2009년 8월 31일 월요일
Ocean Desert
바다에도 사막이 있다고 한다. dead zone이라고 불리는 곳이다. 아래 사진에서 검은 곳이 바로 사막지대라고 한다. 적도를 중심으로 양쪽에 펼쳐져 있다. 자세한 것을 알고 싶으면 여기를 클릭...
DXY란?
오늘 인터넷 서핑을 하다가 DXY라는 단어를 보았다. 처음보는 인덱스인데 찾아보니 런던 국제 거래소(ICE)에서 주요 6개 통화에 대한 달러가치를 나타내는 달러 인덱스란다. 낮을수록 달러가치의 하락을 의미한다. 많은 미국사람들이 페이퍼머니의 발행에 의한 달러가치의 하락을 예상한다. 또한 세계경제가 회복되면서 달러라는 안전 자산에 대한 선호심리가 크게 줄어들어 더욱 달러가치 하락을 유도할 것으로 전망한다. 채권시장보다는 주식시장이, 선진국보다는 신흥국 증시가 강세를 보이면 글로벌 투자자금이 경제회복를 확신하기 때문이며 이런 상황에서는 달러가 약세를 보일 것으로 전망한다. 앞으로 어떻게 진행되는지 지켜보자...
Five Horsemen
Chris Martenson이라는 사람의 블로그를 매일 보는데 이 사람이 미국 경제의 앞을 내다보는 글을 자주 쓴다. 과거와 현재의 데이터를 공부하고, 이것이 미래에 미칠 영향을 깊게 고심하면, 닥칠 미래가 보이는 모양이다... 일단 이 사람이 공돌이라는 점이 마음에 들고, 철저하게 객관적인 데이터를 근거로 예측하기 때문에 신뢰가 간다. 그 사람에 의하면 지금 미국 경제의 파국은 다음 다섯 단계를 거치면서 이루어질 것이라고 하는데, 이미 두번째 단계는 지났고 3번째 단계가 진행중이란다. 자세한 사항을 모르는 나로서는 진위를 구별할 능력은 없다. 하지만 일반 시민이 이러한 분석을 하고 사회에 경종을 울리는데에는 정말 존경심이 든다. 인터넷과 집단 지성의 시대이다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
- The First Horseman: New credit growth falls below interest payments
- The Second Horseman: The Fed monetizes debt
- The Third Horseman: Government deficit spending exceeds 10% of GDP
- The Fourth Horseman: The dollar goes down, while interest rates go up
- The Fifth (and final) Horseman: US debt becomes denominated in foreign currencies
Peak Water
Peak Oil에 이어 이번에는 Peak Water라는 개념이 등장한다. 이 또한 세상에 엄청난 충격을 줄 수 있기 때문에 만약의 사태에 대비를 해야한다. 무언가를 생산하려면 깨끗한 물이 필요하니 미래에 깨끗한 물을 충분히 확보하기 위한 기술이 중요해 질 것이다. 자세히 알고 싶으면 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 28일 금요일
2009-08 Obama Healthcare Letter.pdf2009년 8월 27일 목요일
곤충 로봇
곤충이 걸어다는 것을 모방한 로봇이다. takram이라는 이 회사의 웹사이트도 독특하다. 디자인 엔지니어링을 추구하는 모양이다. 일본에서는 거의 보기힘든 현상인데... 이제 일본도 변화하는 모양이다.
Charity: Water
세상에는 훌륭한 일을 하는 사람이 많다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
The story of charity: water - The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.
Google Tracking Traffic with Maps and Smart Phone
서울에서 자동차를 운전하기 싫은 것은 교통체증 때문이다. 또한 탄소배출이 싫기도 하고... 구글 맵에서는 사용자의 GPS 부착휴대폰과 맵을 연동하여 교통상황을 제공하는 서비스를 시작했다. 미국은 활발히 진행되고 있고, 유럽도 시작했고, 중국도 하고 있다. crowd sourcing에 대한 구글의 감각은 치하할 만 하다. 모든 일을 상업적으로만 이용하지 않는 것도 부럽고...이서비스의 목적이 교통편의 제공이 아니라 지구 온난화를 조금이라도 막기 위해서라는 명분도 부럽다...기술은 명분에 종속적이어야 한다.
스리랑카의 타밀반군에 대한 전쟁범죄...
