Thoughtful Innovation

Despite the sophistication of western technology there are too many people who are unable to enjoy these breakthroughs through dispair, poverty or medical condition.

Design That Matters is a non-profit that takes a pragmatic approach to lending a helping hand in the most unexpected ways. Over 4 million babies die within one month of birth, mostly in 3rd world countries. Despite generous aid from the western world, equipment donated to help these countries tends to break down within a year of installation. Due to lack of technical knowhow and access to spare parts these sohpisticated modern creations are then rendered useless. Design That Matters partnered with a neonatal manufacturer (Neonurture) to produce an incubator that is made entirely of...spare car parts. Warming is achieved via car headlights, the device is powered by a car battery and the alarms to alert caregivers are car horns.

Being aware of the ecosystem in which this device operates resulted in a product that any car mechanic can service yet provides the same level of care as a hospital with the technology for a $40,000 device.



Click here for more information

An unrelated but amazing application of technology for good use is the Eyewriter: how a group of tech geeks got together to help a grafitti artist who fell victim to ALS to restore his ability to create. He can only move his eyes yet they enabled him to "tag" a large building off the california freeway.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

HD-cams in sapce

I came across two fascinating videos taken by HD cams fitted to weather baloons. They both reached the upper atmosphere - over 100,000 feel above earth - before bursting. See images of earth like you never saw before!

Luke Geissbuhler
Camera: Go Pro Hero HD
Used a cell phone with GPS & Instamapper to report drop location



Bear-4 HD Camera Flight
Camera: Canon Vixia HF20 HD
Flight time: 2Hrs 45min

Get your kids addicted!

Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata are a motion animation duo known as Tiny Inventions. They have created an incredibly addictive animation titled "Electric Car". If you have young kids at home beware! This video is very highly addictive and will get everyone singing and clapping along, including you:



The "making-of" video uncovers the artistic talent they put into creating the movie's sets from scratch using found objects, sohpisticated 3D photography and a workflow in Adobe After Effects that truly pushes the software to its limits. Check this out:



If you are as interested (as I am) in how they pulled this off then I have the goods for you! They published a video in association with Red Giant Software who makes the plug ins for After Effects used in the making of most sophisticated motion graphics videos. Here is a link to how they photographed hundreds of set ups to recreate the 3D look and feel and the script based pre-comps in After Effects to achieve true puppeteering of the 2.5D figures.

The behind-the-scenes of "Electric Car"

Innovation as a Process

I would like to thank my friend, Gary Swanson, of Universal Parks for point me in the direction of a great online speach by author and Carnegie Mellon alum Scott Berkun. Scott was a project manager at Microsoft where he was expected to "deliver" creativity as part of his job.

Over time he studies the success of leading innovators such as Newton, Edison and Van Goghand crytsalized his thought about the difference between the "spark" of creativity that is an epiphany and creative or true innovative thinking as a process. Look at the presentation and gain real knowledge!

My most favorable part of the presentation is a quote by William McKnight, Chairman of 3M:

"As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to
delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their
initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom
we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to
want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person
is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the
long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in
authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively
critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it's essential that we
have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow."

William McKnight, 3M, Chairman, 1948

Visualizations for Music Discovery

Using Visualizations for Music Discovery

View more documents from Paul Lamere.

p>As you probably know, I am very keen on visualization and information design. I recently came across a fabulous presentation on visualizing the history of music. The presentation you see in embedded here was shared by the author, Paul Lamere. You will find in it a brief history of visualization, leaning strong on Ed Tufte's writings and then some great examples of visual representations in the form of trees, maps, time series, connection maps, and more.

The presentation is nearly 240 slides long and gets pretty technical later on when it examines the visualization of aural information. Enjoy!

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (also known as total immersive augmented reality) is a term that has been around nearly a decade but recent technology innovation puts the power of AR in the hands of any cell phone user. So what is AR?

