Month / February 2008

by Roger Dennis

Your next online competitor won’t be a corporation

TradeMe is New Zealands version of eBay. It rules the roost for online auctions, has jaw-dropping margins for the company and is used by millions of New Zealanders (that is even more impressive when you consider that there’s only a population of around 4 million).

To date it has had an unassailable lead over any competitor. However the founder, Sam Morgan, knows where his possible threat would come from, and, surprise surprise, it won’t be from a corporate boardroom. It will be from the fringes where people are free to experiment with ideas and business models free from big business paradigm constraints. In a recent interview he noted:


Any future rival to the site will probably come not from the likes of eBay, he says, but from “two students in a scungy flat” with new ideas on how to do it better.

The entrance to a

by Roger Dennis

Business Process Innovation

Not all innovation has to produce sexy products that create some sort of techno-fetish lust (disclaimer : I’m typing this on an Apple MacBook Pro…). Innovation at the process level has the potential to return significant value, as detailed in an article in the Feb issue of Fast Company about how Abbott – a medical devices manufacturer – sped up the process to develop new ideas for stents:


The researchers didn’t want to lose themselves and their work in the bureaucracy of a big organization like Abbott, so their lab remained in Santa Clara, California, far away from Abbott’s Chicago-area headquarters. To speed up research, they reorganized the assembly-line process and connected the designers’ computers directly to lasers to cut the lag time between design and manufacturing. Abbott ultimately slashed the time it took to make a new design from months to weeks, then to just one day; to date, the company has designed and manufactured some 300 different iterations of Absorb. By reducing the time it took to design, “we didn’t need the first one to be right,” Capek says. “We can have one or two failures and still beat our schedule.” He hopes to roll out this production process to other areas within Abbott.

by Roger Dennis

Medici Effect – the book

From the book called The Medici Effect (link takes you a free PDF of the book), comes several interesting quotes. Firstly, there’s Thomas Kuhn – from his highly recommended book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – comes this :

“…almost always the men who achieve…fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.”

Also, on the subject of breaking paradigms and new idea creation :

“One of the earliest creativity researchers, Sarnoff Mednick, wrote, “The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution.” In other words if the concepts combined are very different, the more creative the process or the solution”

Finally, a great quote from someone who came from the edges to challenge a profession. Deepak Chopra started from a institutional medical background, but began to look beyond the standard answers for more understanding of the complexities of mind-body health.

“When I started out people thought I was on some fringe. They thought I was certifiably insane.”

Years later he gave the keynote at the Harvard Medical School conference and Time Magazine named him as one of the top one hundred heroes and icons of the twentieth century.

by Roger Dennis

Art meets Science

A recent edition of Wired had a fascinating interview with Jonah Lehrer on how science can benefit from the arts.

Jonah Lehrer wants scientists to bone up on the classics. A former neuroscience lab drone, the 26-year-old Rhodes scholar would devour pages of Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” whenever he wasn’t spinning down DNA. In the process, he made a discovery: Artists have something to teach researchers. In his new book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, Lehrer argues that many artists have foretold the scientific future — Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cézanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.

This is a lovely illustration of what happens when two sectors collide. Another example is the programme in New Zealand which resulted in a book called “Are Angels OK?” One review of this book by David Clark summed it up thus :

Scientists and musicians, and scientists and artists have worked well together in the past. Thus a successful alliance between scientists and fiction writers is not perhaps as strange as it might first appear. Both science and writing are creative endeavours. Both require considerable imagination, and the courage to “think the unthinkable” (although scientists are denied the luxury afforded writers of fiction of “thinking the impossible”). After this successful experiment, perhaps we will see more examples of the coming together of creative individuals from different fields of human endeavour.

by Roger Dennis

Unevenly distributed futures

William Gibson once insightfully observed that “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

As if you needed more proof, the BBC reports that a neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

Bike helmets will never be the same again

Still not convinced of Mr Gibsons forsight? I recommend you read this article in MIT Tech Review from August 2007 entitled Second Earth (free registration required), which details real world data being used in Second Life.

The photo below gives a glimpse of what is possible – this is real time weather inside Second Life.

Real weather, real time but virtual world

by Roger Dennis

Innovation at a country level

There’s a great quote from Jason Pontin – editor of MIT Tech Review – in his editorial of Feb 08 :

…can governments do anything to increase innovation among companies and organizations within their borders? Not much. Ever since I became the editor of Red Herring magazine in the mid-1990s, I have heard countless story pitches about the establishment in different countries of government-supported technology clusters or hubs. All were to have competed with Silicon Valley and Cambridge, MA. All ignominiously failed, with the possible exception of the technology cluster in Cambridge, England. The things that governments can do to foster innovation are limited and simple: fund research based on long-term discovery, devise regulations and tax incentives that promote risk capital and entrepreneurialism, protect intellectual property, uphold the rule of law, and maintain flexible labor markets. Otherwise, governments do best by doing least.

by Roger Dennis

Second Life avatars made real

From the very edges of the fringes comes Fabjectory

It’s 3-D printing from the virtual world. Their blurb : Have your electronic characters made into incredibly detailed, full color, real-life statuettes.

The whole bits to atoms industry is gaining momentum, with players like Ponoko developing some interesting business models (theirs is make it, and then sell it online too).

(via Fast Company)

by Roger Dennis

Adjacent sector insights

The Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine was damn interesting. In addition to the snippet mentioned below, it also had a couple of great pieces from Bill Cockayne. The first was called “A Primer for Budding Futurists.” (not available online)

The second was an article about the development of the Aeron chair from Herman Miller (should I do a disclaimer here? Both my cheeks are well supported in one of these wonderful chairs as I type). You can read the full article online (PDF), but I’ve summarised the relevant extracts:

For Herman Miller Inc (HMI), design is a way to solve problems…..a long standing philosophy of the company is to particularly focus on the future. If you could thoroughly understand a problem, in the context of now and the future, it would take the competition years to figure out the design and replicate it.

HMI often employs leading thinkers whose outside expertise can provide insight into the issues relevant for designing for the edge of tomorrow.

One particularly influential foray was a multi-million dollar research project on the future of aging in the 1980s. It combined the fields of gerontology, architecture, public policy and the field of aging. The study then focussed on the issues of long-term sitting for these populations.

This is very similar to the Futures programmes that we run at Innovaro, where we draw upon a diverse group of experts from adjacent sectors to map out future business opportunities.

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.)