내전의 아픔이 있는 우리로서는 스리랑카에서 벌어졌던 참상을 외면하기 어렵다... 그렇게 혐호하는 동족 상잔이라는 것이 인간의 보편적인 현상인가...이제는 카메라가 있어 전세계에서 벌어지고 있는 반인간적인 행위들이 그대로 미디어에 노출이 된다. 참으로 다행스러운 일이다. 자세한 것을 보려면 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 26일 수요일
Tic-Tac House
China ban on rare meta exports
누가 자원전쟁의 시대라고 하더니... 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 25일 화요일
태양전지를 이용한 물정화시스템 - 솔라 UFO
일본 오사카 공원에 설치되어 있는 물정화 시스템이라고 하는데 하루 6시간 가동으로 9000리터의 물을 정화한다고 한다. 밤에는 LED를 켜서 색다른 볼거리를 제공한다고 한다. 아이디어 괜찮다.... 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
TIME's 50 Best Websites
2009년
Flickr
California Coastline
Delicious
Metafilter
popurls
Twitter
Skype
Boing Boing
Academic Earth
OpenTable
Google
YouTube
Wolfram|Alpha
Hulu
Vimeo
Fora TV
Craiglook
Shop Goodwill
Amazon
Kayak
Netflix
Etsy
PropertyShark.com
Redfin
Wikipedia
Internet Archive
Kiva
ConsumerSearch
Metacritic
Pollster
Facebook
Pandora and Last.fm
Musicovery
Spotify
Supercook
Yelp
Visuwords
CouchSurfing
BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyager
Mint
TripIt
Aardvark
drop.io
Issuu
Photosynth
OMGPOP
WorldWideTelescope
Fonolo
Get High Now
Know Your Meme
2008년
ADVICE & FACTS
GasBuddy
Howcast
iliketotallyloveit.com
Omiru
PsychCentral
TripKick
Wikitravel
Yahoo! Answers
Zeer
INFO & GOSSIP
Afrigadget.com
AskMen.com
ConcreteLoop.com
Health.com
PopSugar
ProFootballTalk
Rate My Professors
Serious Eats
The Nest
HANDY TOOLS
Geni
MapJack
Mint
NexTag
Nymbler
Picnik
Pixelgirl Presents
SearchMe
TinyURL.com
Mobaganda.com
Urban Dictionary
FUN & GAMES
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
Hulu
Imeem
Kongregate
ffffound.com
Lookybook
Someecards
WebSudoku
Penny Arcade
Gaia Online
HOBBIES & INTERESTS
CarbonRally
COLOURlovers
Apartment Therapy
Digital Vaults
FreeRice
HypeBeast
Kiva
Net-a-Porter
Open Source Food
Petfinder
WikiSky
POLL RESULTS
Vote for Your Favorite
2007년
ARTS & LEISURE
Wotartist.com
PhotonHead.com
CellSwapper.com
Glimpse.com
Chow.com
DonorsChoose.org
IdealBite.com
Etsy.com
PaperToys.com
Mpire.com
Redfin.com
Yapta.com
AUDIO & VIDEO
FunnyOrDie.com
Last.fm
Lala.com
WhiteCityStories.org
DriverTV.com
ExpertVillage.com
Joost.com
StarWars.com
Odeo.com
YouTube's You Choose '08
Blinkx.com
Veoh.com
MiiStation.com
NEWS & INFORMATION
INGDirect.com
OpenSecrets.org
NowPublic.com
Ecofoot.org
I'm Too Young For This.com
Stockpickr.com
FAFSA4Caster
PollingReport.com
Newsvine.com
SimpleWeather.com
SOCIAL NETWORKS
StumbleUpon.com
Hitchsters.com
LinkedIn.com
bix.yahoo.com
Fatsecret.com
Prosper.com
WEB SERVICES
Mozy.com
Tumblr.com
Twitter.com
Weebly.com
Netvibes.com
Wetpaint.com
GrandCentral.com
OhDon'tForget.com
Zoho.com, ThinkFree.com, Ajax13.com
POLL RESULTS
Rank Our Picks
2009년 8월 24일 월요일
Solar Thermal Heating Up Sharply
태양열 시장도 커진다. 그런데 한국에서는 그리 활성화가 되어 있지 않은 느낌이다. 착각인가... 자세한 것은 여기를 참조...
구글을 이용한 설명 CNBC.CA
요새 선거로 시끄러운 아프가니스탄의 상황을 설명한 Google Tour. 새로운 시도이다. 구글어스와 플러그 인이 필요하다. 자세히 알고 싶으면 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 21일 금요일
One-wheeled Scooter
두바퀴 세그웨이의 한바퀴 버전... 시속 10킬로 정도이니 운송수단이라기 보다는 퀵보드같은 오락기구 느낌이다. 하지만 컴팩트하고 저렴하게 만들면 유행을 탈지도 모르겠다. 자이로 센서에 대해 공부해봐야겠다.
다른 시각 John Pilger - Obama and Empire
권력측이 아니라 민중측에서 바라본 미국의 해석. 가차없이 비판할 수 있는 언론의 자유. 그리고 이것을 볼 수 있는 인터넷. 정말 새로운 세상이 열리고 있다. 이 연설을 보면서 느낀 점은 세상을 정확하게 바라보는 시각을 가져야하겠다는 것이다. 세상의 선전에 속지말고, 미혹되지 말아야하며 항상 다양한 시각으로부터 정확한 현상을 파악하는 것 그리고 행동하는 것이 내가 해야할 일이다.
미국의 Social Security가 2년내에 적자가 될지도 모른다
우리의 국민연금과 비슷한 미국의 Social Security. 최근 불황으로 재정상황이 악화되어 2년내에 적자로 전환될 것이라는 심각한 예측이다. 이런 예측은 다름아닌 미국 알라바마주 국회의원인 Spencer Bachus가 언급했다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭... 이런 일을 보면서 당연히 생각나는 것은 우리의 국민연금은 괜찮을라나...
2009년 8월 20일 목요일
전기자동차의 성능은 히터가 결정한다?
자동차는 냉난방을 해야한다. 문제는 이를 위해서는 전력소비가 크다는데 있다. 현재 난방용으로는 PCT히터를 사용하고 있는데 전력소비가 커서 고민이라고 한다. 배터리의 용량을 키우는 작업이 어려운데 반해 소비하는 것은 쉬우니 그럴만도 하다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 19일 수요일
한국이 물 부족 국가는 아니다.
그동안 한국이 물부족 국가라고 들었는데 이상했다. 결론적으로 한국은 물부족 국가가 아니다. 참으로 감사한 일이다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭... Revitalizing Asia's Irrigation이라는 제목의 pdf에 나온다.
