Archive for Innovators
Why trend-watchers may want to take note of Foursquare
I’ve been looking into the Foursquare application lately, noting that some of my staff seem to love checking in to venues they visit.
At first you might think it is easy to dismiss the mobile social-gaming phenom that awards the most frequent patron the title of mayor. (Then you hear that some dirty politics may be developing around Foursquare mayorship, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported.)
BusinessWeek recognizes Foursquare’s co-founder Naveen Selvadurai as one of the best young technology entrepreneurs.
Check out this video on his take about why so many people are checking in everywhere they go:
Is Foursquare a fad or a phenomenon? That’s what the folks over at Mindshare.com asked a few weeks ago. Mindshare says that if 2009 was the year of Twitter, then 2010 most certainly must be all about Foursquare. And with more than one million users, they might be right!
Those who want to understand how technology and social trends impact the face of their business might want to pay attention to Foursquare.
Top 50 Innovators: Is a new world order emerging?
Aside from being a taxing week in the U.S., mid-April is also when BusinessWeek Magazine publishes its top 50 list of the most innovative companies all over the world. This year’s rankings are definitely pointing to a trend I’ve talked about before: That a majority of companies recognized as top innovators are based outside the U.S. Check out this video for some insights:
In the 2010 Bloomberg/BusinessWeek annual rankings of Most Innovative Companies, 15 of the Top 50 are Asian—up from just five in 2006.
The list is dominated by companies from Europe, Asia, and for the first time, South America.
Bloomberg/BusinessWeek’s Most Innovative Companies report has been published each April since 2005, although in the beginning it was the Top 20 list. The results are based on a 21-question poll to senior executives around the globe. The 1,590 respondents, who answered anonymously, were asked to name the most innovative companies from outside their own industry in 2009.
What many will find surprising, I think, is that when Bloomberg/Businessweek started ranking innovators in 2005, only six of the Top 20 were headquartered outside the U.S. A third of 2005′s American champs (3M, Starbuck, eBay, etc.), no longer make the Top 50.
Check out the article & the Top 50 list here.
Got Invention Radio dials up innovation
One of my good friends Brian Fried, host of Got Invention Radio, invited me to come on his show for a four-part series, which aired late last week. You can listen online or download it here. Got Invention Radio is a wonderful show where inventors can call into the program and discuss their innovation ideas with experts. My colleague Jeff Lindsay has also been on Brian’s program before along with a number of other business leaders. (Check out the archive here.)
Our company does a lot of work with inventors who have fantastic innovative ideas for game-changing products, but need a little guidance taking their idea to market. I always tell them Step One is to get a clear definition of idea or invention before you can lay out the path to bring it to market.
People often get stuck in this stage because they haven’t thought through the time, processes and resources needed to make it happen. For instance, has the inventor mapped out what people and skills are crucial? One idea is to explore open innovation–those strategic partnerships that can take your ideas beyond your own brick and mortar walls.
My favorite part of the program was taking calls from inventors who had questions about licensing preparation and prototypes.
We want to help people with projects that will make a significant difference in the lives or habits of people. There are many inventions that are incremental–a little bit better and a little bit cheaper–but the true innovators are making that difference for consumers.
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.
Creating an Ecosystem for Business and Innovation Success: Brasilia's Success Story
When it comes to innovation and business growth, there are exciting success stories all over the globe. For example, in Brasilia, a small state in Brazil with 2.6 million people, a recent experiment has resulted in astounding economic advances and record low unemployment, even as much of the rest of the world struggles with recession and rising unemployment. The Federal District of Brasilia embarked on a revolutionary program in 2006 aimed at reducing bureaucracy and creating an environment for success. This required dramatic steps to advance education, infrastructure, and the rule of law. Improving financial resources (debt financing) for business is one of the next big priorities.
Here is a 14-minute Pixetell presentation describing some of the good news coming from Brasilia, focusing on efforts to create an ecosystem for success. It follows an earlier presentation from Jeff Lindsay. Click on the enlarge-screen icon to view this in full-screen mode.
