Fresh Takes on Innovation

A team of famous neuroscientists has developed a new technique that allows to look inside a person’s brain and forecast peoples behaviour and intentions.

According to the Guardian:

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future.

It is the first time that scientists have succeded in reading the intentions of a human person.

Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,

said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

This new technique opened the discussion about the ability to probe people’s minds again and raises serious ethical issues. The main question is, how will brain-reading technology be used in the future?

see The Guardian

The age of stern intellectual property rights and patent protection seems to be running out. Instead, we are witnessing research & development departments opening their books of data in order to co-create with customers, partners and even competitors. While some business leaders still try to guard their secrets, a paradigm shift has already taken place toward a ‘culture of sharing’, as labeled by Don Tapscott, head of Toronto based consultancy New Paradigm and author of the upcoming book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”.

More and more enterprises opt for more than controlled crowdsourcing. Modern business executives seek strength through mutual and highly transparent mass-collaboration. As Captain Kirk in Star Trek, they are often forced to lower thier shields so as to let in, explore and adapt alien cultures.

However, despite its growing acceptance there is still much uncertainty about a reasonable modus operandi for public participation in precious R&D projects: Which intellectual property should be made accessible to the public and which insights are better kept restricted? How to secure the continuous participation of third parties? and hence: If and how to compensate contribution?

Lots of questions to find answers to. Finding these answers is exactly what we do here at BrainStore. Any comments from the masses?

The MindLab is a specially designed room to stimulate the process of brainstorming. All walls are made of white boards which you can write on, then wipe clean and rewrite. The ultimate room for creating new ideas, no matter how much space you need and no matter how you prefer to create your ideas. If your inputs extend the vertical, no problem, write on the ceiling of the MindLab. If you want to crawl around and take your brain for a walk, no problem, start your red line in the corner on the floor. Whatever your strategies are in brainstorming, with the MindLab it’s possible.

In a short but very funny video, David Ngo tells us about his thoughts on how to achieve true innovation in design. The keyword is process. Instead of waiting for a flash of brilliance, the design process applies several steps like needfinding, brainstorming, prototyping, formgiving and critiquing in order to come up with something that is new, functional and nice to look at.

These steps are pretty close to what BrainStore has been doing for almost 18 years: collecting inspirations, compressing them into ideas and selecting the ones worth going on with.

Via Swissmiss

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has written an article about Innovation in Germany. It states that most companies in Germany are developing their innovation without listening or talking to customers first. Most companies highly underestimate the ability of consumers or B2B clients to participate in innovation, states the spokesman of the German Innovation Counsel, Axel Glanz.

At BrainStore, we have included target audiences, from extremes as far as children and senior citizens, into each and every innovation project from the last 18 years. We know that bringing together the insider view (company that wants to innovate), the target audience view and the complete outsider view (lateral thinkers, freaks and teenagers) helps come up with better and more market compatible innovation.

The Paleo-Future Blog found this engraving from the Library of Congress Archives (look here for High-Resolution Data). It’s an excellent brainstorming on flying machines from 1885.

Other findings you can explore on Paleo-Future include an article on the wireless telephone, dating from 1910 or some funny excerpts of the Closer-Than-We-Think! Comic Strips (1958-1963), depicting how the future was most certainly going to look like.

In Germany, Linda Kowsky has established a web site that shows childrens inventions. You can find a letter in which you can ship water, shoes that look like clowds for soft walking, a tickling machine and many more funny and crazy ideas from kids. It is worthwile to look a the charming little database and to learn from the youngest inventors, whose contribution are both good-hearted and inventive and show how a “naive” approach sometimes unearthes better ideas than a mind that has already seen and experienced everything. Children are welcome to send in their contributions.