005 the Deep Impact probe crashed into the comet, “Tempel 1,” at 23,000 mph, sending a huge plume of debris. This will be the first time we’ve seen pictures of the damage to the comet made by the impact.
Check out this NASA video of the impact itself:
Comets are irregular bodies of ice and dust that orbit the sun, and these photos are expected to yield some new learnings about them.
The Stardust spacecraft launched in 1999 and has traveled 3 1/2 billion miles. For the past four years NASA has targeted Valentine’s Day 2011 for a rendezvous date with the comet. The Stardust will fly within 124 miles of the comet, and will snap 72 pictures as it passes by. The photos will be beamed back to Earth and then uploaded on NASA TV and on the NASA website.
Lessons from CoDev 2011: The Power of Crowdsourcing for Local Motors
During the CoDev 2011 conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, I was impressed with a speech given by a local CEO, John (“Jay”) Rogers of Local Motors in Chandler, Arizona. This small company designs exciting new vehicles using design contests that are open to the public. “Crowdsourcing” is one of the trendy new approaches to innovation, but it’s more than just a buzzword. When managed with smart tools, good incentives, strong respect for the participants and a strong brand, it can add a vast amount of energy and brilliance to an innovation pipeline.
Local Motor’s rapidly growing community (12,000 participants so far) contributes designs and feedback to help in the selection of potentially successful aesthetic concepts for automobiles that Local Motors will then build locally in a microfactory, with final customization of the appearance being achieved with an environmentally friendly and durable vinyl wrap that eliminates the need for paint and gives the owner freedom to have a unique look. The final assembly is done with hands-on help from the new owner, who becomes intimately familiar with the vehicle and with its maintenance. (more…)
Facial recognition technology gives Facebook a one-click edge
The Facebook Blog shows you how to tag using facial recognition technology.
As facial recognition technology becomes more user friendly for social media and other personal applications, we’re starting to see and hear reaction from those who have concerns and from people who think its great.
Facebook just launched a photo tagging application using the technology to help users tag photos faster. If you want to see how it works, pull up one of your Facebook albums that contain some group shots of friends you haven’t tagged yet and you will now see suggested tags.
I read an article about this last night on The Facebook Blog which says that Facebook has been working on the facial recognition platform since October. First Facebook added group tagging, so users could type one name and apply it to multiple photos of the same person. This week Facebook announced new Tag Suggestions, making the chore of tagging multiple photos a single-click process.
Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook. They do it because it’s an easy way to share photos and memories…Tags make photos one of the most popular features on Facebook.
While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore. (Like that time you had to tag your cousin and her fiancé over and over and over again in 64 different pictures of their engagement party, and then go back and tag the guests.)
(Click the photo to read the full article)
That means that when your friends upload photos of this year’s holiday party, your face will automatically be recognized. According to The Facebook Blog, you can opt out of this by visiting your Privacy Settings, choose Custom, then change the setting for “Suggest photos of me to friends.”
Trend: Will your retirees take their learnings with them?
I read an interesting article over at InventionMachineBlog about a trend we’re seeing as our workforce ages. Did you know that half of our workforce today is eligible for retirement in the next 18 months?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says as our US labor force grows older, our percent of 55+ workers will be four times that of the overall labor force.
I see this happening in the corporations of many of our Innovationedge clients and certainly in many of our Fortune 500 companies. It’s projected to be the largest generational turnover we’ve ever seen in our job force.But hopefully those companies are heeding the statistics and making sure their retiring Baby boomers aren’t taking their years of knowledge and subject matter expertise with them.
What does this mean for companies continuing their focus on growth and innovation? How is your company retaining knowledge and capturing best practices for future generations?
