They look like lunatics – but they make millions (errr..they don’t work for TI)

Fortune Magazine has a great article about how Texas Instrument harnesses the power of the fringes to generate new ideas, and explore opoortunities that would otherwise be ignored.

It reveals how a senior TI manager – Gene Frantz – has an interesting role : “searching for and encouraging all manner of lunatics and visionaries.”

The article goes on :

Frantz is the dean of an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company) who call themselves the Lunatic Fringe. They are senior people who have been given free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it goes.

“There’s this continuum between total chaos and total order,” Frantz explains. “About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I’m down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur.”

By embracing the fringes TI has had some notable successes that it would have otherwise have missed on. As the article points out :

…today’s wacky idea can turn out to be tomorrow’s billion-dollar industry. (…) Think of this virtuous cycle – curious, open-minded engineers finding pockets of innovation around the world, which in turn inspires further innovation back at HQ – as an extremely effective opportunity-detection system.

This is a type of loose and free open innovation, the sort of which P&G is currently embracing. TI finds ideas in a myriad of places and showcases the good ones, whether internal or external. It would only work for a large organisation, but when it works, and it’s ingrained in the culture, it works well.

(via The Business Innovation Insider) and Corante

Update : Gene Frantz also blogs for TI. His latest posting is here

Graffiti in itself is an interesting art form. Free from the unspoken rules that govern many artforms, graffiti artists have a unique license to express themselves. Good graffiti can be beautiful as a quick look at Google images reveals

With that level of freedom you’d think it’d be hard to make a splash in the graffiti world and to push some boundaries. How would you innovate in a area where it’s always the creative season?

Here’s a guy who breaks the mould (so to speak).

A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels

There’s more about the story here and the artists site can be found at this link

Thanks to Boing Boing (interestingly the original story is over two years old, but it surfaced on BB yesterday.)

The ever interesting Andrew Zolli writes in BusinessWeek about the importance of the fringes for spotting innovations. I’m a great believer in the potential of innovation that happens outside the core. Indeed most interesting developments are increasingly happening as far away from the core as you could imagine. Think Shawn Fanning, Marc Andressen and the iPod (after all, it wasn’t Apples idea).

Great ideas also pop out of the fringes when sectors collide. Creating an environment to achieve this is damn tricky, and not well understood.

What niche fields will contribute to tomorrow’s great innovations? Ecology, gaming, and social networking, for starters

Although the article appears to have been trimmed down to make it digestable for people who still believe that wearing suits and ties leads to better decision making, it’s worth a read, if only to confirm that yes, interesting things can happen in online virtual worlds.

Shopping in Second Life anyone?

Here’s the article.

I’ve just done some guest blogging for zopa. It’s a post on peer 2 peer parking payment systems. If you don’t know what zopa is, then I suggest you check them out. They are the eBay of the banking world. I used to work with one of the founders at egg in London.

The post is here – Zopa » Blog Archive » P2P Parking (First Guest Blog!)

You’re trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box.

This is an idea which has had potential for years, but it requires a high price tag to build a real-life real-time interactive video game experience. In a world of digital mashups and remixing, it will be interesting to keep an eye on this and see where it goes. An entire generation has grown up playing interactive games in virutal reality – what will be the uptake for the real thing? Read more at the Wired site.

From the fringes comes this idea – a universal remote control with just one button. That one button transmits the ‘off’ command for most TV brands. Thus, the tiny TV-B-Gone becomes the way to turn off annoying TVs in any bar, club or office.

Now that infra-red remote controls are so common, it makes sense that one device should be able to control them all. For a while a my favourite student radio station had the slogan – Kill Your Television. Now you can.