AR is the convergence between the physical world and the world of information. It is a class of applications that marry contextual information with location based data so the result is that your computer interface (PC screen or mobile device) delivers a composite that overlays the data world with the real world. One recent example application is GE's "Plug Into the Smart Grid":



With advances in processor speed for mobile devices the complex calculations necessary to deliver the same experience on a handheld device are now a..."reality". Here are a few examples that were recently reviewed by "Fast Company":

1. Yelp has an Easter Egg (hidden feature) in its latest release of the Yelp Application for iPhone 3GS. Walk down a city street and launch Monocle (the name of their hidden feature) and Yelp information is superimposed on the image of the street, including user ratings and restaurant reviews.



2. Trulia (real-estate search site) layers listings on top of the google android's camera image so you can walk around a neighborhood and spot buildings where apartments are for sale/rent. This is one of 150+ implementations on the "Layar Reality Browser" platform:



3. "Tat" is an Augmented ID application which incorporates AR with visual recognition and social networks. In the demo for this application (for Google Android) users can point their phone at a presenter and get links to their profile, facebook, twitter account, etc - all based on the visual recognition established with the service:



How will AR affect marketing?

The capabilities of mobile platforms have significant applications for marketers (as well as security and manufacturing). Here are some ideas for you to consider:

1. Indirect: viral promotion: leverage the buzz around the use of an AR "toy" to draw attention to your product. Embed your product in the AR and let users share their AR screen with other users to leverage the power of community.

2. Direct: Product Demonstrations: I noticed the Lego store in New York has an augmented reality application which displays the assembled product laid out on top of the box. Imagine an animation that shows how easy/complex the assembly is?

TV 2.0 Product Lets You Watch Hulu on XBOX

I have been hearing about the promise of TV 2.0 for quite a while now but the problem is that the big solutions require big companies with big capital investment and strong partnerships. There is a small company out there with a simple, innovative and cheap solution to let you view your media on your TV and for the first time I have been able to stretch on my sofa and watch Hulu videos on my big ass plasma TV.

Having emerged from Beta in April 2009, Playon is a quick installation on your PC and it seamlessly streams video from Netflix, Hulu, CBS, YouTube, CNN and ESPN through your media capable device to your TV. The software supports XBOX, Playstation 3 and HP MediaSmart TV. They plan on providing support for Nintendo Wii and other devices that support UPnP/DLNA - an alliance of over 250 companies seeking to create products that are compatible with each other to create a seamless entertainment environment that lets us customers view our media the way we want it. Some devices that support UPnP/DLNA include: DirecTV HD DVRs, D-LINK DSM-510/520/750, Pioneer Elite Pro-1140 HD TV, Popcorn Hour A-100, SageTV HD Theater, VuNow HD POD and more.

I installed Playon on my PC and turned on my XBOX. The instructions were very easy to follow: just go to the XBOX menu -> my XBOX -> Video Library and presto there was a new entry on the menus for Playon!

Hulu videos come up in full HD quality and playing youtube videos is easy. The naviagtion around the different services is similar to a file browser which is OK if you are a techie but there is no search feature or convenient browsing so if you go to Hulu -> Movies then you have to choose from a list of 30 folders titled: 0,1,3,30,A,B,C,D, etc. for the first letter/character of the title you want to view.

The "most popular"," viewed most this week/month/all times" are easy to navigate and if you want to view specific Youtube content you will need to add the username of the Youtube content owner to your PC software. Its easy to do (just open the playon control panel and add the list of usernames in that window) but I can imagine many novice users not realising this can be done or being frustrated from having to manually add a user to the list but schlepping their but out of the sofa in order to manually type in a Youtube username.

This is a simple and innovative product that finally let me use my internet media the way I want it and doesn't force me to sit at my desktop to view content. Kudos to the guys at MediaMall Technologies for coming up with a great product!

Company site: http://www.themediamall.com/playon

Adjusted Winner & Peace in the Middle East

In 1962 Brams and Taylor developed what is now known as the “Adjusted Winner” where two parties need to distribite assets that can not be divided. The authors suggest it produces solutions that are envy-free, efficient and equitable. It has far reaching implications on Joint Ventures, Asset liquidation and even sensitive geopolitical processes such as peace in the Middle East. I will walk you through the process via a (albeit hypothetical) real-world example.

