Beyond Brainstorming

What is an Innovation Tool?

What is an Innovation Tool? This is a question I have been asked more than once in the last few weeks since the release of ThinkCube.

Let me start with a definition of a tool:

An implement or instrument. Anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose.   

An innovation tool is an instrument that is used as a means of accomplishing a task, in this case innovation.

What about the definition of Innovation. Innovation is a much overused term these days, there is a lot of discussion around the subtleties between similar terms:  invention, idea, creativity etc. I will keep it simple and define it as:

The creation of something new or different.

In a nutshell an Innovation tool is an instrument that is used in accomplishing the creation of something new or different.

The next question is normally along the lines of ‘How does it work?’

ThinkCube is based on a number of innovation fundamentals that I discovered through my research; they help in the creation of something new and different.

FUNDAMENTAL 1 - Innovation happens at the intersection of domains and fields. The best ideas come at 'interesting' intersections i.e. architecture and computer programming gave us ‘Design Patterns’. Introducing ideas from one domain into another, results in breakthrough ideas. Nature has been a source of ideas for thousands of years.

How does ThinkCube deliver? It has an idea library that draws from disparate fields and domains, opening up many 'interesting' intersections for the user.

FUNDAMENTAL 2 - Breakthrough ideas come from playing with ideas and forming new connections. Combination is powerful creativity technique that is used to stimulate new ideas. By combining two disparate ideas you can form new ideas i.e. a childish example would be combining a zebra and lion, you either get a zebra with a mane or a lion with black stripes. This is obviously a simplistic example, but it can be extended to form complex ideas i.e. combination of a coin stamp and wine press leading to a revolution in printing (there was a lot more to the invention of printing and why Gutenburg in the 1500’s triggered a revolution while centuries earlier other cultures had come close).

How does ThinkCube deliver? ThinkCube is based on a creativity board game where you combine words and ideas to form new ideas.

FUNDAMENTAL 3 - Incubation is a powerful and important part of any innovation process. Incubation was discovered as one of the most important aspects of innovation more than hundred years ago. Jacques Hadamard in his book 'The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field' describes Henri Poincare's discovery that incubation plays a key role in invention. Unfortunately incubation has been ignored in the new innovation processes and methods that proliferate these days. In the age of brainstorming off-sites there seems to be no room for true incubation. Through my research I discovered the power of incubation when I incorporated it into an iterative process of repeated ideation sessions. The best ideas came between the sessions. I called it the ‘1 week later syndrome’, the best ideas come 1 week after an ideation session. The best way to have lots of good ideas, is to have many ideation sessions on a regular basis, forcing periods of incubation between the intense idea generation sessions.

How does ThinkCube Deliver? ThinkCube incorporates an innovation methodology - ‘ThinkCubation’ (Thinking and Incubation) that not only includes incubation, but actually turns it from a passive step to an active process, leveraging the iterative insight of the ‘1 week later syndrome’.

FUNDAMENTAL 4 – Brainstorming is a skill to be practiced and perfected. I wrote an entire blog post about the importance of Brainstorming a while back. In summary, brainstorming is more than a ‘just in time’ activity; a 1 day off-site is not going to solve your most crucial business problems. You need to incorporate a culture of brainstorming into your everyday activities. Brainstorming like a lot of mental skills can be improved with repeated use. Anybody who has ever played a mental game realizes quickly you get better at the particular thinking technique the more you play i.e. in chess you get better at spotting certain tactics (pins, forks, skewers) the more you play. Recently there have been many advances on the research of improving thinking skills; Nintendo’s BrainAge is a game based on the work of neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima where your thinking skills are honed through thinking games.

How does ThinkCube Deliver? ThinkCube is based on a board game that provides a fun environment to train your brain on the most important brainstorming skills: associative thinking, combinatory play, breaking assumptions, looking at the problem from different angles etc.

