Fresh Takes on Innovation

The city of Solothurn is an inconspicuous small Swiss town and within easy biking distance from the BrainStore headquarters in Biel. To explore it, Brains (as the employees of BrainStore are called) can from now on leave their bikes in the garage. Taking a tour on www.touchtown.ch comes as close as one get to actually strolling downtown Solothurn on a sunny day!

Using the latest image-rendering technology this virtual tour is nothing like you have experienced before: it does not only allow city strollers to enjoy every corner of Downtown Solothurn by the clicks of your mouse – no – it takes you inside many shops, bars, restaurants, hotels and even churches!

If you are planning a stay in town or an evening out, this website constitutes a real and valuable innovation: before you make your reservations you can check out the restaurant or the hotel of your choice and decide on your favourite room and table.

According to David Galenson, a University of Chicago economist, there are two types of innovators; experimental and conceptual innovators.

Galenson classifies the painters Cezanne, Renoir and Pissaro as experimental innovators. They did their best work in the mid to late periods of their careers. Experimental innovators explore their chosen area of expertise step-by-step: experimenting, reflecting, learning and then experimenting again until they perfect their craft. Conceptual innovators such as the painter Picasso, the poet Ezra Pound or the entrepreneur Bill Gates, are conceptual innovators. Conceptual innovators take the quantum leap. They usually make their greatest contribution in the earliest part of their careers.

Understanding that people approach tasks differently and bring different perspectives to the table is a core element of the BrainStore process. We recruit and involve a mix of people as diverse as possible in our innovation development – age, gender, nationality, academic background, experience, learning preferences and so on.

BrainStore believes that everyone has something to contribute when looking for good ideas.

Imagine a phone made from cotton. Soft, pliable and light , yet never compromising on power or performance. The Soft Phone concept by designer Qian Jiang takes what we know about electronic cellulose structures and squeezes every last ounce of performance out of it. Literally!

The is a series of discs with electronic fabric stretched in between. The interface uses a combination of tactile gestures like squeezing to hang-up and touch which detects a deformation on the surface to register input. The fibers are fine enough and optically clear allowing light energy to pass thru to display simple contextual menus. Whenever you need a full QWERTY just unfurl the collapsible structure. The cell antenna, battery, camera, and micro electronics are contained inside a tiny clip which itself is made of soft, squeezable, stress-reducing silica.

source: yankoDesign

This is the newest way to create modern art – www.nag.iap.de.

You just define the topic you are designing and how complex you want your design to be. That’s it! The machine searches the web for images that match your topic and chooses them completely freely, and as many images as you ordered and wildly combines them.

And the result? Your art looks exactly the same as in cool and trendy magazines. We suspect the fancy designers used the NetArtGenerator for years.

We in BrainStore like NetArtGenerator because the principle is similar to that of our IdeaMachine: the IdeaMachine incorporates the concept of random combinations to produce something really new. This element of random combination is only one part of how the IdeaMachine produces new and great ideas. Should NetArtGenerator increase their complexity and control possibilities, we love them even more.

On illustration: 6 images about the topic “dog” combined in 10 seconds.

After our very interesting project in Kuala Lumpur in December where we generated ideas on how to make this world a planet of entrepreneurs, we are now in Africa with the UNECA (UN Economic Commission for Africa) and the African Union.

The Conference lasts for three days and looks for ways how R&D in Africa can be boosted and collaboration North-South and South-South can be increased.

BrainStores task is to develop 15 - 20 ideas with the conference participants, who are members of Parliament of African States, Scientists, delegates of UNECA and other UN Organisations as well as representatives of other organisations and associations.

To read more, visit www.uneca.org/sciencewithafrica

We are having a great time here and are impressed with the diversity, hospitality and positive spirit of this wonderful continent.

This Pipe takes the BrainStore Blog, passes it thru a Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr for Inspirations. The photos appear in date order.

Clone the “BrainStore Blog Inspiration” pipe and fit them to your interests. And even begin to use flickr.

Pipes is a free online service from yahoo that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. Learn more…

Lift08 is a three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies. Entrepreneurs, investors, and private sector professionals gather in Geneva to talk about tomorrow’s most important trends.

A small delegation of our brains is at Lift08. Their workshop this afternoon, will provide an insight into Industrial IdeaProduction, highlighting the different steps «manufacturing - proto-industralization - industrialization - digitalization – virtualization» along the model of the world’s first IdeaFactory BrainStore.

We are looking forward to an interesting discussion with the participants.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has ranked Switzerland the world’s second most competitive economy after the United States.

According to WEF Chief Economist Margareta Drzeniek:
“Switzerland is still a good place to do business. In terms of public institutions, red tape etc. it is very well managed. It is also a very good environment for innovation, where it has even improved since last year.”

The top ten in 2007 remain the same as in last year, just in a different order. Europe is strongly represented by Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Finland from third to sixth place. Singapore and Japan are seventh and eight places while Britain and the Netherlands were ranked ninth and tenth.The main change from 2007 is that the USA have moved up from sixth to first place. The economies of China and India were placed 34th and 48th respectively this year.

The report also says that Switzerland is characterised by an excellent capacity for innovation and a very sophisticated business culture.

Read the whole article

Teaching economics to high school students can be tedious for both teacher and student. But these days are over: The Swiss National Bank, responsible for the money policy in Switzerland, has recently launched a website called www.iconomix.ch that offers a wide range of interactive, fun and exciting materials for teachers and students.

The National Bank has created a fabulous interactive teaching site here with tons of interesting materials that are not only available for teachers and students, but for anyone who wants to know how markets operate, how risks can be minimised, how prices are established, or, even more basic, why societies use money to pay for goods. Some materials are worksheets, but there are also very detailed simulations, games and group tasks to keep you going for ages. Enjoy!

BrainStore has been involved in naming the website. The winner name, “iconomix” is the German way you would write the word “economics” phonetically. It also reminds young people of characters from the very popular “Asterix” cartoons.

In a recent Time article two Harvard professors of psychology talk about how seldom our mind is actually focussing on the here and now. If our environment doesn’t draw our attention, we keep wandering off: Traveling back (and forth) in time, browsing through experiences and thoughts - “moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn — for free”. We learn by trial and error. By reviewing our experiences and previewing the consequences of our actions, we save a lot of real life trial and error that could lead to mistakes.