Adjusted Winner
Under adjusted winner the parties start with 100 points and divide these points among the asset(s) being challenged. As our hypothetical example we will look at the circuit city liquidation and examine how adjusted winner could be used for a fair distribution of its assets.

For simplicity purposes we will focus on the following liquidatable assets: the real estate portfolio, brand name, credit card portfolio, circuitcity.com and the corporate jet.

Now lets look at two imaginary debtors for these assets: Debtor1 and Debtor2. Under adjusted winner they would have to allocate 100 points across the 5 assets.

Supposed they distribute their points as follows:

Asset	Debtor1	Debtor2
Real Estate	40	15
Brand Name	25	30
Credit Cards	10	10
CircuitCity.com	10	40
Corporate Jet	15	5
Total Points	100	100

Here is how the process works: Each debtor is assigned as a "winner" for an item in which they allocated the highest points. In our case (marking in red indicates winner)

Asset	Debtor1	Debtor2
Real Estate	40	15
Brand Name	25	30
Credit Cards	10	10
CircuitCity.com	10	40
Corporate Jet	15	5
Total Points	100	100

So in the first round Debtor2 would get the Brand Name & CircuitCity.com and Debtor1 would get the RealEstate portfolio and Corporate Jet. The Credit Cards remain undivided (because the points are a tie).

Because Debtor2 has more total points (30+40=70) than Debtor1 (40+15=55), we now award the Credit Cards to Debtor1.

Asset	Debtor1	Debtor2
Real Estate	40	15
Brand Name	25	30
Credit Cards	10	10
CircuitCity.com	10	40
Corporate Jet	15	5
Total Points	100	100

That Brings Debtor1's points up to 65 (55 + 10 for the Credit Cards) still five points less than Debtor2. This is where the adjusting phase begins in which items (or fractions of them) are transferred between the parties until they reach an equillibrium of points.

We now need to shfit assets (one or more or fractions thereof) to Debtor1. For each item Debtor2 won we look at the following ratio: # debtor2 points/# debtor1 points. For Brand Name that ratio is 30/25=1.2, and for CircuitCity.com is 40/10=4. Adjusted winner establishes the ORDER in which the items are transferred: from low (ratio) to high.

So the Brand Namewill be the first to be transfered (with a 1.2 ratio) but we can not transfer the entire Brand Name asset to Debtor1 because then Debtor2's points will go down to 70-30=40 and Debtor1 will go up to 40+10+15+25=90. So we need to distribute the Brand Name between the Debtors.

We need to transfer a portion (p) of Brand Name from Debtor 2 so that the Debtor2 points and Debtor1 points are equal. In other words:

Debtor1 Points (65) + Debtor1 value of Brand Name portion (25*p) =
Debtor2 Points without the Brand Name being transferred (40) + Debtor2 value of whats left of Brand Name ( 30*(1-p))

65+25p=40+30(1-p)

65+25p=70-30p

55p=5

p=1/11

So Debtor1 will get 1/11th share of the Brand Name, driving Debtor1's points up to: 65+25/11=67.27 and Debtor2's points end up being 40+30*10/11=67.27.

Knaster "Inheritance procedure"
When there are more than two parties involved, the Knaster Inheritance procedure can be used. Here is an example: In April 2008 Nielsen acquired IAG Research for $225m. The prior owners consisted of a group of six PE firms (AlpInvest, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Kohlberg Kravis Robert, Carlyle and Thomas H. Lee Partners).

Assuming each partner had the first right of refusal, what would be the most fair way to open IAG for an internal bid amongst the six PE firms to buy the rest of the group members out before opening the bid up for outside contenders?

Commonly it works this way: the investment is valuated (by the partners or by an outside audit). Each partner decides how much they will “bid” for the buyout and the highest bidder wins and pays the others out.

The problem with simple bidding is that we all perceive an investment differently. An iPhone is a status symbol to one person and a necessary communication and productivity device to another. I might not be willing to spend $200 for the same product you are quite comfortable shelling twice that amount.

Similarly the value of IAG is different to each of the PE firms invested in it. Blackstone, for instance, is an investor in other media holdings that may find IAG worth much more than its book value because of its audience research capabilities. Other PE firms might look at IAG solely from a debt leverage perspective and be content with unloading it off their books.