Home & Housewares show brings innovation opportunities
Looking for your next best selling product for the home? Check out this year’s upcoming International Home & Housewares Show. I’ll be over at the Inventors Corner Pavilion to speak on March 15. That’s where companies can go see actual product creations and their inventors on hand.
The International Home & Housewares Show is the world’s premier housewares marketplace, and it features more than 2,000 exhibitors and more than 20,000 buyers from over 100 countries around the world! It’s the one place you can go to see first-hand consumer lifestyle and product trends for all areas of the home, both inside and out, under one roof.
For my part I will be sharing best practices for taking innovation to the next step and discusses how to create a strategy, structure and culture to successfully drive innovation efforts. I am going to share insights on how to engage internal stakeholders, address innovation fatigue and overcome barriers to personal and corporate success, as discussed in our book Conquering Innovation Fatigue.
While I’m at the Inventors Corner I’m looking forward to meeting those inventors and seeing how are the most creative minds are solving the problems that consumers face each day.
Prize4Life Illustrates Collaborative Innovation at Its Best in the Quest to Cure ALS
In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, we emphasize that many innovators are motivated by the desire to make a difference in the world rather than merely obtain personal profit. We also discuss the concept of innovation competitions as a great way to fuel innovation success and access new talent. We also emphasize the importance of collaboration across disciplines and organizational boundaries as the future of innovation success. All these concepts are nicely illustrated by an organization seeking to cure ALS, Lou Gherig’s disease. Prize4Life, Inc. (Prize4Life.org) makes an interesting case study of what can be achieved in the realm of altruistic innovation using collaborative models and innovation competitions.
Meghan Kallman, Marketing & Communications Manager of Prize4Life, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kindly shared some information with me about their inspiring innovation efforts. Here is the information she provided:
I would like to share with you the case of Avichai Kremer, co-founder and CEO of Prize4Life, Inc. Then a student at Harvard Business School, Kremer discovered in 2004 that he had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
A computer-science engineer and ex-captain in the Israeli army, he had planned to graduate, work as a manager in a hi-tech company, and raise a family. Those plans changed drastically when he was told he would have 2-5 years to live, and that the medical establishment could do nothing for him. Kremer’s business perspective sparked his interest in the economics of ALS therapies, and inspired him to use his Harvard training to work for a cure.
Little is known about what causes ALS and only a few companies develop ALS drugs, so Kremer and two of his Harvard colleagues queried scientists and industry executives about the gaps that have prevented researchers from finding a cure. Companies said that they needed some basic research tools to reduce the cost of the development, like a biomarker – a better way to track disease progression. So Kremer and his classmates began Prize4Life, Inc., a non-profit organization employing business theories to stimulate research, which announced in 2006 that they would give $1 million to anyone who could come up with such a biomarker. The ALS Biomarker Prize program recently awarded $100,000 in progress prizes, and the organization’s second prize, the Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize, hits its one-year anniversary in October 2009.
While prizes are the visible core of our results-oriented model, we are also conscious of the need to create a vibrant and supportive arena in which our participating teams can effectively compete. Prize4Life has thus created a series of innovative projects and partnerships, piggybacking on its groundbreaking prize model, to ensure that all competing teams equal opportunity to be successful.
As one example of such partnership: in June 2009, Prize4Life and the Alzheimer Research Forum announced the launch of a new ALS-focused internet portal known as the ALS Forum (http://www.researchALS.org). Initial reaction to the new web portal has been swift and positive. The site offers ALS researchers around the world a one-stop access point for cutting edge research news and unique web-based resources. We also have designed and developed a manual to help researchers design their animal trials, and are currently designing and developing a database of genes associated with ALS that we intend to make available to researchers.
