Image by Alex Osterwalder via Flickr

From the new Lateral Action blog comes “Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation“. Brian Clark says:

So why do we find it so hard to break out of our rut and do truly innovative things?

Because it’s hard. Because it often requires us to significantly alter our perspectives and step outside of our comfort zones.

He then points out that Tyler Durden of Fight Club can help us, just like he helped “Jack” in the book and movie, to make that big step.

Tyler’s Fifth Rule of Innovation:

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f*****g khakis.”

When we talk about fear, risk, mistakes, and losing it all, what are we really afraid of? Are we defined by the stuff we own, or would we prefer to be defined by what we accomplish and create for the world?

Do you have a favorite fictional icon on whose quotes you depend for guidance in business or life? I like to remember Rick’s perspective: “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

My guiding influences are Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, from whom I took the phrase “barrier busting” (see the explanation here) and “integrative design“, and Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist, and author of the Law of Accelerating Returns. Between them they describe a future of appropriate energy usage, based on sustainable and renewable resources, enabled by continuing technological advances obeying Moore’s Law.

Please drop by and check it out – I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

green energy, sustainability, amory lovins, kurzweil, integrative design

Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a decade, a report released Tuesday suggests. By then, the price parity could propel solar adoption so that it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2025

If you listen to this kind of thinking, solar energy (which is defined as what, by the way?) is still far more expensive than other kinds. But solar energy, even today, has a finite payback time – if I put solar collectors on my roof, for example, eventually they will pay for themselves.

So that’s one way it’s wrong.

Secondly, the study assumes that conventional energy prices will go up by 3% per year. That could be a slight underestimate. Didn’t we just experience a three month period where gas prices nearly doubled? (That’s 100%, folks!).

I can’t make any argument about the assumption that solar energy prices will come down 18% per year. That’s a lot, by one metric, but we’ve certainly seen large and faster price drops in high tech in the past. Even the iPhone, last week, dropped in price by almost 50% in less than a year. Sure, that was partly through some magic AT&T financial pixie dust, but to the user, it’s a clear 50% price cut. There’s no reason similar magic pixie dust, whether from the government or from the utilities themselves, won’t contribute to market price declines.

The claim that solar currently accounts for less than 1/10th of a percent of the U.S. energy supply today is fine. But the assumption that it will still be less than 1 percent in 2015 (seven years from now) is curious. If we start at .1 percent, and double our solar usage every year, we end up at 128 times as much – 12.8% of today’s total. This is the amazing power of Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Even if it takes two years for each doubling, we’re still up a factor of 32x in seven years. That means 3.2% today’s usage. Our total energy usage may also go up (although there are very good reasons to think it may not go up much and and will be starting a downward trajectory), but for a 32x increase in solar supply to translate to 1% of our total energy use, total energy use would have to double. Not too likely in the U.S., where population growth has stopped, and SUVs are starting their long decline.

Finally, there’s good reason to believe that solar energy will actually have a much larger share of U.S. energy usage, due to the power of “negawatts” (as explained brilliantly by Amory Lovins in this series of talks at Stanford in 2007), in which efficiency turns out to be the most cost effective way to power industry and create profits. Oh, and by the way, it significantly reduces our energy usage, by as much as a factor of five to seven!

The article combines a couple of types of fallacious thinking – that technological progress is linear, for example, rather than geometric, and that other factors, such as the desire to reduce greenhouse gases or realizing the benefits of negawatts throughout the economy, don’t have an additional accelerating effect on technology changes.

Folding doors that actually fold! The video is definitely worth watching. It’s a really outside the box thinking experience.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model Concept (2008)

…Edison changed the image of the sole inventor by converting innovation to a process with recognized steps practiced by a team of inventors working together…

Definitely an inspiring opening – I guess if Edison could do it 120 years ago, we should be able to do it now!

I got this Innovation Management Overview link via the Innovation Tools site (which itself has a lot of great information on innovation, including a feed of innovation-related news).

By the standards of six years ago, those things are free now. Of course, it’s never free as in beer, because in fact we’re now using all the bandwidth, storage and CPU power we thought we’d never need, doing things a lot of us though we’d never be able to do in real life, like watch streaming live TV on our laptops (and our phones).

Today, I listened to Jeff Hawkins’ talk at ETech a year ago, Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like A Brain?, where he announced the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing. I think the idea now is, “If you’re not planning for how you’ll use human-like pattern recognition in your system, you’re not planning.”

What are the possibilities? Jeff listed a few, but there will be lots we’re not even thinking about now (or think are impossible – like we thought watching TV on mobile phones would be). It’s “human-like,” but not human. It can do things we don’t have time or patience for (just like a computer can do arithmetic all day that would drive us bonkers, even if we could do it as fast). And it can do pattern matching on patterns we can’t see – whether those are in infrared, or in huge piles of data that we just don’t have the sensory apparatus for.

