Category / Fringe scanning / peripheral vision

by Roger Dennis

Body shaping for technology

From the Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine (theme : The Future) comes this fascinating snippet of how people are modifying their behaviours to use technology.

In an interview, an 18 yeart old student called Altan reveals how:

“…he has begun to experiment with increasing his own efficiency; he reshapes his fingernails to accurate points to better use tiny touch screens.”

This speaks loudly to a couple of interesting trains of thought:

  1. the technology is designed badly in the first place – interfaces that require body modification should not really make it out of the lab (“Hey Mum, I just got my head modified to make my ear closer to my mouth to use this waaay cool tiny phone”)
  2. scanning for weak signals like this can reveal valuable insights into the design of your product

(p.s. I’m catching up on a lot of magazine backlog, so excuse the timeliness of this post.)

by Roger Dennis

NESTA and Fringe benefits

For various reasons  – and connections – I’ve just spent a bit of time reading the work of the NESTA Connect team in the UK.  One of the blog entries had a link to a fascinating event in the USA called the Triple Helix.  The aim of the event is to encourage a model of innovation that looks across sectors to seek the collision points. With a heavy bent on collaboration, both the NESTA blog posting and the  Triple Helix website are fascinating reads.

by Roger Dennis

Early crowd-sourcing (surfing of a different kind)

Over at BusinessWeek there’s a great pointer to a blog posting by John Hagel about innovation and surfing. It seems to me that this is one of the most well documented examples of crowdsourcing, and how lead users can develop new directions for a product. The posting does not stop there, and has lessons to be gleaned about forming user networks and tapping into users on the edges/fringes.

It’s quite a long read, and well worth more than a cursory glance. The one thing that grabbed me was this excerpt:


find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity

And now – off to the beach..

by Roger Dennis

Idea arbitrage

From Wired comes a fascinating article about an electronic engineer using theories about the flow of electrons to predict the fate of endangered species.

By borrowing some engineers’ insights about how circuits work, ecologists now have a promising new tool for helping conserve mountain lions and other threatened species.Ecologists are now using “circuit theory,” thanks in large part to a scientist named Brad McRae who works at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. McRae designed electronics for printers before completing a Ph.D. in forest science at Northern Arizona University. He realized how striking the parallel was between the circuits he had worked on as an engineer and the species he was now trying to understand.

[…]

As they reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, circuit theory beats popular gene-flow models. It not only works — it works well.

The lesson : look outside your own sector and be open to adopting fresh approaches to challenges.

by Roger Dennis

Problems with predictions

During a bunch of meetings earlier in the week, I was asked some questions about some of the insights which came out of the Shell Technology Futures programme we ran at Innovaro over the last eighteen months. More specifically, people wanted to know how the work helps to get a better understanding of possible futures.

Then last night, I came across a quote which summed this up quite elegantly. It’s from a draft of a book from Bob Johansen at the IFTF:

Foresight is a particularly good way to stimulate insights. While prediction is impossible, provocation is easy. Insights arise from differences: different ideas, different angles, and different moods. If insights were obvious, everyone would be having them. What new development might be created—given the external future forces that are at play? This is a search for “Aha’s!” It is a search for insights, a search for coherence in the midst of confusion.

One of the outputs from the Technology Futures programme this year was a presentation which went under the working title of “Ah-ha’s and Insights.”  It was key comments, quotes and insights into some of the discussions which happened at the workshops in Bangalore and London.   It is designed as an entry point into the complexity of some of the material – namely a book – which also came out of the programme.

Rather than endless words, it’s a series of striking images with very minimal text – and it works well to stimulate further thinking in different directions.

Less is always more.

(The original quote above is from Boing Boing (of all places) via a very circuitous route…)

by Roger Dennis

Inspiration in unexpected places

From an article in the FT (admittedly a while ago, but I’m playing catchup) comes this great little quote about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:


Holidaying executives, hoping to recharge amid all this artistic experimentation, might not expect to pick up ideas to take back to work with them in September. But perhaps they shouldn’t switch off their business brains altogether. As William Taylor and Polly La Barre pointed out last year in their entertaining book, Mavericks at Work: “The Fringe is more than performance art. It is a colourful symbol of the performance of open-source innovation.”

by Roger Dennis

Leapfrog Innovation – Zune vs iPod

Apple is a great example – probably the best – of a company that keeps one step ahead of everyone. While other companies rush to copy the current product line, Apple is already about to release the next “big thing.” It not only releases a new product, but it kills off the older lines -the ones the others are copying.

For example while companies were trying to copy the iPod Mini, Apple brings out the Nano. The Mini was the most successful MP3 player of all time. And Apple killed it off.

Now, while others are trying to emulate the iPod Classic, it brings out the iPod Touch. One of the companies desperately trying to play catchup is Microsoft, with it’s Zune player. It has just released a new version of the player – a scant few weeks after Apple leapfrogs once more.

The BBC has an article which contains a quote which captures this nicely :

“This device with the all-too-familiar dial wheel compares reasonably favourably with last generation iPod players,” said Mark Mulligan, analyst with Jupiter Research.

“Microsoft needs to come at Apple from an unexpected angle but at the moment it is Apple with its new iPod touch and nanos that is shaking up the market,” he said.

So how does Microsoft do this? By ignoring what the others are doing, and starting to explore outside the normal design boundaries. At Innovaro we do this with our ‘Futures’ programmes which bring in perspectives from sectors seemingly unrelated to that at hand. For example, with the current Technology Futures programme we ran for Shell Gamechanger this year, we had insights from world experts in areas as diverse as genetic engineering, architecture and superconductivity.

As with the last programme we ran in 2004, this has produced a series of invaluable inputs to Shells strategic planning, so much so that we will now be running the programme with a much shorter gap between the iterations.

But back to Apple – my bet is that within the next 18 months Apple will kill off one it’s current iPod lines and release something that is again revolutionary – and which will catch competitors off guard.

Microsoft trys to copy Apple, but produces a lemon.

by Roger Dennis

Disruptive business models – the music industry

Radiohead is conducting an interesting experiment in business model innovation. While musicians are known to be creative, their contracts with the more conservative parts of the music industry generally stop them innovating their way out of business. As it is not currently tied to a record label, the band is not bound by the same rules, and has decided that not only can fans download their new album online, but they can also decide how much they should pay for it. A spokesman for the band said :

“Although the idea is that you can decide what you want to pay, most people are deciding on a normal retail price with very few trying to buy it for a penny.”

How would your customers react if you made the same offer to them?

UPDATE : IFTF has more here.

by Roger Dennis

Science Fiction as a predictor (again)

From this interview in Wired comes a great quote from Ridley Scott about the influence of the seminal film, Blade Runner

Wired: Blade Runner was prescient in many ways, anticipating globalization, genetic engineering, biometric security. How do you gauge the movie’s influence?

Scott: Enormous. One of the top architects in the world told me he used to run it in his office once a month.

by Roger Dennis

Mesh networks

Back in 2005, Technology Review editor Jason Pontin was looking for ideas for his next column. I suggested that he look at mesh networks, which he did.

Now the latest issue of TR has the TR35 – the top innovators under 35 – has a great profile on twenty five year old Sanjit Biswas of Meraki Networks. He is bringing mesh to the masses – and often the poor masses.

Watch as mesh networks slowly but surely make their way into the mainstream.