Fresh Takes on Innovation

Here is another proof of how small things can make a big difference in our everyday lives: Efrat Gommeh, an industrial designer from Israel, has created such innovative tableware that one is tempted to go shopping for Christmas gifts early this year. To give you an idea of her work, here are two examples of her unpretentious and beautiful collection.

The Lock Cup: imagine a morning in your office without a missing coffee cup… The cup can only be used if the key is in the lock, otherwise it leaks.

 And here comes my personal favorite, The Info Tray:

Love it or leave it, the tray is a helpful accessory when you are suddenly overwhelmed by great ideas and need to brainstorm in the most unexpected moments.

Btw, according to Gommeh’s self-definition you might assume she’s worked at BrainStore before: «The studio is characterized by an innovative and fresh approach, attention to details and a broad perspective which incorporates the point of view of the user, the manufacturing limitations and marketing considerations».

If knowledge is power, personal newsfeeds are your weapons. A newsfeed customized to your information needs allows for professional news monitoring and information retrieval like previously only news services and professional communication agencies could.
If for instance you wished to be constantly informed about your clients, suppliers and competitors, then an aggregated newsfeed could be an interesting solution for you.

In the following example I’ve combined selected data sources to process them with different methods. Eventually the outcome is a helpful aggregated idea-feed.

This is comparable with the concept of a search engine: finding what one is looking for via queries from any number of sources. So instead of constantly dealing with complicated Google scanning on a certain subject, you can continually inform yourself of a predefined field.

In this aggregated newsfeed example, articles of selected sources on the subjects of trends, ideas, innovation and future are displayed on a daily basis. For instance, you can subscribe to the Yahoo! Pipes aggregated feed as badge for iGoogle or Netvibes.

Have you already heard about shnit? It’s the famous Swiss short film festival. This year, shnit came up with its 6th edition with a firework of short films, covering reams of topics and genres. I had the honour to present a special prize at the shnit Awards Night 2008.

BrainStore’s special prize was an IdeaPackage, worth 30′000 Swiss francs. The winner is Lisa Blatter with her short-film «Nachglühen» (Afterglow) which was chosen to be the best Swiss production in 2008.

Already busy with a new project, she couldn’t appear in person, but was completely overwhelmed when she received the message that her film was chosen. Being asked how she feels and what she is going to do with the prize she answered:

«I’m an observer of beautiful, sad, funny or just spontaneous moments. A collector. But still on search for a story to keep my protagonists grounded. They are still roaming. Together with BrainStore, I’d like to get an impulse for my next major film project.»

BrainStore will help Lisa starting up her next big project. Together we will develop 10 great ideas in a half-day workshop with 12 participants. Cut!

Once again, the versatility of our mobile IdeaFactory was put to the test. After Kuala Lumpur, Düsseldorf and Addis Abeba, its latest mission was Hamburg. Once again, we left Biel to make the seemingly impossible possible.

We captured the Cap San Diego, the largest sea-worthy museum freight ship worldwide, and renamed it without further ado BrainShip. The pop-up feature being part of our mobile IdeaFactory, this proved to be the only right name for the ship.

During two days, we produced ideas for OTTO, the largest mail order business worldwide.

The ship has never seen anything like that before: smoking heads, animated discussions and OTTO’s decision makers racing against teenagers – what a sight!

After these two successful days aboard the Cap San Diego, we’re already planning the next step, the BrainPlane: idea production in the Airbus A 380.

Markus, Lena and I just spent an exciting week in Moscow, where we met with several big and medium-sized players from mining to micro technology in order to promote the notion of BrainStore and our IdeaProduction method. With a very positive feedback from the audience, Markus and I headed back West to Switzerland while Lena stayed in Moscow to lead our negotiations for several projects in Russia.

What a vibrant and high-contrast metropolis! Russian upper class Babushkas blending in with construction workers in the majestic subway stations of the cramped Muscovite Metro and ad-hoc Rolls Royce displays announcing luxury goods right next to historic socialist buildings.

And us, running through this urban jungle from meeting to meeting, dazzled by the blatant controversies and thrilled by the frenzy of Muscovite business customs… Spassiba Rodina!

Biel, Frankfurt, Long Beach… next stop Moscow!

I always knew it! Sleep is essential in the process of finding good ideas. In Japan it’s already common to take a nap during working hours. So don’t be confused when you enter your colleague’s office tomorrow and find him resting his head on the table. He is probably just searching for a great idea!

Dr. Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, says, most people think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive.

Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha!-moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but are usually unaware of it. We have noticed this at our 2-day workshops, where a huge amount of inspirations and ideas is generated on the first day. After a highly stimulating day and evening the participants get some well-deserved rest during their sleep. On the second day they are always highly motivated to connect and combine ideas and to come up with new ones.