Fresh Takes on Innovation

I just found this example of a simple and good idea in the BrainStore archives and wanted to share it with our blog readers.

A few years ago, the British Tourist Authority in Zürich asked BrainStore to come up with ideas on how to attract more families to London or England in general.

As usual, we set up a community to come to an Idea Event and to think about this task. When setting up the community, we decided to invite teens, who have a great deal of influence on their families, and the editors of school newspapers (today it would of course be school blogs), who are always interested in reaching their target audience.

The community came together with the task to come up with a fun campaign that can be put into school newspapers as an advertisment.

After reflecting about some clichés around Britain (mind this was a few years ago) which evolved around rain and the quality of food, and after looking at the way other tourist destinations advertise their benefits (usually: very very blue sky) the team was asked to come up with more concrete ideas.

One of the ideas was to create a series of fun postcards, showing Big Ben and a colored sky with unusual objects (pigs, rubber ducks, golden suns etc). The message: We Britains do not need to show blue sky, because we have so much more to offer and that’s way more cool than anything you can experience in any other destination with your family.

The series of postcards was distributed to school newspapers, and the editors created a full page advertisement with the above message, glueing one postcard of the series of four into every paper.

Soon, word spread among teens everywhere in Switzerland that England is a cool destination, and they started to talk their parents into visiting London or England.

What is important about this process is the inclusion of two important groups: teens as influencers for their parents, and editors of school newspapers as credible peers for this audience.

We just found this amazing app called Codecheck. It allows you to scan the bar code of products and you will immediately get all available information about the product, such as a description of the contents, production information and ratings from consumers who have used this product. Clever and simple. http://www.codecheck.info.

At BrainStore, we believe that in order to create successful innovation, the process of coming up with ideas and the decision about which ideas will be implemented has much to do with the right roles and the right process. Today, we would like to look at the roles in our Idea Factory Process. The role model of our process has always been the classical production factory. In a factory, clear roles are assigned to different people in order to guarantee the quality of the resulting product. When it comes to great ideas (that will also be successfully implemented), we believe a similar system of checks and balances is helpful.

Firstly, we are convinced that there is a difference between the people who are steering the innovation process and the ones participating in it. We call them Innovation Team (the ones who steer the process) and Creating Community (the participants). By making this distinction, it becomes possible to steer an innovation process in a more systematic way, because the people who are responsible for the process are not producing the ideas themselves, and the people participating in the process do not need to worry about how the process is actually run. This way, the process is more efficient and the results are more broadly accepted.

Now let’s have a closer look at the people who are responsible for making an innovation process successful. There are 5 different roles. Two of the people (Head of Innovation and Innovation Promotion) are more auxiliary to the innovation culture and the relationship with clients (whether those clients are internal or external clients is not important), and three roles (the ones we will describe in more detail right now) are responsible for the whole process of developing ideas and bringing them to the point of implementation.

The first role is the Process Manager: He or she is responsible for steering the process, for ensuring the communication between the project owner (client) and the other members of the innovation team, and for making sure that the quality of the content is exceeding the clients expectations.

The Content Manager is responsible for setting up the search fields and methods for the idea generation and idea compression process, for monitoring the content, working together with internal or external people who ensure the process is running smoothly and for doing editorial work on the content that is generated in the process.

The Community Manager makes sure that for each process, the right community of participants is coming together to work on the project question. He or she is responsible for a balanced mix of participants, for their motivation and remuneration and for communicating the results (in accordance with the client) to the community.

At each process step, one of the innovation team members has the lead, while the others check the results. This way, quality is monitored and there is no risk that the content or the process deviate from the project objectives.

As an Idea Factory, we like a challenge, and over the years we have dealt with some pretty complex projects and questions. There are two kinds of project challenges, however, that always seem to be a bit tougher than others, and those are how to make something boring attractive and how to attract young people to becoming members of charities or NGOs.

So if someone told you that in Berlin, every month, hundreds of people meet in a Club in the borough of Kreuzberg to play BINGO to support local projects, you would certainly ask the question how this might be possible.

It’s acutally quite amazing and also, astonishingly easy. Take a cool club, add benches and tables, ask the local shops to sponsor some prizes, get a cool band and two entertaining presenters. This, actually, is the mix that makes “Super Sexy Kiez Bingo” in Kreuzberg work since 9 years.

The two presenters are Inge Borg and Gisela Sommer (picture), two witty transvestites whose comments and questions are legend. They will introduce the BINGO rules to the audience and then draw numbers from an old cement mixer until someone yells “BINGO”.