가정용 배터리 시스템
태양광발전이나 풍력발전 시스템 만큼 중요한 것이 배터리인데 2000불 정도에 20-40kWh의 전기를 저장할 수 있으며 섭씨90도에서 작동한다고 한다. 미국 Cramatecc이라는 회사라고 하는데 지켜보자. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 17일 월요일
2009년 8월 14일 금요일
Incarceration Nation
내가 비록 미국의 범죄현황에 대해 관심은 없지만, 그나리의 비영리기관(The Pew Charitable Trusts)이 발행한 연구보고서를 보고는 부러웠다. 차트와 그래프가 알기쉽게 작성된 것이 일반인들이 현상을 이해하기 좋았다. (보고서를 보고싶으면 여기를 클릭...) 현상을 정확하게 하는 것이 모든 시스템 만들기의 기본이다. 미국의 시스템이 강력한 것은 결국 정확한 현상파악에 있는 것이 아닐까 생각해본다. 국가가 하는 일들을 국가에서 녹을 받는 사람이 파악하는 것은 정확하지 못할 개연성이 크다. 우리도 독립적인 비영리 연구기관들이 번성하여 한국사회에 대해 정확히 분석하고, 정책을 구현하는 사람을 이를 참고해 더 나은 시스템을 만들었으면 좋겠다. 열심히 살자....
Top Ten Reasons why the KINDLE won't be an iPod for books
킨들과 같은 전자책이 나오면 꼭 사고 싶었다. 그런데 다음 주장을 보니 그런 것 같기도 하고... 전자책이 대세라고 하는데 잘못 생각했나...
1) When you buy an iPod, you can transfer all of your current music onto it. With Kindle you have to start buying all new books.
2) The paper-form book (aka “dead tree version”) is still the best technology for reading: fully portable, a nice thing to own and put on shelves, great for sharing, good in bed, at beach, etc. If you lose it or get it wet, no big deal—easily replaceable.
3) Music has constantly found new formats that improve on the old. Same for the iPod. It’s unquestionably better than that bigger, skipping CD player. Books haven’t been able to improve on the form for centuries.
4) Holding 100 albums in your hand is great. Holding 100 books? Not as much.
5) How often do you really go away for so long that you need 10+ books? (Bookstores are everywhere.)
6) Kindle is too expensive (see #1) and too big.
7) Books take much longer to consume, don’t work well in individual (shuffled) parts, and we often only read them once.
8.) Now that you can carry music on your phone, and the iPhone has bundled music, email, internet, and telephone in one small size, is anyone really willing to buy a bigger iPhone or Kindle just to read books on it?
9) Most of us spend more time listening to music than reading. We just do; it’s easier to do while we’re involved with other things.
10) Books: they’re better!
Seth Harwood podcasts his ideas on the publishing industry and his fiction for free at sethharwood.com. He is currently figuring out how publishers should best approach the new, emerging e-book market. Hear his ideas in his latest Hot Tub Cast™ and read them here soon. His first novel is JACK WAKES UP, in stores now.
2009년 8월 13일 목요일
내가 사용하는 무료 웹하드
1. Dropbox: 2G까지는 무료. 전용프로그램을 설치해야함. 내컴퓨터 폴더와 웹하드 사이에 Sync가 자동으로 이루어짐.
2. Microsoft Skydrive: 25G까지 무료. 오래된 파일 백업용
3. Wuala: 1G까지 무료. 전용프로그램을 설치해야함. 작업하기는 편하나 다른 사람의 컴퓨터를 쓸때 제한이 있음.
4. 네이트파일박스: 500M 제공. 고객확보차원임. 주로 메일과 관련된 파일에 사용
구글어스를 교육에 이용하는 방법
세상을 이해시키는데는 구글어스만한 것이 없다. 동영상과 결합하면 강력하다. 방글라데시의 홍수를 이해하기 쉽게 설명하였다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 12일 수요일
Share of Total Income Going to Top 1% of Families, 1913-2007
미국의 얘기다. 미국에는 이런 데이터를 발표하는 경제학자가 많은데 왜 한국에는 없을까... 아니면 내가 못찾는 것일까...
1978년을 기준으로 부가 집중되고 있음을 알수있다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
2009년 8월 11일 화요일
Green Cement
calcium carbonate나 석회석 대신 magnesium silicate를 사용하면 이산화탄소를 흡수하는 세멘트를 만들 수 있다고 한다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
Visually Good Website-Noe21.org
지구온난화를 방지하는 웹사이트인데 잘 만들었다. New Economic Orientation for the 21st Century 동영상을 꼭 볼것... 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
Can Do - And the Pursuit of Happyness by Maira Kalman
읽어볼 만 하다. 그림을 이용해서 하나의 스토리를 만드는 일. 소라에게도 얘기해 주어야겠다. 여기를 클릭...
Innovation Principles
이글을 쓴 사람은 Diego Rodriguesz라는 사람으로, 전부 21개의 원리중 16개까지 발표했다. 자세한 것은 여기를 클릭...
1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
The signature behavior of people who routinely achieve innovative outcomes is that they constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.
Instead of only reading someone else's market research summary, they go in the field and shop across the category in question. That way they can get a feel for all the intangibles which are lost in translation, as language, photos, and even video are imperfect mediums. Honda's innovative rethink of the pickup truck came from Saturday mornings spent in the parking lot of Home Depot.
Instead of taking someone else's diagnosis of a problem at face value, they seek a second opinion, and the deliverer of that second opinion is their own person. When there's a problem on the production line at Toyota, they don't wait for a PowerPoint to circulate with photos and diagrams of the bug in question. Instead, everyone concerned walks over to experience the bug firsthand. And then they ask: why, why, why, why, and why?
Instead of spending sixty minutes talking about what might be done, they build four 15-minute prototypes to immediately jump to the lessons that only come when you start breaking things. At the Stanford d.school, we hold "Iron Chef" prototyping sessions where small teams receive a problem statement from the audience (show me a way to run fast on the Moon!), and then they prototype the hell out of it for five minutes. And invariably they get somewhere interesting that would have been unreachable via conversation and hand waving.
