INNOVATION IN MIND - Mindblog

Here comes the kids

Fredrik Häglund — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:28:52 +0000

Innovation in mind will continue

Fredrik Häglund — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:29:29 +0000

As Mats Lindoff entered the stage at 4 PM Sep 17, everyone in the Quadrangle knew that Innovation in Mind was about to end. In the tent that is. For there are a lot of minds in which innovation will live on. It is not a shortage of ideas and creativity that will hamper innovation in our flat world of global competition. As Curtis Carlson pointed out, the problem is that most companies do not have a clear idea of how to systematically nurture and support work on innovation. A deficiency that may explain why companies fail to adapt and as a result go out of business. Think of the possibilities if companies and established organizations better could pick up on and support the innovative ideas that users, which not uncommonly, also are employees, come up with.

"Leap - and the net will appear" (Hashemi, 2009)

Beauty in mind

Fredrik Häglund — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:35:38 +0000

Nikolaus Franke, who made an excellent speech on user innovation, mentioned a rather interesting thing about Botox. The Botulinum toxin was originally developed for treatment of spasms but around two thirds of the revenues come from use in wrinkle removal. Beauty in mind.

Sucess is loving what you do

Fredrik Häglund — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:27:32 +0000

Today was the first day of the conference. And what a day it was. The quadrangle was packed with people and the line up of speakers did their absolute best not to let anybody down. One that gave an inspiring talk was Sahar Hashemi. Of course she had a good story to tell, but nonetheless a well delivered speech. Sahar founded Coffee Republic in London in 1995. A bold endeavor that brought coffee to a tea loving country. Besides telling the story about the rise of Coffee Republic she made an interesting remark on on ideas. She commented that unless you put your idea on paper it will not become tangible enough to work on. It connects well with what Nolan Bushnell said the other night at Qday. He said something along the lines of "any idiot can have an idea in the shower - but it is what happens next that matters". Ideas are good but implementation is the key.

Two links from Bengt-Åke Lundvall

Bengt-Åke Lundvall — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:56:09 +0000

http://create2009.europa.eu/ambassadors/profiles/bengt_aake_lundvall.html

Are more users always better?

Fredrik Häglund — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:45:21 +0000

Social media is today a well known phenomena and through sites like Facebook and MySpace people all over the world can interact openly. If we take Facebook as an example its many users should, according to theory, attract even more users, since a large network increases the odds of interacting with friends and new acquaintances. And apparently it has. But lurking around is the trend that people move to smaller and more specialized social networks with the ability to focus on and support a unique activity that appeals to a specific set of users. Many of these such as Flickr (photo storage and sharing, last.fm (tracking music); twitter (short blogging) are already well known and with the introduction of services like OpenID it will be increasingly easy for users to choose and operate several of these focused social medias. Another example reveals how professionals can use social media to interact and that is Sermo. It was founded in 2006 Daniel Palestrant and is open only to verified doctors, i.e. a network with a very clear focus and target group. Are we seeing the demise of large and aggregating social networks?

Do the crowd change the game?

Fredrik Häglund — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:41:22 +0000

Is the many really smarter than the few? Is the crowd changing the game? In a recent article published in FastCompany the use of crowdsourcing is discussed. It would seem that a company can be advised to use "the crowd" when it has something to fall back on and avoid it when there are apparent threats to its reputation and business relations. And even if the use of the crowd do not result in a marketable product or service, the company will still have the vast amount of data that was generated in the process. Something that may prove valuable down the road.

Music lives here

Fredrik Häglund — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:31:28 +0000

As often is pointed out and discussed, some of the more important innovations in recent years concerns business models. An industry in which the incumbents have struggled to face the challenges posed by new actors operating on new business models is the music industry. Many of us remember pioneers such as Napster and Kazaa. They and similar attempts changed the way music was distributed and consumed. They are no longer around in their original form but in the aftermath several new, and from a business model point of view, interesting solutions, have arisen. One of those is Amie Street. Their idea is to let the community, i.e. the listeners, determine the price of the songs. When a song is added it starts free and increases in price the more it is purchased. By rethinking the business model Amie Street has come up with a solution that enables new talent discovery, new distribution channels and new forms of revenue streams. Great stuff.

What do consumers want?

Fredrik Häglund — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:43:14 +0000

A big theme during the upcoming conference will be how users innovate and how innovation increasingly takes place across previously closed boundaries. This made me think about the time when Steve Jobs was asked about what type of phone we will be carrying with us in five years. Jobs replied that he did not know. The place was the D5 conference in 2007 and Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher had managed to convince both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to appear together on the same stage. Microsoft and Apple are two companies that over the years, in somewhat different ways, have been good at supplying the market with new products. Of course Microsoft is the company that found the right business model whereas Apple continues to lead product innovation by design and the beautiful and user-friendly products that the people in Cupertino come up with. But why did Steve Jobs reply that he did not know? After all, he is often considered as a visionary leader. It would seem likely that the reason is that it is immensely difficult to know what consumers want due to the problems of obtaining this information. As a result, only 1 out of 4 products that are put on the market is successful. Companies thus have a lot to gain from incorporating the user in the innovative process. But it also means that there is room for strategic action. To understand this we can simply ask ourselves how many of us that ten years ago expected to have our entire music collection in our mobile phones. Or for that matter GPS. So, perhaps Jobs does know...

Evolving innovation landscape

JanRollof — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:11:49 +0000

The main themes of this conference, and the many exciting topics in the programme, reflect a changing and evolving innovation landscape. Competence and skills are much more widely distributed than before, constituting an important premise for open innovation and user driven innovation. Today, networks and communities provide rich opportunity to share knowledge and ideas. Many innovations are taken forward through collaborations, often across geographical and organizational borders. Further, the perspective of users has become increasingly important. For many products and services, users desire ease of use, good performance, and possibility to customize. Social aspects, design and mobility are also crucial factors.

Indeed, innovation processes encompass many opportunities and challenges.