Fresh Takes on Innovation

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 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 charity 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?

With spring just on the horizon, it’s almost that time again.  No… not wedding season… conference season!

Here at BrainStore, we keep hearing about tons of really innovative conferences in Europe and America.  Some are directly about innovation, while others just create an atmosphere perfect for innovation.

So, since it’s often hard to find out about all the cool conferences out there, we thought we’d share some of our upcoming favorites with you.   Perhaps you’ll even meet us at some of them!

Upcoming conferences we like (March through July):

SxSW Interactive (12-16 March in Austin, Texas) South by SouthWest Interactive is the place to be if you’re interested in emergecing technology, especially if it’s online.  The conference is five days of presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of networking events hosted by industry leaders and a huge showcase of the best new websites, video games and startup ideas.  It’s also chockfull of great music, fun events and networking – not to be missed!

Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy (23-24 March in Berkeley, USA) This inaugural conference, put on by the Economist Magazine, will examine the latest thinking on what makes innovation possible, how innovation is changing, and why innovation matters today more than ever.  The goal of this event is to expand or overturn established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work.

99% Conference (15-16 April 15-16 in New York City, USA) This conference is unfortunately already sold out, but it’s still so cool that we’re going to tell you about it anyways.  Most innovation conferences are all about how to have new ideas – the 99% Conference is all about idea execution – providing road-tested insights on how to make ideas happen. They don’t want to give attendees new ideas, they want to empower attendees to make good on the ones they’ve got.  If that sounds interesting to you, sign-up for their newsletter so you can find out about the 2011 conference right away!

Front End of Innovation (3-5 May, Boston, USA) The European version of this conference was last week, but if you weren’t able to make it to Amsterdam, you can still sign-up for the Boston event.  The Front End of Innovation Conference features fantastic presentations by visionaries who are passionate about innovation and have delivered real results.  The conference has four distinct tracks, from open innovation to green innovation, and most of the presentations are done by companies who talk about how they have applied the innovation concepts to the real world.

LIFT Conference (5-7 May in Geneva, Switzerland) The Lift Conference brings together a community of doers and thinkers to explore the social consequences of new technologies. The conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.  The three day conference will combine speeches selected by Lift curators with speeches proposed and selected by the online Lift community, as well as artistic and social events.

The PINC Conference (11 May in  Zeist, Netherlands) is a conference that combines new ideas, great stories and impressive presentations with speakers from all over the world and from every industry.  PINC stands for “People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity” and the conference’s goal is to touch on each one of those subjects while exposing attendees not only to great speakers, but also to an environment filled with creativity.

World Innovation Forum (8-9 June in New York City, USA) A 2-day conference right in the heart of NYC where the world’s greatest thought leaders in the field of innovation come together to provide actionable insights to revolutionize all aspects of business.  The conference covers everything from future trends, to innovation in fields such as marketing, health care and green technology and is attended by many of the most innovative companies in the US.

InnoTown (9-10 June 2010 in Ålesund, Norway ) InnoTown is a conference that seeks to open people up to innovation.  The conference emphasizes innovation, vision, inspiration, strategy, creativity, promotion and internationalisation. It brings together people from different countries, trades, environments and professions, and challenges all of them to find new ideas, to think new thoughts and to dare to fail (in order to succeed in the end!)

TED Global (12-16 July 2010 in Oxford, UK) TED is a legendary invitation-only conference that started in the US and has become so popular that additional TED events are held biannually in different locations around the world. The US-based TED ended last week (so get your tickets now if you want to go next year!) but the European conference will happen in July.  Just like the original version, TED Global will feature four days of short, fast-paced talks on everything from ecological debt to whether music can teach math.

Of course, those aren’t all the cool conferences happening in 2010, but it will give you a taste of what’s happening in the next couple months.  Please let us know if we’ve missed any that you recommend, or what ones we should be aware of later in the year.  We’ll do another post later on with what’s happening during the summer and fall.

Young Innovations Europe (YIE) is a fresh and exciting magazine created for and by young people interested in exercising positive leadership in their own communities in groundbreaking ways.

YIE are interested in showcasing the best initiatives, programs and innovations young people are implementing throughout Europe.

In their first magazine, YIE also portrais the Idea Factory BrainStore on page 9. You can read the article online on YIE’s website.

Matthew Inman aka “the Oatmeal” says his site “The Oatmeal” is about comics, stories and quizzes, but in fact it is so much more. It is a site that explains facts, products and things. It even explains, for example, which 10 words we need to stop misspelling.

As we have been dealing with coffee a lot lately at BrainStore, we particularly enjoyed the Oatmeals “15(ish) Things Worth Knowing About Coffee” which explains where coffee comes from, how it came to be our favourite morning drink and how it is served in different countries. What makes Matthews work so interesting are his great texts and great artwork.