Adjusted Winner & Knaster Inheritance are two methods that help solve the dilemma how interested parties can compensate each other for their perceived value. Here is how the Knaster Inheritance procedure works:

Suppose the partners write down their bid offer in a sealed envelope with the following bids:

AlpInvest	$180m
Blackstone	$210m
Hellman & Friedman	$198m
Kohlberg Kravis Robert	$114m
Carlyle	$144m
Thomas H. Lee Partners	$126m

Assuming they all have equal shares (i.e. 1/6th of IAG):

The winning bid seems to be that of Blackstone at $210m. They have a claim to 1/6th of the company which they value to be (1/6) of ($210m) or $35m.

Because Blackstone has a fair claim to 1/6 of IAG they will compensate the other partners with the remaining 5/6th of their perceived value of IAG (5/6) of ($210m) or $175m and deposits it into a “kitty” account.

Now each of the other 5 partners withdraw 1/6th of what they estimated as the value of the company from the “kitty”:

AlpInvest	Withdraws 1/6 of $180m = $30m
Hellman & Friedman	1/6 of $198m = $33m
Kohlberg Kravis Robert	1/6 of $114m = $19m
Carlyle	1/6 of $144m = $24m
Thomas H. Lee Partners	1/6 of $126m = $21m

The total withdrawal from “kitty” account is 30+33+19+24+21 = $127m

The difference between $175m and the “withdrawals” is a surplus of $48m. That surplus is equally divided among the 6 partners (including Blackstone) so each partner gets $8m.

So (if this example were not as hypothetical as it really is):

Blackstone Gets IAG and pays $175m less the $8m back = $167m
AlpInvest Gets $30 + $8m = $38m
Hellman & Friedman Gets $33 + $8m = $41m
Kohlberg Kravis Robert Gets $19 + $8 = $27m
Carlyle Gets $24 + $8 = $32m
Thomas H. Lee Partners Gets $21 + $8 = $29m

Adjusted Winner and the Middle East Peace Process

Moshe Hirsch, Vice Dean Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published an article in which he suggests applying the same logic to the equitable division of East Jerusalem as part of a middle east peace settlement.

Jostein Tellne (of the University of Oslo) offers Adjusted Winner as a way to help wealth sharing negotiations in Sudan.

Wolf Likes Pig Stopmotion

Wanted to share with you a great stopmotion video I stumbled upon. The neat part about the video is that it is actualy two stop-motion effects, one within the other. Here is the video itself:

Funny Dance Travels Around the World

My friend Bill Stoller (and PR guru brainchild of Publicity Insider) sent me a video link to a guy doing a funny dance around the world. Click on Read More for the sensational story of the self proclaimed deadbeat who has travelled around the world to produce his wacky videos (viewed over 17 million times), his confession that the dance video was a hoax and his following interview admitting the hoax claim was a hoax...

Matt Harding, originally from Connecticut, worked in game development until February 2003 when he quit is job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he saved up to travel. Matt's friends and colleagues were all too familiar with his wacky dance, a move he admits he never improved beyond the skills he had at age 6.

On his trip to Asia, his friend suggested recording the dance and it came out funny. That's what Matt thought. And that's what allot of people who watched the video online thought as well. By the time he realized how "quasi-famous" he was, the people at Stride Gum became aware of him. When he suggested he would take a trip around the world and record his funny dance they gave him a thumbs up. In 2006 Matt's trip took him through 39 countries in 6 months, dancing across 7 continents.

His latest video was viewed over 17 million times. This time around, in "Dancing 2008" he is joined by many more fans in the places where he visits. Take a look at Matt's video:


In Entertainment Gathering '08 (EG) Matt made an appearance and described how he "suckered" the world into believing his video was real by submerging a Boeing 727 in order to simulate a spacewalk and hiring an army of robots in order to maintain a level of secrecy around his project. Take a look:




And here is the final clip for your entertainment pleasure: This is Matt's interview with David Pogue, technology columnist for New York Times at MacWorld in which he has allot of fun describing his ridiculous presentation at EG and how his Hoax was really a Hoax.



Nice work, Matt! Keep on dancing.

