Steve Blank: Why Innovation Dies
- Innovation in New Markets do not come from “overarching strategies”
- It comes out of opportunity, chaos and rapid experimentation
- Solutions are found by betting on a portfolio of low-cost experiments
- With a minimum number of constraints
- The road for innovation does not go through committee
Steve Blank shows us an interesting example of how organizations approach innovative business development in his own university. And concludes with the above lessons…
Stanford Startups Focus on Health Care - Health 2.0 News
Of the nine startups that demoed, five companies aim to tackle problems in health care ― from ensuring that instant messages in the hospital are securely transferred, to making health care costs more transparent.
It becomes more and more clear that the wave of entrepreneurial innovation have come to health care. The main problem now is the traditional perception of health care, organizational models and incredibly complex web of regulations which shows a much slower speed of change.
Strategic Insight is Not on the CEO Radar - Alessandro Di Fiore - Harvard Business Review
This is really something that echoes a problem I have been pondering for years: I really agree with Drucker on the issue and I been for many year but why is strategic insight so under valued and overlooked? When discussing the need for real insights the whole discussion usually ends with a lunch-to-lunch exercise in the woods… because “we have already planned that and we don’t have more time to spend”. The message about the importance of investing time and energy looking for a strategic insight simply doesn’t get through!
In the research ECSI have found a four suggestions to why might be that way:
- Insight is confused with innovation = wrong expectations of what it is
- Insight has no owner = pieces of it are spread
- Schumpeter’s bias = we seems to believe insight is an individual property
- Lack of internal integration = thinking and doing is usually not connected
MIT Media Lab Rolls Out Folding Car | Singularity Hub
You think European cars are small now, wait till the Hiriko takes to the roads in Spain’s northern Basque country. The two-seater is about the size of a SmartCar, but when parked, it can actually fold. After folding the car takes up about a third of a normal parking space.
Source: singularityhub.com
World’s Smallest Steam Engine Is Size of Fog Droplet
Engineers have made a tiny engine a few micrometers wide, or roughly the size of a water droplet found in fog.
The device is both confined and powered by a “trap” of laser light, and it sputters a bit. The fact that it works at all, however, may push the boundary of what’s possible in engineering microscopic machines.
“The machine is so small that its motion is hindered by microscopic processes which are of no consequence in the macroworld,” said physicist Clemens Bechinger of the University of Stuttgart in a press release. A study about the microscopic Stirling engine was published Dec. 11 in Nature Physics.
» via Wired
Source: Wired
Source: slideshare.net
Porn Is No Longer A Leading Indicator of Web Innovation
Adult entertainment studio Pink Visual announced the release of an API yesterday so Web and mobile developers can take advantage of the company’s content to create dynamic games, websites and native applications. There was once a time when this would have been significant news. It is not. The porn industry was once the leading pusher of technological adoption. If porn adopted a new innovation, it indicated that tech would likely flourish.
The classic example of this is VHS. Betamax was a better technology but it was more expensive than VHS. So, porn went with VHS and that became the dominant standard for nearly 20 years. The early rise of the Internet was also filled with porn and, like it or not, has been part of the definition of the Web for nearly 20 years as well. The time has come for porn to move over. If you really want to see what the next great Web technology is, the best place to look is at cutting edge game developers working with HTML5.
» via ReadWriteWeb
The net effect of recent information technology on the porn industry is shifting the value position towards individuals from the publishing companies. Cheaper and better communication is empowering the million headed crowd of amateur porn producers working in their own bedrooms with their home video equipment and is ultimately draining the industry from R&D resources which can be spent on technology innovation.
Source: infoneer-pulse
Google and Carnegie Mellon researchers team up on cloud-powered facial recognition that would enable you to take a photo of a complete stranger and track their real identity in mere minutes
Then every public place on the planet becomes like the local pub where you know everyone’s first name, income and previous spouses but still treat them as acquaintances…
(via emergentfutures)
Source: The Atlantic
Sweden tops Global Creativity Index before US, Finland, Denmark and Australia in that order.
I wonder how this correlates to e g how the Swedish school system works? Especially since Sweden seems below par in the PISA measurements… Maybe the Swedish school systems is bad at producing factory workers, but good at producing creative people??
(via The Global Creativity Index - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities)
Source: theatlanticcities.com
The Eight Pillars of Innovation | Think Quarterly by Google
I wonder why Susan Wojcicki is picking the word “innovation” in the head line when it could replaced by e g “success”? Could it be that innovation is the holy graal of success these days…? ;-)
Interesting read though… Click and read more about the pillars:
- Have a mission that matters
- Think big but start small
- Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection
- Look for ideas everywhere
- Share everything
- Spark with imagination, fuel with data
- Be a platform
- Never fail to fail
