Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
The idea that two seemingly unrelated or conflicting points of view can be synthesized into a new and rewarding perspective is at heart of improvisation. The ability to resolve conflict by identifying and playing productive games is the secret to creativity, innovation and, ultimately, entrepreneurship.
Warm heart of Disney animation meets Steve Jobs’ cool tech to produce Pixar.
Choir songbooks plus moribund 3M R&D project yields PostIt notes.
Simplicity of a 32-word landing page plus complexity of human language brands Google.
Here’s a great example that surfaced this week on the BBC showing how improvisers resolve conflict to conjure up fresh ideas. Thanks to our friend James Dean Conklin (iconic actor meets bop on the head to shape a uniquely evolved human being) for calling it to our attention.
Phillip George, a designer from Australia, was ‘inspired’ by a series of riots on Sydney beaches in 2005, in which the Surf crowd attacked the Sufi crowd. George has produced a series of surfboards featuring beautiful Arabic designs that’s being shown right now in Australia as a museum exhibit. Right on, duddah!
Tags: 2005, 3M, Australia, Conflict, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Google, Innovation, Phillip George, Pixar, Resolution, Riots, Steve Jobs, Surfboards, Surfi, Surfi Culture, Sydney
Posted in Agreement Principle, Character, Communication, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Gifts, Innovation | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Tags: Broadband, Career, China, College, Did You Know?, Education, English, India, Innovation, internet, Jobs, Learning, Science, Video
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Networked World | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Our November GameChanger of the Month selection was a slam dunk. Barack Obama is going to be America’s first baller president, and he’s going to be its first Improviser-in-Chief.
His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger. (more…)
Tags: Barack Obama, Chicago, Economy, Follow the Follower, GameChanger of the Month, Hyde Park, Improvisation, Inauguration, Innovation, Lincoln, Listening, McCain, November 2008, Palin
Posted in Agreement Principle, Branding, Casting, Character, Communication, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Focus, Fundamentals, Group Mind, Innovation, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives, Themes, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
A year ago, the town of Newton, Iowa, population 15,000, was in the doldrums. In a pattern that is worth noting because it’s going to be repeated throughout the U.S. in towns large and small as the economy crawls toward new sources of productivity, the town’s largest employer, Maytag Washing Machines, closed its plant and officer there in October of 2007, costing Newton 1,800 jobs, 800 in management and 1,000 in manufacturing.
By early 2007, Newton had already seen the writing on the wall, and had begun mapping its evolution–from washing machines to wind machines, as it would turn out. Today, Newton is home to a manufacturing plant for Boston-based TPI, one of the country’s leading wind turbine brands. CBS Evening News covered the story last week. How Newton did it can serve as a blueprint for other similar-sized communities, whose fortunes (and mis-fortunes) are tightly tied to a single large employer. (more…)
Tags: Alternative Energy, Innovation, Iowa, Newton, Reality, TPI, Transformation, Wind Turbines
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Innovation | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Heather Champ, the Director of Community for Flickr, was the subject of Chris Colin’s Sept 29 On the Job blog on SFGate. Ethan Bauley, social networking entrepreneur for the online marketing company, M80, sent me the link, as he often does when business improvisation makes news.
Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene. (more…)
Tags: Chaos, Chris Colin, Community, Conformity, Derek Powazek, Entrepreneurship, Flickr, Fray, Guidelines, Heather Champ, HR, Innovation, JPG Magazine, Networked World, Policy, Policymaking, SFGate
Posted in Branding, Entrepreneurship, Issues, Networked World, Scenes, Themes | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Sigh. The post about Paul Polak got swallowed up by WordPress (and I didn’t have it backed up). So if anyone out there saved the lost post in a file, please send it along and we’ll re-post.
Meanwhile, here’s the re-construction, in abridged form:
Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and the author of Out of Poverty, has been battling poverty in development countries for 23 years by helping poor farmers eke out a better living off the land. IDE operates on a local level, dealing with grass-roots problems and building markets for locally-manufactured solutions. This self-sustaining model has resulted in cleaner drinking water, better efficiency in agriculture, improved health and better standards of living for millions of people around the world. (more…)
Tags: GameChanger of the Month, IDE, Innovation, International Development Enterprises, Out of Poverty, Paul Polak, Third World Prosperity, Vietnam, Zambia
Posted in Character, Dialogue, Environment, Games, Gifts, Networked World | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
June, 1985: At a conference on film financing, a banker from First Boston asks a crowd of film industry executives to name the most valuable thing in the movie business. None of them have the answer she’s looking for, an answer that was prescient at the time, and never more relevant than it is today. “The most valuable thing in the movie business,” the banker informs them, “is 52 weekends a year.” In the banker’s opinion, it is the film studios’ ability to capitalize on the 52 yearly opening weekends that determines their status in the marketplace. Not long after the banker makes this observation, the Weekend Boxoffice Report begins appearing for the first time in newspapers around the country. For better or worse, who ‘wins the weekends’ becomes a new metric for a film’s success, a new context for audiences to consider, and a driver of a film’s revenue in ancillary markets.
In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. (more…)
Tags: Branding, Connect and Develop, Content, Context, Context is King, Contextualization, Google, Innovation, Mochila, Morf, Networked World, P & G, Social Engineer, Social Networks, YouTube
Posted in Branding, Listening, Networked World, Suggestions From the Audience, Themes | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
In the Networked World, we celebrate the webpreneur who can humble higher status players by acting more nimbly, creatively, profitably; but we’d be foolish not to respect to the big games played by big players, because they have so much potential to move money and jobs into (or out of) an economy.
Besides which, there’s nothing else in the world like playing with trains. Big trains.
Naturally I was interested when my cousin, Kevin, an engineer with GE in Florida, told me about a train project he’s working on there as part of the company’s Ecomagination initiative. (more…)
Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, CO2, Disney, Ecomagination, Environment, Fuel Consumption, Game, GE, Innovation, Locomotive, Theme, Train, Trip Optimizer
Posted in Communication, Creativity, Innovation, Themes | No Comments »