Image Fulgurator

Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' projects images into the photographs of strangers, while those stragers remain oblivious to the trickery behind this extraodinary gadget.

Julius demonstrates the use of his gadget on his website by showing photos that had unexpected projections visible only when viewed after the fact. One surprised observer at the Berlin wall proof-of-concept demo could not believe her eyes when a phantom image showed up on her boyfriend's photo of the "YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR" sign.

How does he do it? The concept is very simple: The Image Fulgurator (which looks like a retrofitted camera-gone-rogue) detects the firing of a nearby flash and then projects some random message onto the subject being focused on at the moment the picture is snapped. Almost invisible to the naked eye, this ghostly image comes to the fore on the photo that eventually emerges on any standard digital or film camera.

Here is a demonstration of his gadget in action:

To retain the element of surprise - he has cleverly devised a way to focus the projection in a preview window within the Fulgurator's body!

Readers of an article posted on one of the websites discussing this creation came up with a few ideas how this could be used: an anti-paparazi device which follows a celebrity and renders paparazi's photos useless by interfering each time their flash goes off (at night or using a flash fill during the day). Interested learning more? Check out his schematics and patent description here or visit the artist's website.

Innovation: Johnny Lee's Wii Remote Hacks

My favorite source for innovation is the TED conference - an annual meeting of the world's most creative minds in politics, the arts, technology and environmental studies. Here is a little treat for you:  "Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts." Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon University demos his cool Wii remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

Here is his feature presentation at Ted last year:

Here are some more cool ideas from Johnny Lee's lab:

* How to build a $14 steadycam unit for your video camera

* His thesis work on "projector-based location discovery and tracking"

Honda's Musical Highway

An interesting experiment in viral marketing: Honda carved grooves on a section of road in Lancaster, California so that when a Honda Civic drives over it, the tires generate what sounds like the "William Tell Overture." A sign was placed near the road section indicating it was a Honda musical road.

Unfortunately the section chosen was too close to the nearby neighbors who complained that the noise was "driving" them crazy. As a result, Honda ended up paving over the grooves on September 23rd. Rumor has it that they are looking for another spot to try this out again. Here is a UGC video of the road section and what the effect sounds like:

Despite the glitch with the neighbors, it seems like Honda was able to trigger the viral word of mouth. A quick search on Youtube with the keywords "Lancaster Music Road" yields 40 hits.

Crowdsourcing: Your Life May Depend On It

In the Sept 4th article "Following the crowd", the Economist revisits a popular topic in Internet computing. When we hear of crown innovation we typically think of Wikipedia - the crowd-crafted authority on knowledge (though the courts might not agree). Some people suggest that a large crowd lends itself to a multitude of voices to a point where it is hard to find the needle in the haystack (See James Todhunter's article on "Crowd Innovation").

On the other hand the phenomenon known as Emergence was vividly described in Steven Johnson ("Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software"). Scientists have long ago discovered that a swarm of ants (who are individually dumb) use pheromones to mark their trails. The first ant to return "home" with food, thus reinforces her pheromone trail. Other ants start following the strongest "smelling" trail and before long you end up with a single line of ants traversing the shortest path to food.

When we outsource complex questions to a crowd of singularly inferior "experts" - will they conform to the most accurate answer? What if your life depended on it?

Companies have long relied on the power of the crowd to poll for ideas and test new product ideas ("what new themed restaurant would you want to create?"). Crowds have been used to track war criminals on Google maps, spot CIA airplanes by their call signs as they travel around the world and to report on traffic conditions.

Alpheus Bingham founded a marketplace for crowdsourcing complex questions. His site - innocentive.com - ellicits individuals to compete for solving some of science's most perplexing challenges by connecting companies, academic institutions and NPOs "with a network of 160,000 engineers, scientists, inventors and business people."

If we are to agree that the crowd is greater than the sum of its parts, how would you like to outsource your medical diagnosis to 1000 individuals around the globe? A reader on the blog "Crowdsourcing" suggests just that. Having endured conflicting interpretations of her own MRI scans she puts her trust in a crowd's ability to read the images.