Photo courtesy NasaImages.org
Shopping in the future
In two more days Cisco is unveiling its vision for Borderless Networks, along with a cool new video that shows end-users what the future of shopping might look like very soon. Here’s a sneak peek Cisco is showing the world today:
A Hotbed for Biotechnology Innovation
Today I am over at San Diego State University where I’m teaching executive MBA classes. Along with cities like Madison, Austin, Raleigh Durham and Boston, San Diego is a key player in a field that may be more of a hotbed for innovation than any other: biotechnology. Genetic engineering, genomics, and molecular drug development are just a few of the industry terms that we are all becoming familiar with.
It’s an exciting environment here in San Diego. We’re anchored by research institutions and universities such the Salk Institute, Scripps Research Institute, University of California-San Diego, and hundreds of biotechnology firms, this could be the biological Silicon Valley for the 21st century.
With unequaled potential, the industry is still trying to prove it’s financial viability. This is because of many factors, but mostly it’s because it is researching the unknown and results can’t be predicted.
For example, in biopharmaceuticals, research for a new drug can take 10 years or more and cost more than $1 billion before any revenue is realized. On top of that it only takes one adverse study or regulation problem along the way to tip the scales between incredible income and huge losses. (more…)
Trend: A golden opportunity for investors
Here’s a trend that I find interesting: The ability to purchase gold through ATM-like machines branded Gold To Go.
We first saw these machines appear this spring in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace Hotel and in Germany. I remember wondering about the kind of investors who would seek out these machines.
As it turns out, the response has been so overwhelming that the company that makes Gold to Go is planning to install these vending machines in a Florida resort as well as a casino in Las Vegas.
Gold To Go dispenses gold bars and coins up to an ounce at a time. But because the price of the precious metal fluctuates, the machine has to adjust every ten minutes. The machine offers ten different products and buyers can get their gold in their own country’s identity—such as a Canadian maple leaf coin.
Users simply insert their cash or credit card, but the machine limits the purchase amount to prevent misuse like money laundering.
This isn’t for just any investor. As I write this, gold is priced at just over $1,300 an ounce! What do you think? Would you buy gold from a Gold To Go machine?
In the News: IP and Apple–the Other Apple
Apple’s commercial success has often been linked to its intellectual property. Today IP and apples’ success is in the news again–the other apple, the kind you eat. The story involves the theme of tension about the way universities pursue technology transfer.
The story begins with the University of Minnesota and their agricultural research that led to the delicious and wildly successful Honeycrisp apple. That apples was the subject of a 1990 US plant patent, US PP07197, “Apple Tree: Honeycrisp” by inventors Jim Luby and David Bedford. That patent recently expired, but brought substantial revenue to the University (at least $8 million). So what’s next? How about the SweeTango, also called “the Honeycrisp killer,” an apple that builds upon and exceeds the Honeycrisp? This advanced apple was also developed at the University of Minnesota during a decade of research and is now being marketed through an exclusive license. That’s the problem: exclusivity. A lot of apple orchards could benefit from this tree, but the University of Minnesota has chosen to license it to only one group. The competitors have chosen to sue, claiming that it’s inappropriate for a public university to benefit just one company. The story made it to BusinessWeek in the Sept. 17, 2010 story, “Licensing Deal for Hot New Apple Comes Under Fire” by Steve Karnowski.
The university chose Minnesota’s largest orchard, Pepin Heights, to commercialize its new apple. But 15 other orchards say it’s not a sweet deal for them, and they’re suing. The school counters that research universities everywhere award exclusive rights to all kinds of intellectual property, and that the royalties are crucial for replacing shrinking public funding for research. It also says the deal is needed to protect the quality of an apple it spent more than a decade developing.
“When Pepin and the university signed this agreement, they had no consideration for what it would do to the Minnesota apple industry,” Frank Femling said. “The only thing they considered was their financial interests.”
The Femlings grow 13 kinds of apples at Afton Apple Orchard, about 15 miles southeast of downtown St. Paul. Most of their varieties came from the university, including the hugely successful Honeycrisp. They’re not growing the SweeTango, and they fear what will happen if it becomes as popular as the Honeycrisp. Cindy Femling said they’re already losing sales.