You can follow the Oatmeal on Facebook or Twitter and get great and colorful explanations about lots of things regularly. Check it out!

I visited www.eternit.ch today. Eternit is the market leader in the roofing and façades sector in Switzerland. The company also acts as an important partner for fireproof and aesthetic interior fittings and design products.

Mr Daniel Hauri, who is responsible for the sales of garden and design products kindly showed me the production and explained the process of fibre cement, which is fascinating.

In the factory in Payerne (in the French speaking part of Switzerland) the company produces roof tiles and wall claddings in different forms and colors, but also gardening pots and design objects like the Guhl Chair (by Willi Guhl, Swiss Designer 1915 – 2004).

What impressed me is the way the company has expanded it’s product portfolio from typical building elements to design objects.

But what truly convinced me today about eternit was a very simple and meaningful marketing idea that was presented to me by Daniel Hauri.

“Because the design products section grew significantly over the last years, we had to hire new workers for our manufacturing process here in Payerne. As the demand rose, the quality (the gardening pots and design objects are produced largely by hand) was getting a bit below standard. We searched some ideas on what we could do and found a very simple solution: A sticker with the personal signature of the person who made the object can now be found in every finished object. It was great marketing in the shops because people realised that the object was actually produced by a person, but it also helped us raise the quality standards, because suddenly the workers went to the shops as well and searched for the pots and objects they had made”.

What I really liked about this idea is the fact that one idea worked perfectly to solve to issues at the same time: Quality and Image.

Thank you, eternit and Daniel Hauri, for sharing this idea with me.

When I was a kid, I used to dream up things like this and draw them during dull classes. The flying car, the car that can swim under water, a city on the moon…

My friends and I truly believed that when we grow up, these things will indeed exist.

And now, look at this: The flying car, at last! Brought to us by Terrafugia, a company founded by award-winning MIT aeronautical engineers. It’s name is also a beauty, it is called “The Transition” and can actually legally drive on roads as well as fly. This is so cool!

The training only takes 20 hours and you can then fly your Transition and drive it home after landing. It costs around 200′000 Dollars.

Thank you, Pascal, who is always on top of all the trends in the aerospace industry.

I learned about this amazing project while visiting the annual conference PINC in Holland. It is a grassroot movement from Estonia, one of the three Baltic states.

A small group of young people wanted to do something about the incredible amount of illegal waste being dumped in forests everywhere in the country. Mostly they wondered why no one seemed to care. They wanted to solve the problem, but also get people engaged in solving it.

Thus, the project “Let’s do it” was born. Four people decided that they would clean up the mess, in just ONE day, motivating a large portion of the population to participate in a day of cleaning up the forests. Only three full time employees managed to motivate 600 volunteers to participate in the project. They mapped the whole waste with help of GPS and cell phones. Celebrities participated in a campaign – for free! And 50′000 volunteers helped clean up all the mapped territories in just one single day. 10′000 tons of waste were gathered in one single day. Wow. It is truly amazing what people can achieve when they work together for a common cause!

What I like most about this project is that not only did the Estonians get rid of their illegal waste in forests, but they have started an ongoing dialogue about sustainability and ecology that every single Estonian at least heard about, but more likely participated in.

You know Open source software, and we at BrainStore love open source innovation – but did you know that there is open source Cola? Now you do. Feel free to copy the recipe and try this at home!

Design by Hwang Jin wook, Jeon You ho, Han Kuk il & Kim Ji myung

At BrainStore we were pretty excited a few years ago when a defense contractor asked us to create some ideas on how their existing technologies could be used to make the world a better place.

They wanted to know what the scenarios of future threats to mankind were and how to respond to them. We came up with many ieas to tackle themes like modern piracy, desertification, world hunger, water poisoning, terrorism in cities, deluge and many more.

One concept took into consideration to build a kind of “seed bomb” that you could drop over territories that cannot be reached easily. The bomb would carry seedy to grow vegetables and could be used by the local farmers to grow produce.

I found a similar concept on Yanko Design Magazine. The seedbomb consists of a biodegradable capsule that contains soil and seeds. Once the capsule reaches the ground, the plant first grows in the capsule and produces moisture, which then melts the biodegradable capsule. I like the design and the way the concept is thought throug. Bravo, Yanko Design.

While researching this topic, a friend pointed out that using seed capsules is not such a new idea after all. The technology exists since the 70ies in some way and was used by Guerilla Gardeners, wo try to claim back a piece of nature within urban space. I am truly amazed at the idea of Guerilla Gardening. It opens a whole new world to me! And here is one very nice example of a Guerilla Gardening blog worth reading!