Formerly I owned and managed a diagnostic imaging facility where we provided nuclear imaging, echocardiography and bone density testing. There are many factors that impact the outcome of a "read" (the interpretation of test results). For example, in our myocardial perfusion imaging (nuclear cardiac stress test) there were at least three:

1. The imaging process: we used a 2 day procedure that enabled us to give two identical doses of radioactive tracer in two separate procedures (one for rest imaging and one for post-stress-test). Most hospitals used a single day procedure using Thallium or Cardiolite. In a same-day procedure you use a low dose followed by a high dose in order to mask the remnants of the first injection. If the time between both doses is too short then the interference of isotope from one injection to the other greatly impacts how they get "read".
   
2. Imaging quality: The radiation technologist can help or hinder the correct interpretation of the results. After the images are taken various filters are applied to enhance the results and the images arearranged on "film". If the procedure was a single-day process then the technologist might over-compensate for the difference in dose sizes (see #1) thus resulting in a false positive or false negative
3. Quality of the "reader": Many physicians are installing diagnostic equipment in their offices as a means to increase revenue. Their experience as clinical diagnosticians differs from that of a radiologist who typically "reads" these images. Accuracy is 70-90% depending on the expertise of the reader.

The crowdsourcing of diagnostic imaging neglects the other factors that render an accurate determination: do you have an inferior wall defect or do you not?

The classic value chain here is:

Technician prepares images to -> radiology who reads them and sends them to -> physician for diagnosis

Does a crowd "vote" help improve the odds of a correct diagnosis?

Related Books: "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business"

QR Barcode Code for Web Commerce

A technology that is little known to U.S. consumers, QR barcodes are extremely popular in Japan. These special patterns allow a merchant to encode data that can be read by mobile phones, PC software and peripheral equipment.

It is a 2-dimensional barcode that creates a link between the physical world and the online world. In the image included here, upon taking a snapshot of the chocolate with your cellphone, you are taken to the manufacturer's website for more information and for an opportunity to buy this product and others. To give you an idea how this can work for online merchants, I modified the blogger template for "Scattered Atoms" and enabled a QR barcode for each article. Say you love one of my articles and want to read it on your cell phone? Here are the simple steps to allow you to take a picture with your phone of a QR code on your computer screen so that your phone will immediately take you to the URL of the article!

Install a QR reader on your phone. The one I found most widely available for all phones, including RIM Blackberry, is BeeTagg (point your mobile browser at http://get.beetagg.com/)

1. Notice that all the articles on my blog now have a "Generate a QR code" link as shown below:
   
   
   
   Click on the QR button and a new window will open with the QR code for the article which looks like this:
   
   
2. Use your cell phone to take a snapshot of the QR code. Your cell phone will identify the link and automatically open the URL that contains the article!

This technology has been used on business cards, public billboards (similar to the bluetooth activated billboards), stamps, in newspaper articles & ads, in printed documents (invoices) as well as food products.

I have come across some innovative business models that build on proprietary encoding of barcode data to lock in an advertiser/business. There are enough publicly available tools to allow any brand marketer to make this technology available to them at low cost in order to bridge the gap between the "material" world and the virtual/online world.

Here are some example applications:

• A QR barcode taken off a receiving label for a package, opens up the corresponding order on a WAP enabled application for the company's inventory management system
• A QR barcode in a magazine ad for a particular item, once scanned, takes the consumer to the manufacturer's website
• A QR barcode on a business card, once scanned, automatically adds the full contact information to the user's cell phone, which is synchronized through their enterprise server (Blackberry) to their address book
• TSA and Continental Airlines Continue to Expand Paperless Boarding Pass Pilot Program
  Continental now has the technology to stop using paper-based boarding passes. Instead, passengerswill be sent a QR barcode via SMS to their cell phone using encrypted communications. A handheld reader used by staff will scan the barcode from the user's cell phone to register the passenger.
• Polo Ralph Lauren Launches QR Code Enabled Mobile Commerce Site
  Fashion design powerhouse, Ralph Lauren started using QR code in its catalog and magazine advertising. They offer free software on their website http://m.ralphlauren.com/

Notes:

In case you are wondering how I am creating these barcodes dynamically, there are a few online services out there:

http://www.viooli.com/qrcodegenerator/demo.php

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Once you generate an image with one of these sites, right-click on the image and the properties will reveal the encoding necessary to invoke it directly. I then pass the URL for the blog article into the string dynamically by incorporating this into my blogger template.