But it is not all joy for the winner to get his pize, because Inge Borg and Gisela Sommer will question you about your work, your life, and – of course – your sexual orientation. The public engages by yelling, asking the winner to sing or take off his t-shirt (mostly if he is a good looking young guy, as about one third of the audience is gay).

When the number 11 is drawn from the cement mixer, the whole audience cheers loudly and the band plays a little tune. Infact, this tradition to cheer for the number 11 has been established a few seasons ago, says band leader Gary Dee of the “Wild Flamingo Bingo Band”, to make sure that the band stays well awake during the 5 hour long show. Inge Borg and Gisela Sommer vary the usually dull game of BINGO by introducing new languages, by spicing up the procedures with jokes and comments and by generally creating an atmosphere of entertainment and fun that rivals well-known comedy shows.

The atmosphere is a mix of beer fest, Las Vegas, charity concert and private party. To play BINGO you buy one or several rounds worth of playing cards and you make a donation to the charity that will receive the earnings of the night.

“Super Sexy Kiez BINGO” attracts hundreds of people from all walks of life, most of them between 20 and 30, and well before the show opens a long queue builds in front of the club, because people want to make sure that they get good seats.

The secret behind “Super Sexy Kiez BINGO”’s success is, we think, the unusual mix of the components. Bingo by itself would be boring. A charity event for a local project would probably not attract so much as 10 people. A show with funny transvestites and a band is not to everybodies liking. But mix them together, add some good drinks and a very cool location, and you get the sort of evening that is very memorable indeed.

Find Kiezbingo on Facebook

Recently, we ran across a very interesting column in the NY Times about 3M’s new “World of Innovation” showcase at their customer innovation center in St Paul, Minnesota.

Although 3M is the inventor of thousands of products (the Post-it, most famously), the “World of Innovation” showcase isn’t a museum dedicated to glorifying their most successful inventions.

Instead it’s a room filled with 40 of what 3M calls “technology platforms” – which are technologies that 3M has developed in areas like optical films, reflective materials, abrasives and adhesives.  And none of those technologies are shown as the finished products that they’re currently used in.

The goal of this Innovation Center is to inspire visitors to look at 3M’s range of inventions as potential solutions to their business challenges – whatever those challenges are!   And it works.  Customers discover new uses for the same technologies in vastly different fields.

Here at BrainStore, we love this concept and use a variation on it ourselves!

At 3M, engineers develop the technologies that are displayed in the “World of Innovation” showcase and then customers who have challenges (e.g. need to find a better adhesive for repairing ducts) arrive at the Innovation Center to search for technologies that will meet their needs.

At BrainStore, we don’t have a range of our own inventions that we display.  Instead, our clients come to us because they need new ideas about how to get more out of a current product, whether that’s cheese or chemicals.  Our challenge is to get the people who are who are involved with the product every day to see new possibilities and come up with new uses themselves.

And this also works!   Amazing, isn’t it?

Time Magazine just came out with a list of the 50 best inventions of 2009.  We took a look and selected 5 of our favorites.

Those might not be the 5 best inventions on the list from a commerical or social value, but they’re the ones that got our vote.

	The Foldable Speaker We like this speaker because it’s perfect for travel.  It starts off as a cube, but all you have to do to fit it conveniently in your laptop bag is to unfold it into a slim piece of paper.  Plus, part of the profits from sales of this speaker go to charity!
	The Solar Shingle Solar power is great, but it’s not very practical for most people.  It costs a lot to install giant solar panels, which don’t have a nice appearance. The Solar Shingles takes the solar panel and turns it into small shingles that can be installed on the roof right next to the normal shingles.  To make them even better, the solar shingles will cost 10% to 15% less than normal solar panels and are easier to install.
	The YikeBike We love our Brompton fold-able bikes at BrainStore and this is a new twist on an old favorite.  Imagine: an electric folding bike that charges in a little over 20 minutes and can reach speeds of up to 20 km/h (12 mph).  Yup, we think that sounds great too.
	Vertical Farming Vertical farming makes it possible to get more out of smaller parcels of land – which could be a huge benefit as the population increases and people want more locally-grown food (especially in urban areas).  It’s also cool that the vertical farming uses far less water than conventional farming while still making sure that plants get all the nutrients and sun that they need.
	The Human-Powered Vending Machine This invention doesn’t change the world, but it makes us happy.  The concept is simple: to get something from the vending machine, potential customers will have to pedal a certain distance.  We like the image of people pedaling madly away to get their afternoon treat, but we also like how an old technology gets a different spin.

Take a look at Time’s list and let us know which ones you like best!