My other blog…

Last week I found a video from a presentation made by Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Innovation (not to be confused with Tom Kelley’s book “The Art of Innovation”, which I encourage all of you to read ). This presentation is both funny and interesting and provides a good opportunity to hear some good tips for entrepreneurs about innovation without having to flight 15 hours to get to SF .

Guy Kawasaki has also published in his weblog an article that includes picture with a visualization of this speech by Martha McGinnis (in the original post you can also find a bigger version of this image, which has better quality, specially if you want to print it).

Last Wednesday, Google announced in its blog that they had released Google Patent Search, which allows to search in over 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1790 through the middle of 2006. In the announcement they also stated that they are looking forward to increasing the coverage of this tool and that they are working on saving and printing this patents. Advanced Search can be done using the Advanced Patent Search page or as explained in Monkey Bites, by means of specific keywords such as ininventor: or intitle:.

The main difference among this new tool and the existing free search service of USPTO is that the latter only supports full text search for patents issued in 1976 and onwards. It has to be noticed that there are also several paid tools that provide advanced patent search features.

Consequently, this new tool could be useful not only for academics and researchers (Patents are commonly used to measure innovation) but also for innovators and inventors. Nevertheless, initially I would use this tool carefully as it seems that not all patents may be returned when searching in Google Patent Search (via Paul Kedrosky’s blog).

Finally and for those of you not so interested in this “serious” uses of this tool, you may want to check Wired post on this subject which points out some “cool” patents.

Under the title CIO Sessions (where CIO stands for Chief Innovation Officer and not Chief IT Officer as some may have thought) ZDNet has published several video interviews with CIOs of different companies and institutions such as British Airways, Reuters, Yahoo and Oxfam (I have really enjoyed the Innovation in a bucket video).

While reading Innovate on Purpose, I have found another two definitions of innovation, which confirms that the statement I did in the second post of this blog (there are probably as many definitions of innovation as people out there) is quite true:

• The first one was provided by Carol Pletcher, Chief Innovation Officer of Cargill, during the second day of the Innovation Immersion Conference and defines innovation as “Converting knowledge and insights into solutions that create distinctive value“. Meaning than innovation is about creating products, services and business models and not only about making the next iPod-like gadget .
• The second one was included in an article that explained the differences between Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurs and it states that innovation is people putting ideas into valuable action. Thus, every organization and every person in an organization can be innovative.

Although I like them both, I still prefer the one provided by Peter F. Drucker in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” .

My good friend Marta pointed me out that Knowledge @ Wharton had published a paper called ‘Smart Growth’: Innovating to Meet the Needs of the Market without Feeding the Beast of Complexity, which I sincerely recommend reading as it introduces some key ideas regarding innovation such as the importance of identifying users’ needs, fast prototyping, process innovation, the necessity to manage the complexity, etc. Additionally, this article includes a quote from Henry Ford, which one of my favourite innovation quotes:

If you find this article interesting, you may want to check periodically the Innovation and Entrepreneurship section of Knowledge @ Wharton (I have already added it to my bookmarks).

As I promised in the post regarding “The Six Myths of Creativity”, here is a book on creativity I have really enjoyed: “Rules of the Red Rubber Ball: Find and Sustain Your Life’s Work” by Kevin Carroll, where seven rules for Creativity are introduced:

1. Commit to it
2. Seek out encouragers
3. Work out your creative muscle
4. Prepare to shine
5. Speak up
6. Expect the unexpected
7. Maximize the day

Additionally, Kevin Carroll acts as speaker in many conferences, like the one I was lucky to attend last year in Bilbao during the e-Business Global Conference 2005, where he shows the audience how to “DREAM” for success by being Dedicated, Responsible, Educated, by having the proper Attitude and by being Motivated. If you have the opportunity to attend one of his conferences, I really encourage you to do so. Alternately you can watch him in any of the videos available on his web page, but I’m afraid that attending to a conference is the only way to get a DREAM rubber band as the one I got :

This question was made to Doug Hall in an interview published in IEEE Spectrum magazine (August 2006 issue) and the answer, which I am quoting below, provides an interesting insight:

There are three laws of what I call marketing physics, three things that matter. The first is “overt benefit”, which, in a consumer’s word is “What’s in it for me?” The second is “real reasons to believe,” which translates to “Why should I believe you?” And the third is “dramatic difference,” or “Why should I care?” The classic mistake that engineers make is to talk about features, not benefits. Engineers will talk about the technology and assume that people will know why it’s important and believe that it works. But it doesn’t work that way. […]

These three laws make clear in a very short paragraph that successful innovation is about making products that are valuable for the users (buyers are interested in the benefits they are going to obtain and not in the great technologies that make these products possible) and to be profitable these products need to make a “dramatic difference” or leap in value (if they provide the same value as existing products, they are in for a bloody competition).

You can read the whole article in IEEE Spectrum online and find further articles by Doug Hall can be found in his web page.

After reading +34 article on Google’s new service that provides traffic information for mobile devices, I have remembered a similar application I discovered last year on BBC backstage webpage.

BBC Backstage is an innovation tool used by the BBC, which allows developers to use BBC’s contents in their applications, thus making BBC’s contents more valuable. This is a example of what Henry Chesbrough calls Open Innovation or Eric Von Hippel refers to as democratizing innovation or innovation by users. Further examples could be Yahoo! Developer Network or Google Code.

I include an screenshot of Yahoo! Developer Network because I specially like their Tagline:

After reading David’s post regarding creativity, I have remembered a very interesting article I found some time ago called “The Six Myths of Creativity” written by Bill Breen. The six myths described in this article are:

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
5. Competition Beats Collaboration
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

I think the first one is the most important one, as everyone is born creative, it is just that we forget how to do it while growing up! Thus, creativity should be practiced and encouraged in organizations, as 200.000+ creativity-empowered employees of a corporation can come up with more and probably better ideas than 10 “supercreative” people.

I have read some interesting books on this subject so if anyone wants to hear about them, just leave me a comment and I will write about them in another post.

Peter Drucker defines Innovation in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” as:

“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and apply the principles of successful innovation.”

I specially like this definition because (1) it makes clear that innovation is not just about high-tech, but about new business (new products, services, processes, etc.), (2) it states that innovation is not something that happens magically, but a disciple that can be learned and practiced and (3) to succeed you need to be proactive and search for the sources of innovation and exploit them.

If you have not read Peter Drucker’s “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, I encourage you to do so, as in addition to this fantastic defintion of innovation, it provides great insights about innovation and its practice.