Systemic Innovation & Process Improvement

If you have been keeping up-to-date on articles relating to Lean, Six Sigma and BPM then you will notice that there is a repeating pattern that can be found in every new methodology that has become a recent fad. Six Sigma is in fact the product of re-branding of models and tools that have been available since early 20th century. Lean, Six Sigma and BPM all dervice from tried and tested theorems such as statistical controls, Deming's PDCA cycle, facilitation & brainstorming techniques and more.

Recently I have become engrossed in a long forgotten and little publicised methodology for creativity and systemic innovation - TRIZ. Learn more about TRIZ by visiting the TRIZ trade journal website or look it up on WikiPedia.

I have been re-reading a book written by Genrich Altshuller (the visionary behind TRIZ) titled "And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared". Altshuller described the development of innovative systems as one having four periods:

1. Selection of parts for the system: This is akin to the initial development of airplanes when inventors interested in creating a flying machine had very basic questions such as "what materials should it be made of?", "what are the basic parts?", "should it have fixed wings?", "how will it be powered?", etc.
2. Improvements to the parts: Now that the invention (airplane for instance) has been proven to work we can set on improving its individual components: a more powerful engine, lighter wings, larger fuselage, etc
3. Dynamization of the system: Parts shift their role to assume a different one. Wings that change their profile, collapsible fuselage, propeller that can operate vertically as well as horizontally for upward lift, retractable landing gear.
4. Self-development of the system: The system can adapt to changes in its environment. Today's rockets and space systems that dispose of their own parts, adjust their position automatically to maintain orbit or open up solar panels to replenish energy using solar power.

If you examine this list is sounds slightly like Demings Plan, Do, Check and Act cycles. However as I thought about the four periods I realized that it mimics exactly what we do in our work on improving core business processes or when we try to transform organizations to a process-centric thinking:

1. Selection of parts for the system: When an organization lacks any process definitions (i.e. it is in the initial phases of the process-maturity curve) we find ourselves scrambling to select the parts for the process that will become the permanent and formal definition for the process. When I think of my past initiatives, the first thing I do what assessing a process that has never been defined, captured and documented is to decide how to call the individual pieces (process steps or components) and how they inter-connect. This is based on interviews and informal process mapping techniques ("what do you do with the paper once you get it from X? Who do you send it to?") For a newly defined process, these parts have to be selected and given a title, even if people are repeatedly performing tasks within the individual process steps being assembled in the definition of the overall process.
   
   For more ideas on a component approach to business processes and the impact SOA has had on business component thinking see IBM's excellent article: "Impact of Service Orientation at the Business Level", IBM Systems Journal, Vol 44, No 4, 2005 Cherbakov Et Al . 653.
2. Improvement of the parts: So now that you have gone through an assessment of the business process the next thing you will probably do is look for low hanging fruit and follow a methodology such as Lean or Six Sigma (or combination thereof) to improve the process capabilities. Sounds similar to improving the airplane parts above, doesn't it? In transactional processes this means automatic certain steps (e.g. combustion engine on an airplane versus human-powered airplane) and eliminating unnecessary steps in the process (e.g. eliminating additional wings from tri-plane to bi-plane to monoplane)
3. Dynamization of the system: One technique we use in business process management is reusable components or shared services. For instance: if multiple creative processes use the "legal review" process step then it can become a reusable or shared service. Thus the individual step "legal review" take a modified form in that i can be invoked for more than a single purpose and alters from its originally intended purpose.
4. Self-development of the system: Lean Six Sigma gurus will immediately recognize this period as the continuous improvement. A stable and mature process that has been brought under control reaches a higher level of existence by developing continuous improvement capabilities. In reality this has to do with roles and responsibilities and an incentive to continuously improve a process from within: incentives, roles & responsibilities and policies & procedures established with the goal in mind to be able to detect opportunities to improve a process on an ongoing basis.