Instead of only reading second-hand source or searching on Google, they go to the place and talk to people and see the sights. Talking to a person living on a dollar a day is much different than reading about it, as important as that background knowledge is. Experiencing the Mona Lisa in person is something quite different than viewing it on your MacBook. In order to understand what was really going on in Dubai, Joi Ito picked up house in Japan and moved there.
To truly start living as a design thinker, experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.
2: See and hear with the mind of a child
If experiencing the world firsthand is about wisdom, then being open to what that world tells you requires cultivating the un-wise mind of a child: open, curious, fun-loving.
Being open and curious takes practice.
Having an open mind requires one to suspend (or at least defer) judgment. This is an acquired skill.
Curiosity must be fed: when asked by a classmate of mine how we should best spend our time preparing ourselves for a life spent designing stuff, the great design guru Sara Little Turnbull said, "Great designers are great readers." In other words, you must feed your curiosity, because it grows stronger as it is fed, and the cognitive foundation set by that curiosity is what enables one to recognize patterns and make connections across disparate elements of complex systems.
Having fun (especially as you work) requires energy and time. But it’s worth it: fun shows ways forward other than the drab grey of the mundane, and it can shake us out of the path of an obvious solution.
Without the mind of a child, one can’t see or act deeply. We must see and hear with the mind of a child.
3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"
Too often we focus all of our energy on designing the thing, and forget about the people who will use it. As we approach any design effort, we must step back and always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"
Part of the challenge lies in taking an "ecosystem" approach to the human experience. It's relatively easy to think about the experience of the end user of the thing you design, but what about the experience to be had by the person who sells it? How could we make that better? Who will service it? Who will retire it? Who will market it? Who will provide training and education? A comprehensive look at all of their needs will help (but not guarantee) a better overall experience for the end user.
Another part of the challenge lies in thinking about usage through time. We often design for those few moments that make up the core value proposition. But what about all the other experiences? How does it feel to start using it? What does mastery feel like -- is it exhilarating or boring? How does using this expand our human experience? How does it influence our environment? What does it feel like to extend one's relationship with the offering? Does it help someone get to a state of flow?
There are many examples where designing for the entire experience has made for success in the world (here's a list of "well done" vs. "not so well done"):
- Apple Store vs. Sony Style
- Dream Dinners vs. Hamburger Helper
- Trekking in Bhutan vs. in Nepal
- Disneyland vs. your local amusement park
- World of Warcraft vs. Second Life
- Mint.com vs. your credit card and bank statements
As Lance Armstrong would say, it's not about the bike. We must keep asking "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"
4: Prototype as if you are right. Listen as if you are wrong.
To make change in the world, we must constantly engage in a yin-yang cycle of prototyping. This implies a commitment to two behaviors:
- Prototype as if you are right.
- Listen as if you are wrong.
What is a prototype? A prototype is nothing other than a single question, embodied. In a way quite similar to the scientific method, productive prototyping is about asking a single question at a time, and then constructing a model in the world which brings back evidence to answer your question. In order to believe in the evidence that comes back to you, you need to prototype as if you already know the answer. A strong belief in your point of view will push you to find more creative solutions to the question at hand.
Once your prototype is ready for the world, it is important to listen as if you are wrong. You (and everyone around you) must be willing to respect the evidence that the prototype brings back, whether you life it or not. You must also go out of your way to put your prototype in to the world. Hiding it in a closet is only cheating the process, and ultimately, yourself. My colleague Dennis Boyle, who is one of the world's truly great design thinkers and a remarkable product development guru, has a saying which we like to refer to as Boyle's Law. It goes like this:
"never attend a meeting without a new prototype"
This serves to both push and pull. It pushes you to prototype earlier and with more frequency, because you want to (and have to) meet with other people in the course of life. And it pulls you toward a more productive state, because you can't have a meeting without having a new prototype, which means that you spend less time talking in pointless meetings and more time doing productive explorations. Doing is very important.
There is an important build on Boyle's Law, which goes by the handle of Raney's Corollary. Coined by another one of my colleagues, Colin Raney, his corollary states:
"you only learn when things start breaking"
The goal of a prototype is not to be right, but to get an answer. That answer is what allows you move forward with wisdom.
When we engage in both of these behaviors, prototyping as if we are right but listening as if we are wrong, we engage ourselves in a continuing cycle of do-try-listen. When faced with the challenge of bringing something new in to the world, this cycle leads to concrete results that have a better chance of changing the world, as they are born of lessons from the world. As such, I much prefer the word "prototyping" (a verb) over the word "prototype" (a noun). It is about doing. Prototyping is how things move forward.
5: Anything can be prototyped. You can prototype with anything.
Prototyping is the lingua franca of innovation. It externalizes internal thinking in a tangible form, rendering it more intelligible by others and the world. The good news is that, though it has its roots in the creation of physical things, when taken as a mindset and a methodology, as a way of finding solutions, prototyping can be applied to any domain. Anything can be prototyped, and you can prototype with anything.
Anything can be prototyped. Prototypes aren’t just for physical products. I routinely see people prototyping services, complex experiences, business models, and even ventures. Really, anything can be prototyped: before filming Le Mans, Steve McQueen took a film crew to the French race a year earlier, shot an entire movie's worth of stuff, and then threw most of the exposed stock away. He knew that they best way to learn how to shoot a great movie at Le Mans was to first shoot a rough movie there. His camera people gleaned deep insights into camera placements, mounts, and techniques which put them in good stead when it came time to shoot the real movie. And the value of the tacit knowledge transfer involved cannot be underestimated: rather than try to explain to new camera people what he wanted, McQueen could point to actual film clips and say, “This is good.” Prototyping leads to speed as a process outcome.