In summary, ThinkCube combines innovation fundamentals into a practical tool to help you and your teams in the creation new ideas. Along the way you will learn about many disparate fields and domains, improve your thinking skills and most importantly have fun!

Happy ThinkCubating,

EveryThing is Miscellaneous: Book Review

In Brief

David Weinberger’s new book is a hard book to categorize, which is also the irony, since it’s central premise is about categorizing information. I place this book in the company of other books about the internet and information; Ambient Findability – Peter Morville, Wikinomics – Don Tapscott, Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler. To me it’s about the changes wrought by current trends on the internet. Weinberger is deeply familiar with internet and all it’s implications, since he is one of the original authors of Cluetrain Manifesto which was probably the first book to outline the game changing nature of the internet. Here he tackles how to cope with the seeming chaos of digital information that we are deluged with.

This is a thought provoking book and will make you look at organizing information in a different way. It will help you understand some of the current trends on the internet and put it into historical context.

Audience

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in internet trends especially as it relates to organizing information. If you are at all interested in the history of information and how we as humans have struggled to come to terms with the world, then this book is one of the best I have come across. It is well written and a pleasure to read.

Details

David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic – Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.

Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.

He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1. 1^st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2. 2^nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3. 3^rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The 1^st and 2^nd orders of organization are covered as Weinberger explores the history of our obsession with categorizing information; from Plato’s ‘Joints of Nature’, to Aristotle’s ‘Trees of Knowledge’. We have been lumping and splitting information for thousands of years. Until recently we have been constrained by the laws of physics, it is hard for objects to be in two places. It is also hard to categorize the real world into orderly taxonomies i.e. what category does a duck-billed-platypus fit into?

The 3^rd order organization is what Weinberger is referring to in his title, ‘Everything is Miscellaneous’. In a world where we can organize information any way we want, nothing needs to be categorized per-se and everything can live in a state of limbo in the miscellaneous category until we need it and then, and only then, does it need to be grouped, filtered, sorted for our immediate consumption.

The 3^rd order world has freed information and people to categorize information anyway they want. It is no longer an academic exercise to come up with taxonomies. With tools like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr etc. we slice and dice the world of information to our personal needs. Understanding this digital disorder we live in and how we cope is the ultimate point of this book. True to form, Weinberger has given us a wealth of information to ultimately understand where we are today and how to build the tools to cope in the future.

Key Take-Aways

You will come away from this book understanding the following:

-         Our historical struggle to organize information from the physical to the digital

-         That we live in a new reality where information is freed from its physical constraints.

-         The world of information is now available to all of us and can now be organized any way we want.

Summary

If you enjoyed any of Weinberger’s previous books (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined) you will not be disappointed. This is a pleasure to read and will make you think – my two most important attributes when it comes to books. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in information and the current trends on the internet. Weinberger has been right on the money with his observations of the internet and this book is no different; organizing information in the age of the internet is an important subject. Read why there is more to information than search alone.

Open For Business!

ThinkCube is now officially available for sale at metamemes.com and at Amazon.com!! For a limited time, we’re offering FREE SHIPPING when you buy directly from metamemes.com.

If you signed up for a release notification via our site and did not receive the email yet, please resend your email address to sue@metamemes.com for a 20% off "thank you" coupon code. We’re sorry - we experienced an unexpected hardware failure and some recent signups were deleted. More frequent back-ups are underway!   

ThinkCube Has Arrived!

Yes folks, you heard it right - ThinkCube has arrived! And we have the aching backs and sore muscles to prove it. We spent quite a few hours over the last week offloading delivery trucks, taking inventory of all the pieces, and setting up our own little ThinkCube assembly factory.

As of today, ThinkCube is available for purchase on Amazon.com. We expect to go live with the www.metamemes.com shopping cart early this week. Anyone who signed up for a release notification email will be receiving those this week, along with a special "thank you" coupon.