Mark Rotenberg, the university’s general counsel, said the school partners with private industry all the time to bring technology to the marketplace — not just apples but a myriad of other innovations as well, including lifesaving drugs and medical devices.
“This has become, for research universities across the United States, the dominant way in which basic research is made available to benefit the community at large,” Rotenberg said.
As an example, Rotenberg pointed to the technology transfer program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 75-year-old Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is considered a leader in turning university research into products that benefit society, and using the licensing income to support further scientific investigation.
Emily Bauer, a licensing manager at the foundation who specializes in plant technology, said it generally prefers nonexclusive licensing because it wants the technology to be widely used. She said the foundation doesn’t usually award exclusive licenses for agricultural products. But in some cases, she said, exclusive licensing is the only way to get the technology into the marketplace.
Rotenberg said the university believed Pepin Heights could do the best job of quickly getting SweeTango apples into the market.
Dennis Courtier, owner of Pepin Heights in Lake City, said restrictions on who grows it are necessary to protect the quality as it competes with other snack foods, including candy bars and potato chips….
[The university] also wanted to avoid a repeat of a significant problem with the Honeycrisp. Anybody could plant it anywhere, and the quality suffered in warmer growing areas, hurting its reputation. So it picked Courtier and Pepin Heights, who formed the “Next Big Thing” cooperative to manage and safeguard the SweeTango. It has 45 growers in five states — Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and New York — plus Quebec and Nova Scotia in Canada.
The university is hoping the deal yields a repeat of the more than $8 million it earned from the Honeycrisp. Besides a $1 per tree royalty, Next Big Thing pays the university 4.5 percent of the apple’s net wholesale sales.
Orchards outside of Minnesota that don’t join the co-op can’t grow it. Minnesota growers who aren’t in the co-op must sign an agreement with Pepin Heights and accept restrictions that plaintiffs such as the Femlings consider one-sided.
While we leave it to the parties involved to resolve the particular issues in this case, we do recognize that it is painful when competitors acquire a technology that has a competitive advantage. However, intellectual property owners generally have rights in determining how their property is used and by whom. Universities in the United States under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act have an obligation to look for ways to benefit from IP that they develop. That doesn’t mean that they can only consider non-exclusive licenses. In this case, preserving the quality of the SweeTango brand may logically require a controlled approach to distribution of the crop, and the choice of one particular channel with added limitations in planting might make sense. Yes, the terms offered may be one-sided, which is the advantage of having a superior product and IP on your side. Those on the other side can agree to the terms or walk away and pursue alternatives, including developing or acquiring their own sources of competitive advantage. But we’ll have to let this case play out to see where the courts rule–there may be many details beyond the brief story we see in the press that could lead to unpredictable outcomes.
Nothing is safe in the business world. Disruption is always a threat. You may have a great product and a valuable crop, and the next day someone may develop something superior and not choose to let you in on the action or give you the terms you want. There’s a temptation to cry foul and look to the courts to even the playing field, but that’s rarely a fruitful approach.
Here’s a promotional video about SweeTango that discusses how long it takes to develop an innovation in apples. I especially enjoyed this because it features an inventor, the lead apple developer at the University of Minnesota, David Bedford.
I especially appreciate the story of SweeTango innovation since I’m an avid apple grower and apple processor myself. OK, I only have two trees, both Jonathans, but they put out about 1,000 pounds of amazing fruit that keeps me very busy for a couple of weekends and evenings in the first week of October–we’ll can well over 200 quarts of our secret-recipe applesauce, make dried apples, apple leather, various apple concoctions, and give away a couple hundreds pounds or so. The tart, juicy taste of our particular fruit when picked on a cool fall day beats that of nearly any product you can find in the grocery store, in my biased opinion, but I welcome every advance in this field and look forward to trying SweeTango.