You can prototype with anything. You want to get an answer to your big question using the bare minimum of energy and expense possibly, but not at the expense of the fidelity of the results. It's not only about aluminum, foamcore, glue, and plywood. A video of the human experience of your proposed design is a prototype. Used correctly, an Excel spreadsheet is a wonderful prototyping tool. GMail started out as an in-market prototype. A temporary pop-up shop is a prototype. Believing that you can prototype with anything is a critical constraint in the design process, because it enables wise action, as opposed to the shots in the dark that arise from skipping to the end solution because zero imagination was applied to figuring out how to run a create a prototype to generate feedback from the world.
A wise person operates with the worldview that anything can be prototyped, and we can prototype with anything.
6: Live life at the intersection
Innovative outcomes result from living life at the intersection. This is true not only within the confines of innovation initiatives, but also at the level of individuals, teams, and organizations.
Innovation needs to happen at the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility. These three elements make up the legs of a proverbial stool called "it'll work in the world." Too many innovation initiatives focus on only one or two, much to their detriment. For example, creating something without regard for its feasibility out in the world is not unlike designing a bridge without regard to the existence of gravity: it might work, but the likelihood of it being a reliable, safe, means of transport will be greatly diminished. And while it might be tempting to "really be creative" by ignoring constraints, a wiser approach is to view constraints as liberating. Look at any bridge by Santiago Calatrava, and you'll see desirability, viability, and feasibility all coexisting in a glorious symphony enabled by constraints.
Calatrava is great example of what happens when an individual lives life at the intersection. He is a prototypical "T-shaped" person, combining great depth in engineering, architecture, and sculpture with the breadth that comes from a design education and a life lived, well... getting stuff done.
Teams and organizations engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life need to live at the intersection, too. A team of experts ("I-shaped people") with no means of communicating will get no where, fast. A team of generalists ("hyphen-shaped people") with no means of building and executing will suffer the same fate. Diverse teams of T-shaped people are uniquely able to communicate in ways that support the generative application of their areas of expertise. The end result is innovation.
7: Develop a taste for the many flavors of innovation
In music there's a big difference between Mick Jagger and Maria Callas. If you're a pilot, hopping a bush plane around Alaska requires a different skill set you need to grease a 747 on the runway in Hong Kong.
And so it is with innovation: it comes in many flavors, and the ability to discern those flavors and proceed accordingly is a foundational of skill of individuals and organizations who are able to achieve innovation outcomes on a routine basis.
This is most easily explained using a 2 x 2 matrix. I promise this is the only 2 x 2 I will be using in the course of this ongoing discussion of innovation principles:
No matter where you want to go tomorrow, today you and your organization sit at the lower left vertex of this 2 x 2. So, looking up the vertical axis, you start with the offerings that you currently deliver to the market, and then range up to things that are new to you. Then, looking out across the horizontal axis, you start with the people you know, and out at the end of the axis you have people (or users) you don't know at all. The four quadrants of the 2 x 2 then fall out as follows:
- lower left: existing offerings for existing people
- upper left: new offerings for existing people
- lower right: existing offerings for new users
- upper right: new offerings for new users
Three different flavors of innovation are defined by these quadrants:
- Incremental Innovation: you seek to deliver improvements to offerings you already sell to people who you understand fairly well. Your capabilities as an organization are designed to deliver these offerings to these people.
- Evolutionary Innovation: one aspect of your offering (either unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar offering space) is changing as you seek to bring new something to market, forcing you to evolve away from what you know. Your mainstream organization will be only partially equipped to successfully innovate here.
- Revolutionary Innovation: the proverbial blank sheet of paper. Everything is new, as you don't have a history with the offerings, nor do you understand the people here. Your mainstream organization not only is not equipped to innovate successfully here, it won't even see the value in innovating here.
For each type of innovation to work, different organizational structures, metrics for success, development processes, individual skillsets, financial structures, even seating arrangments and reward structures must be put in to place. Just as you wouldn't take a 747 to reach an Alaskan fishing village, so too you wouldn't try to go after a revolutionary innovation outcome using a team and structure built for incremental outcomes. But it happens all the time, ergo the need to develop a taste for these flavors. Innovation efforts are more likely to fail due to flawed architectural decisions made during their genesis than because of a lack of effort or luck on the part of the participants who put that architecture in to action.
There is no value judgment being applied across these three flavors of innovation. Though "revolutionary" innovation is the flavor which captures the imagination of the public, incremental innovation is what keeps the lights on and your brands relevant in the short term. But revolutionary innovations are what lead to breakthroughs that build value for the future. In reality, a healthy organization must maintain a portfolio of innovation initiatives across this landscape if it wants to stay healthy for the long haul.
I am the last person to claim that this is a definitive model for understanding the landscape of innovation. But in my experience it is simple enough to be used in practice, yet not so simplistic that it yields erroneous outcomes. For more depth, please reference the following paper authored by Ryan Jacoby and yours truly.
8: Most new ideas aren't
Most new ideas aren't. Someone, somehow, somewhere already thought up the essence of what you're thinking about.
Which is all the more reason to keep plugging away.
Accepting that someone else already had your idea is liberating, because it frees you up to learn. It moves the focus from what's going on in your head to what's going on in the world. Much of innovating is actually about stealing ideas from one context, connecting them to other ideas, and putting them to work in another. Where can you find analogous experiments or successes or failures that can inform your own work? Remember, before Facebook there was Friendster. And before the iPhone came the Newton. You can choose to live ignorance of what came before or what is happening in other parts of the world, or you can dive in and embrace all their hard-won lessons as your own.