Founders at Work (Book Review)

The Summary

Jessica Livingston has written an amazing book. If you want to read the stories behind some of the most well known software companies in the last 30 years, you will find it in this book. But Livingston hasn’t just covered the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft), she has included a diverse collection from Steve Wozniak (Apple) to David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals), Dan Bricklin (Visicalc) to Blake Ross (Firefox). It covers a lot of ground from the early 80’s software boom to the Web 2.0 starts ups. But there is more than just stories about starting companies, there is real advice from the frontline trenches of software start-ups. Keep your post-it notes and highlighter handy, if you are like me you will be annotating and highlighting a lot!

The Audience

If you have ever considered a start-up you should definitely read this book. It’s like picking the brains of some very experienced entrepreneurs. Anybody that has already tried their hand at start-ups will recognize the value of this book. Most will probably feel like I did, and wish that they had had this book before they started their first company. It could have saved me many painful lessons (both financially and personally). Reading these interviews is like having 32 mentors.

The Details

Like many people I am always a little skeptical of ‘success stories’. Just because someone did x, y and z, doesn’t mean that I could follow these very steps and be as successful.  Just because Aunt Ethel, who lived to be a 100, attributes her long life to drinking a glass of whisky every day, doesn’t mean I can drink a glass of whisky every day and live to be a 100. Instead of a collection of fluffy ‘creation myth’ stories written about software companies, Livingston has put a lot of thought into how she approached these interviews and has collected some real gems of insights from these entrepreneurs. She has uncovered a gold mine of valuable advice and information about starting a company. As you read these stories you start to see some patterns emerging. Some of these patterns I recognize from my own experiences, but others were new to me. Sometimes you see contradictory advice from different founders; one tells you, you need to focus on the technology and somebody else explains that it’s more important to focus on business/market opportunity. There are definitely multiple paths to starting a company, but some advice is repeated story after story, and these seem to be universal truths.

The Ideas

Here are some of the universal truths that I culled from the interviews:

- Iterate through ideas, the first idea isn't always the best

- Business plans are important - but be prepared to change it many times

- You need to be naïve – “unencumbered by reality”

- Persistence makes all the difference

- Passion – you need to be really excited about what you are doing and think it's really important

- Understand and listen to your end users

The book is full of ideas and advice like this.

The Take-Aways

Overall, I can’t say enough good things about this book. Obviously it’s aimed at entrepreneurs, but I know there are going to be many people just interested in the stories behind their favorite companies or people. Personally I loved the interviews with Ray Ozzie, Joel Spolsky, Joe Kraus and Steve Wozniak. I was also fascinated by the stories behind companies like: 37 Signals, Six Apart, del.icio.us and Craigslist. I was even surprised by the story behind ‘Hot or Not’, it’s not as shallow as you might think.

Entrepreneurs -- wanna-be, new and experienced –- you NEED to read, think, digest and act on the advice in this book and your next/current entrepreneurial venture will go much smoother.

Product Placement Gone Wrong

Martha Stewart’s popularity certainly benefited from her jail time in 2005. But did it teach her anything about honesty? A recent Business Week article, Queen of The Product Pitch, leaves you wondering.

The article describes Martha Stewart’s new revenue stream generated by disguising product plugs as regular segments in her daytime talk show.

Paid product plugs are nothing new on talk shows; Oprah, Ellen, and The View all do it. The difference with The Martha Stewart Show is that Martha’s being sneaky about it. She incorporates the products so seamlessly that it’s often hard to distinguish between her actual advice and a paid pitch.

How will her viewers feel when they eventually realize she’s being deceptive? Maybe betrayed? Used? That’s how I felt. I actually saw one of her “plug” segments prior to reading this article and thought, “Did she really just endorse that product that I know is crap?”

Martha defends the practice saying as long as she promotes products she really believes in, she won’t hurt her brand or viewers. Can anyone be unbiased with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table? In the long run, I think this practice will back fire on her. People don’t like being lied to. I think this is product placement gone wrong.