About Prize4Life
Prize4Life was founded by a group of Harvard Business School students when one of them, Avi Kremer, was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 29. Prize4Life works to accelerate the discovery of a treatment and a cure for ALS by using powerful incentives to attract new people and ideas, and to leverage existing efforts and expertise in the ALS field. Among other program initiatives, the organization currently administers the ALS Biomarker Prize Challenge, the Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize, and the ALS Forum.THE NEXT ALS BREAKTHROUGH COULD BE YOURS
Meghan also shared with me an example of a successful outreach effort using the competition model. “We actually awarded $50,000 to a dermatologist who had never studied ALS before, and who was intrigued by the prize model, and who submitted a winning entry, which is a testament to the potential of the prize model itself.” For the complete press release with much additional information, see the press release, “Prize4Life Awards Prizes for ALS Biomarker Challenge to InnoCentive Solvers: Extends $1Million Challenge Seeking ALS Biomarker” (PDF).
Further examples of great collaboration can be seen in their press release, “Prize4Life and The Jackson Laboratory partner in fight against ALS
Non-profits join forces to provide researchers with new preclinical resources” (PDF). This describes a partnership with The Jackson Laboratory (JAX®), the world’s leading provider of mouse models, to provide preclinical resources for ALS research. Together, Prize4Life and JAX® have prepared a comprehensive training manual to enable researchers to more effectively use the SOD1 mouse model in the fight against ALS.
Their website is http://www.prize4life.org.
Want to Help?
If you would like to help, Meghan told me that there are many opportunities. “We always need donations and fundraisers (this is the link), but we also have folks who host events for us, who blog on our behalf (on their blogs or on ours), who reach out to scientists who may want to compete for our prizes, to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, to link to us on their sites, the list goes on! We have an exciting event coming up here in Boston, for those who are local–Boston’s pro lacrosse team will be featuring us at ‘Heroes Awareness Night’ at the Boston TD Garden on February 6, and donating a percentage of the proceeds to our efforts. If anyone is on the east coast and wants to attend, they should click here:http://bit.ly/512shV. Anyone interested can contact me directly, mkallman at prize4life dot org.
A great example of collaborative innovation in action, with bonus points for using innovation competitions and having altruistic goals. ALS is a terrible disease and needs more attention in the quest for cure.
Inventables delivers inspiration and innovation to the dreamers of the world!
I am thrilled to see that TECHCRUNCH.COM is featuring the innovative company of my friend and partner Zach Kaplan. Zach’s Chicago-based company, Inventables, inspires thousands of designers in their companies (such as Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, and Black & Decker), to be innovative. Check out the artlicle here!
So what is Inventables and why are so many designers and engineers excited about this company? Inventables is a no-frills website that was launched this month where vendors of raw materials and technologies can create online profiles for their products in order to generate qualified sales leads worth their time. Inventables makes it very easy for vendors of materials and technologies to get an initial introduction to potential buyers.
Microsoft X-Box, PING Golf Clubs, and Kraft Foods are examples of buyer companies using the marketplace. Dupont, 3M, and Eastman are examples of companies participating as vendors.
I’ve been serving as an advisor to Inventables, and couldn’t be more pleased and excited for its future.
Says Zach:
“We founded Inventables to help companies innovate by sharing our excitement for what technology makes possible with the world’s innovators. We’ve opened up our once proprietary research for free to the world so that information and access to new materials that was once only available to the largest companies in the world is now available to anyone with an internet connection.”
Who’s Mining the Shop? The Need to Mine Inventions in Companies, Universities
“Who’s mining the shop?” This is a question that needs to be asked for every university, company, and organization capable of creating inventions. In my corporate and academic experience (am the former Corporate Patent Strategist at Kimberly-Clark Corp., and was a professor before that), numerous inventions never get the protection they deserve because nobody was there to coach the inventors, to recognize the potential for intellectual property, and to do the extra work required to develop a sound IP strategy for the work. Many inventors know almost nothing about intellectual property. Many don’t even recognize that what they have developed is an invention. This can be especially true in businesses when the invention is developed outside of a normal R&D department, such as a new business method or software tool. But even research scientists and professors may miss the patent potential of their work unless there is someone there to coach and guide them.