Best of all, standing on the shoulders of giants is a free activity.
At the end of the day, if someone else has already had your idea, then the goal shifts from having ideas to making them real. Innovators ship, dreamers don't.
So what's keep you from making your idea real?
9: Killing good ideas is a good idea
So that brilliant idea of yours isn't the only version of it under the sun, but that's okay (Priniciple 8) you're pouring everything you have in to making it real because you believe it is the one and true answer to the problem at hand.
A this point, killing that good idea could very well be a good idea.
It's easy to fall in love with an idea. And when we're not mindful of process, and spend our energy worrying about whether we'll be successful and on budget and on time (not that those are bad things, they're very important), we can also fall in love too early with an idea, simply out of fear. The mental or organizational dialog goes something like this: "This one is good, and we're in a rush, so let's go do it.". Early closure is the enemy of innovation. Better to move fast through lots of ideas early, throwing most of them out in the process, than to hone down to one in the very early days, polishing it to perfection in the vague hope that it is The One.
Killing ideas also reserves energy so that there's enough left over to actually bring the very best ones to market. In work, as in life, you can't do everything, so deciding what you won't do becomes as important as deciding what you will do (while always maintaining a bias toward the doing). In a discussion about why Apple never shipped a post-Newton PDA, Steve Jobs said "If we had gotten into it, we wouldn't have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn't have seen it coming." At the end of the day, you never want to be low, slow, and out of money or time.
So go look at your portfolio of ideas, and then kill a few that aren't going to be remarkable in the way they go about making people happy and creating value in the world. You'll be much more innovative as a result.
10: Baby steps often lead to big leaps
When operating in the realm of the blank sheet of paper, where assumptions about how things might work outstrip the things you know will work, baby steps are a way to learn your way to success. Granted, a big leap can also get you to your end goal, and will do so very quickly if you're lucky, but a leap into the darkness is very likely get you hurt. Smaller steps allow you to assess the best path forward as you move forward, recognizing that for trailblazers, the path is of your own design.
Baby steps are appropriate at the start, middle, and end of things. This applies equally to individuals, teams, and entire organizations.
As obvious as it may seem, starting something is essential to its completion. But often times people can't accept the challenge in front of them, and so they find myriad ways to avoid doing something: budget reviews, scoping meetings, taking sick time, eating pizzas, buffing that feature on your last project, surfing Facebook... all fine ways to delay dealing with reality. By taking a huge problem statement and breaking it in to smaller chunks, baby steps make it easier to get going. If you're stuck in foggy, uncharted waters, you can spend a lot of time trying to to shoot the stars to chart a course, or you can raise the sail and move a bit, then reassess and move a bit more. Baby steps help you get going, fast.
In the messy middle of an innovation initiative, baby steps allow you to quickly explore multiple directions in parallel, rather slaving to polish one idea before you know it is The One, or even The Best One We Have Now. Big leaps make for expensive bets. Baby steps, on the other hand, are by their nature cheaper to pull off, so you end up spending less money per unit of learning, and that learning comes sooner. And it's easier to kill off ideas when they're expressed as baby steps, because there's no huge sunk investment tempting you to spend more time and money in order to save the project or your career. Most important of all, per Boyle's Law, baby steps increase the frequency of feedback you receive, because you can bring a lot of baby step prototypes to quick meetings. You learn a lot this way.
Many "overnight" innovation successes are actually the result of years of baby steps which added up to a big leap. That E Ink screen in your Kindle is the result of years of incremental innovations in the marketplace that took the technology from something best suited to department store signage to its current form, which is a truly remarkable breakthough. Those years of patient baby stepping at E Ink allowed them to accumulate a huge amount of explicit and tacit knowledge about how to design and make these displays; the more they learn, the harder it will be for others to duplicate their efforts with one big leap. Baby steps can also lead to capability growth. If you look at the product launch historyof a firm like Honda, you see a steady beat of incremental product launches scheduled with presidential election regularity. Every time Honda launches a new Accord, they not only put a better product in the market, but their people and systems evolve as well. Stack all those launches up, and you can see why car companies that default to a "big leap" strategy are not doing so well. Finally, baby steps can open up unforeseen opportunity streams in the guise of real options. The folks behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band didn't set out to create the world's biggest ever living room music entertainment system -- they were just MIT guys interested in making the music performance experience more accessible to all. Via fourteen years of patient experimentation and baby stepping, they got there, big.
11: Everyone needs time to innovate
Given all the challenges we face in the world, we need to everyone to innovate. Everyone is potentially creative and able to bring something new in to the world. The idea that there two types of people: "creatives" and everyone else, is but a myth, albeit a damaging one at that. Up and down an organization, everyone needs time to innovate.
If you're sitting at the top of an organization, or in a position with a high degree of gravitational pull, you need time to innovate. To get the most out of it, your time spent innovating should take the form of helping other people grow and setting things up to be successful. Your innovations will deal with setting the stage in the right way for the right things to happen, and with architecting systems, teams, and structures so that appropriate behaviors emerge given the innovation challenge at hand.
If you're working on the front lines of an organization (where some might describe you as being at the "bottom"), you need time to innovate. Because you are doing the critical work of the organization, you're the most in touch with the people who benefit from its offerings. You can use the tools of design thinking to start making a difference today in how you make those people feel. Figure out what they need that you're giving them, make some prototypes, and start testing them. Cycle though that and improve the way things get done. It takes time, but the potential benefits are enormous.
Note well that I'm not saying that everyone should be creative all the time. Far from it: we need people to be executing when they should be executing. Land that 747 safely, mend that broken leg, receive that shipment of returned goods, and file that tax return. But for the critical questions of how, let's give everyone more time to make it all better.