Here’s an example. I have a product that manages requirements and their relationships to customers and customer requests (among other things). I talk regularly to customers, and take notes on these conversations. They often mention desires or usage scenarios that are outside the scope of the topic of the conversation at the time, and that aren’t seem related to the product planning I’m doing. Two years later, when I’m actually considering adding features related to those comments, I don’t necessarily remember the conversation. Or if I remember it, I don’t remember which customer made the comment. Currently I use Google Desktop to help me find the appropriate notes, but it’s a pretty rough approach – I have to use my best guess at the appropriate key words, and I end up spending a heck of a lot of time combing through my notes again and again. I’d love to have a human-like agent do this trolling for me – on a weekly basis, review all my old notes against my current requirements and tell me where there are overlaps. And while we’re at it, maybe it can read my blogroll and find related articles I could be referring to.

I know there are a few products out there that (claim to) do some of this already, and perhaps they work (I haven’t tested them). If so, they are the vanguard of this new set of capabilities, and in a few years they will have been overshadowed by realities we’re only dreaming about now.

How are you planning for the technical capabilities – human-like pattern matching or whatever it might be – that we’ll have at our command in five or ten years?

Doug Hall, unlike most business consultants, makes quantitative claims in his book Jump Start Your Business Brain. According to his research, he can predict the effect of certain basic marketing techniques on the success of a business. For example, he says that businesses that articulate “an overt benefit, a dramatic difference, and a real reason to believe” have about a 47% chance of success, while having only two of the three gives about a 30% chance of success.

Today I just ran across another interesting set of quantitative data about success factors, from the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Success Factors in New Ventures: A Meta-analysis, by Song, Podoynitsyna, et al. (I believe the link I provided is free, although most issues of this journal are behind a paywall.)

Based on a meta-analysis of a number of other studies about successful and non-successful new ventures, the authors determined that eight factors – out of about 20 candidate factors – were the best predictors of success. The candidate factors included items like:

• A low-cost strategy
• Prior startup experience
• Patent protection

Interestingly, the eight success factors did not include prior startup experience, or what they call “product innovation”. Instead, the factors were:

1. supply chain integration
2. market scope
3. firm age
4. size of founding team
5. financial resources
6. founders’ marketing experience
7. founders’ industry experience
8. existence of patent protection

The article is a bit vague on some of these – for example, it doesn’t suggest the ideal size of founding team, just that it’s a success factor. And isn’t is obvious that a successful new venture will typically be in business longer than an unsuccessful one? As the authors acknowledge, to a large degree the article leaves more questions open than it answers.

So, getting back to the original question, if you are starting a new venture, or thinking about doing so, will you pay attention to the research and make sure you have all your success factors in a row? (Or that you have an overt benefit, dramatic difference, and real reason to believe?)

Technology-wise, I download podcasts and talks from a variety of sources on the Internet, both manually and with a “podcatcher” such as Juice, then burn them as data files to a CD. I bought a CD player for my car that plays MP3 CDs (a Sony CDX-GT300). Each data CD holds about 20 hours of podcasts. Because my CD
player has a front-panel AUX input, I also have the option of plugging my MP3 player into the unit.

Sources

My favorite sources for podcasts are the following:

• IT Conversations
  • Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron Chair (from Pop!Tech)
  • Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice (from Pop!Tech)
  • Neil Gershenfeld on the Fab Lab (from Pop!Tech)
  • Clay Shirky on Ontology is Overrated (from ETech)
  • Jason Fried of 37 Signals on lessons learned building Basecamp (from ETech)
  • Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity (from Accelerating Change)
  • David Brin on our ability to cope with accelerating change (from Accelerating Change)
  • Cory Ondrejka on Second Life (from Accelerating Change)

Several series on IT Conversations have been particularly rewarding, especially the talks from the Pop!Tech Conference, held in Camden, Maine every October; the talks from the O’Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETech); and the Accelerating Change Conference held at Stanford University in November. IT Conversations has archives from the last two or three of each of these. Some high points:

IT Conversations also archives the TechNation NPR radio show featuring interviews with scientists and technologists by Dr. Moira Gunn.

• The TED Conference
  • Al Gore on Global Warming (the first six minutes show that Al could have been a standup comic if he’d wanted a different career)
  • Amy Smith of MIT (a winner of the TED prize) on making charcoal appropriately

Richard Saul Wursky’s Technology, Education, Design Conference, held in Monterey, CA every year, features an amazing lineup of important and influential thinkers and doers every year. This year they started putting the talks online. Each is 18 minutes long, and they cover the gamut from global warming to appropriate technology to architecture. Every one is fascinating. Favorites are:

• Science Friday Podcasts (from NPR)

There are a number of other locations I’ve downloaded talks from, but those have the best overall selection. For other talks, I use Google to find out if thinkers I’m interested in are featured on podcasts, or I
check their blogs or websites. For example, Robert Sutton, the Stanford professor who wrote Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense, gave a great talk at a Stanford event that he links to on his blog.

To find talks by Kathy Sierra, the awesome author of the Creating Passionate Users blog as well as the Head First Java books published by O’Reilly, I searched Google and found this fantastic talk from the SXSW Conference.

I hope you are able to download and listen to some of these amazing, mind-expanding talks. I’d love to hear your feedback about them, and to get your recommendations for good talks and good sites for finding “brain food.”