Technology transfer offices are charged with this task in many universities, and legal departments or patent review boards have this duty in many companies, but both can miss huge opportunities unless there is someone who goes out to mine the organization for inventions. That involves reaching out to groups and individuals, educating them (often in presentations or group meetings) about intellectual property, being available for one-on-one discussions, asking questions, looking for signs of exciting developments, being an advocate and mentor, and constantly mining for IP gold. These are activities that we at Innovationedge have done for some of our clients, with exciting results. Let us help you develop a plan to capture more of the inventions that are in your midst, and to generate new intellectual assets (including low-cost assets) to build a powerful portfolio.
One of the many exciting experiences I had at Kimberly-Clark came after recognizing that a particular remote mill had developed some clever solutions to a few problems they were facing. After further inquiries, I learned that the mill had some very bright engineers who were solving lots of problems in clever ways. I suggested that there may be some patent opportunities coming out of that mill, and arranged a trip where a couple of us would spend a couple days there giving presentations and doing interviews of team members to see what they might have. I found many exciting and potentially patentable advances from their work, and ended up working with them to generate nearly a dozen invention disclosures, several of which were filed as patents. This created a lot of excitement for the mill and helped them pay more attention to the IP potential of what they were doing.
As with that mill experience, part of successful mining involves helping people write up the initial invention disclosure. When people are very busy and writing disclosures doesn’t fit their job description, someone needs to be the assistant/mentor who basically writes it for them, taking away the pain of the IP process. It requires resources, but it can lead to substantial returns.
We would be happy to work with you to examine your organization and determine what you could achieve by applying some additional resources to help generate IP through proactive mining. Mining and generating intellectual assets for clients are among our favorite services that we offer. We consider it an important step toward overcoming innovation fatigue in some organizations.
Who’s mining the shop? Great question. Give us a call today and let us help you strengthen your mining efforts.
Inventions Ahead of Their Time
One of my painful experiences in the pursuit of patents has been surprisingly close prior art. Even after serious and careful searching related to an invention that seems entirely new, one may later find that someone else pursued a very similar idea many years ago. Like the Good Book says, there is no truly novel thing under the sun, though there may be many nonobvious improvements thereof.
A great example of this is the iPod, a terrific innovation that may have been anticipated to some degree in 1979. “Suspiciously Prescient Man Files Patent for iPod-Like Device in 1979” is Dan Nosowitz’s recent post at Gizmodo pointing out how an old, expired patent hinted at several aspects of the iPod. Of course, music players and MP3s were already around when the iPod came out, but the 1979 data is rather surprising. That patent may have had some great concepts, but like many inventive concepts, it may have been too early to be practical and successful. Timing is so important for success in innovation: is the market ready, is the supply chain available, is there an ecosystem that can be tapped, can the concept stick and resonate with other innovations, and can it be offered economically?
Consideration of the market roadmap for a prospective innovation can be critical for success. Many times suceess requires adjusting the business model to find the resonances that can add energy to the offering and to find ways to present the innovation in a disruptive manner rather than going head-on against established incumbents. Innovation is often more about the business model and marketing plan than it is about the technology itself. The iTunes model was part of what made the iPod a winner. 1979 was the wrong digital era for that invention.
Do you have an invention that is way ahead of its time? Is you company pursuing a product concept too far ahead of its time? Why not considering tapping the expertise of the team at Innovationedge to look for ways to realize the potential of your innovation vision in the near future, rather than simply laying a foundation for future generations to benefit from your work (royalty free). We enjoy working with innovators to find the right way to position an invention in order to find disruptive innovation opportunities, or to find the right business model and partners to increase the odds of success, or to create the marketing roadmap that can identify the path forward for bringing the concept successfully to the market. It’s not easy, and sometimes the problems really can’t be readily circumvented, but when there is a fit with our skills and interests, we really enjoy working with others to help them find innovation success.