12: Instead of managing, try cultivating
Leading people to innovative outcomes has much more in common with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control management techniques. Whereas the later is concerned with efficiencies, coping with scarcity, and always being on top of things, cultivating is about embracing variance, abundance, and the idea of living at the bottom of things. A leadership model based on a cultivation mindset can be found in the following four defining behaviors of cultivators of innovation:
1) Being at the bottom of things
Flourishing gardens come from being at the bottom of things. Instead of pursuing the traditional management goal of being on top of things -- with the lucrative by-product of being at the top of things -- the leader-as-cultivator makes it their job to live simultaneously at the bottom and in the middle and on the edges, dealing with things that might seem like plain manure to outsiders.
It's not lonely at the bottom. The bottom can be a messy place, but it is the wellspring of success when it comes to fostering creativity. With plants, as with people trying to act in creative ways, you can't tell them what to do, but you can try to support what they need to do, matching essential resources to tasks at hand. This is not traditional, I'm-the-heroic-boss leadership. Instead, the creative cultivator takes satisfaction from tending to the health of the overall garden, and wisely leaves the kudos for smelling great and looking good to the roses.
2) Trusting what is there
Creative cultivators trust what is there. A wise cultivator resists the temptation to "dig up the seed as it is growing", as it were, to check if people are being creative enough. Many breakthrough innovation initiatives are stifled by linear project timetables more appropriate to incremental efforts. The paradox of cultivating innovation is that confidence in outcomes is itself an enabler of innovation; a wise gardener knows that roses are the best authorities on the creation of rosiness, and until they bloom, only checks in to see if they need more food and water. Furthermore, creative cultivators trust that the right answers -- though not necessarily the ones they would have thought up themselves -- will emerge from their gardens. So much about what makes a creative organization tick is tacit; it is about what's there and what it creates in an emergent way, rather than what a few brains wish to have happen via explicit processes and goals.
3) Embracing the ecosystem
By their nature, gardens are part of larger ecosystems. Healthy gardens readily accept inputs from the outside world. Rain, seeds, nutrients, soil: we needn't worry where they come from, we just care about their integrity and how they help us grow good stuff. Encouraging variance -- the generation of weird or unexpected ideas -- is a key goal for someone cultivating a creative culture. Anything that encourages variance through the cross-pollination of ideas from outside sources (very much the function of bees) should be reinforced. And as we're sadly seeing out in the world, gardens without the benefit of bees soon stop producing.
Thinking about the long-term health of all stakeholders in an ecosystem is also a signature act of a cultivator. Innovating is a long-term endeavor and requires a great deal of patience, investment, and fortitude. Actions that value short-term productivity over the long-term health of the garden and its larger ecosystem are not conducive to lasting success.
4) Taking a bird's eye view
Finally, creative cultivators do all of the above while simultaneously curating the garden from a bird's eye view. Managing a portfolio of creative endeavors requires knowing how many plants a certain piece of land can support and then pruning or culling as need be. As Principle 9 states, sometimes you have to prune (or kill) ideas and projects. Doing the most with the resources at hand, listening to what works and what doesn't, and guiding growth to be something unique and wonderful – that is the essence of strategy, and of gardening as well. Most importantly, by taking a bird's eye view, a creative cultivator creates the context for plants to grow in accordance with a strong vision of how the garden should evolve. In organizations, this means having points of origin that can inspire individuals to be creative in certain ways, and not others, and to innovate in the right directions.
Taken together, these four ways of leading should help innovations flourish. Instead of trying to manage innovation, we must move to a model of leadership that's all about cultivating it.
13: Do everything right, and you'll still fail
Odds are your innovation efforts will fail. Bummer. Big, big bummer.
It's tough to bring something new in to the world. Your chances of survival improve with a process informed by design thinking, but it's very likely some key factor -- across desirability, viability, or feasibility -- will not quite be there, and things will go pear-shaped.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to win, to make things happen. Quite the opposite: because the odds are so low, it means working even harder, pushing as much as you can to get things right. I don't know about you, but I really hate failing. It feels bad when it happens from a big-picture point of view; I have no problem with a prototype failing (that's a good thing, per Raney's Corollary), but I loathe the idea of something failing at a systemic level. Yuck.
But acknowledging that failure is a likely outcome enables us -- if we work with the end in mind -- to make a leap to a more productive state of being. That state of mind is the focus of Principle 14.
14: Failure sucks, but instructs
Since you will fail when you take on the challenge of bringing something new in to the world, it's useful to adopt the mantra of "Failure sucks but instructs". Repeat that mantra a few times, and then hark back to Raney's Corollary:
"you only learn when things start breaking"
None of us want to fail. But when we do, we have a choice to make: we can choose to learn from the failure, or we can choose to avoid dealing with what the world is trying to tell us. Time and time again, history shows us that innovators who get stuff done are also the ones who best learn from their failures, which may be legion. Think James Dyson cranking out thousands of vacuum cleaner prototypes, the Wright brothers crashing their kites and gliders over and over, and even the rational marketers at Amazon hypothesizing and testing across multiple web platforms each and every day. Each is a lesson in the power of success driven by cycles of failure coupled with learning.
Failure sucks, but instructs. The wisdom is out there. Can you accept it?
15: Celebrate errors of commission. Stamp out errors of omission.
When we attempt to bring new things in to the world, we will make mistakes and screw things up. That, along with death and taxes, is a certain thing.
So, for individuals trying to make a difference, or for organizations trying to be innovative on a routine basis, a fundamental question must be asked and answered: do we want to reward smart thoughts in the absence of action, or do we decide to celebrate the act of trying, even when it takes us to places of failure? I say that we need to err on the side of errors of commission. Doing must be more weighty than thinking or talking.
In the words of Bob Lutz:
Errors of commission are less damaging to us that errors of omission... taking no risk is to accept the certainty of long-term failure.
Obviously we need balance, and not everything can be about charging in and apologizing later. It's good to listen to what the world is telling you and course correct as you go. But a bias for action, and ways of rewarding action and penalizing inaction, will lead to remarkable things happening over time.
We must celebrate (and learn from) errors of commission and stamp out out errors of omission.
16: Grok the gestalt of teams
If you're going to get innovative stuff done in the world, odds are you're going to do it with other people. If you haven't looked out the window lately, we're living in an ever more connected and interdependent world. If there ever was a time for lone inventors to thrive, this is not it: smart, action-oriented, high-EQ, multidisciplinary, interdependent teams are uniquely positioned to take on the broad, systemic challenges so in need of innovative thinking today.
So if you're going to do remarkable stuff, you've got to learn to grok the gestalt of teams.
There's an entire literature on effective team roles and dynamics that I won't go in to here, but based on all my years of battling on the front lines to bring new stuff in to the world, here are a few of my favorite insights in to behaviors that make for exceptional teams:
- Build it out of T-shaped people: an effective innovation team is composed of people who are really good at what they were put on earth to do, but also share a common way of getting things done in the world. We want depth: an engineer needs to be an engineer's engineer, and we want the MBA to be capable of unlevering a beta in her sleep. But we want breadth, too. We need them both to not only get along, but to thrive in a symbiotic relationship centered on getting stuff done. In my experience, what adds that breadth to a team is a group of individuals who are versed in the ways of design thinking.
- Know thyself, and let everyone else know, too: a high-performing team is no place for posturing or secrets. If you're good at something, we want to know so that we can you let you be the lead on that. And if you're not so good at something, we want to know that too so that we can help you get better, or keep you from wasting time on that front. The way this happens is for individuals to be proactive about disclosing this information through the course of the life of a team.
- Be friendly, because the networked world is your oyster: imagine how powerful your small team could be if it were part of a vast network of experts and people wanting to contribute to your success, if only you'd ask. Well, guess what? Via the marvels of modern technology, you're already there. Need someone to hack some code? How about a coder in Bangladesh? Need an expert on nanotubes? Find her on Twitter. Need some help with that marketing plan? Why not befriend that VP that occasionally strolls by your team space? The network your team needs to hit the remarkable zone is already there waiting to be asked. Be friendly and invite those folks in. Because they want to be on the team, too.
These are only a few points. What matters to you when it comes to being part of an effective innovation team? I'd love to hear.
As the cliched saying goes, "there's no 'I' in team" (and you never want to be at the receiving end of the saying "there's no YOU in team", but I digress...), so get out there and grok the gestalt of teams. Be the team, good things will happen.
17: It's not the years, it's the mileage
If you're going to reach innovative outcomes on a routine basis, you need to match the right team to the opportunity. Part of that means understandingPrinciple 7 so that you know what type of problem you're tackling, the other part involves understanding what kind of experience you need on your team.
When it comes to answering that last question, the right kind of experience profile depends on whether you're looking at a high or low variance situation. Examples of low variance situations are flying a 747 from San Francisco to Singapore, operating on a heart, or serving up burgers at In-N-Out. In each of those situations, we desire a predictable outcome delivered with a low degree of variance from a predetermined standard, and in this context, the right experience is expressed in terms of having done the same thing many times before. We want a pilot who can fly the 747 on, well, autopilot. We want a surgeon who has done hundreds of the same operation, and learned something from each one, not a surgeon who has done one hundred different surgical procedures once. As such, experience is really about tenure in a role, with relevant experience having a direct correlation to years in the role.
In a high-variance situation, where we are expecting an innovative outcome, but have little to no sense what the right answer might look like, we need a different definition of what "experienced" means. In this context, we want people who are experienced with the process of innovation -- in other words, people who have gone through the "understand - build - test" cycle of Principle 4 many times. We want folks with a lot of mileage under their belt, in other words, but that mileage need not be strictly correlated with years at work.
For example, one of the reasons why Honda cycles its production engineers through its various racing programs is to increase their innovation process mileage; designing a new component for a mass market automobile takes several years, so between the time an engineer graduates college and turns 40, they may have only shipped three to four designs to market (if they're lucky). Contrast that with a race engineer, who faces the challenge of optimizing a race car for a different track configuration every two weeks for eight months, as well as managing an arc of innovation for the entire car over those same eight months. During that short period of time, they may experience 10, 15, even 20 cycles of "understand - build - test". So when it comes to picking an engineer to go figure out the future of mobility, which one would you choose, the "I've shipped the same thing to market three times" person, or the "I've done 20 cycles every year for the past four years" individual? By my reckoning, in this world an engineer age 26 could have 20 times the relevant process experience as a person 14 years their senior.
Mileage really does matter when it comes to understanding the art and science of bringing new stuff in to the world. Many of the hottest Web 2.0 apps are springing from the agile fingers of lads barely past drinking age who are in fact hoary veterans of the coding wars, having been engaged in hacking kernels since they were eight. They have a tremendous amount of relevant mileage under their belt, and have a skillset that's perfectly tailored to the nimble world of innovation on the interwebs.
I'd like to propose a metric for assessing the innovation prowess of an individual or of a team. It looks like this:
innovation experience index = [market ships] / [years of practice]
In other words, how many innovation market ships have you experienced over a given period of time? And of those, what's your profile for incremental innovations? For revolutionary innovations?
It's all about mileage.
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