Fresh Takes on Innovation

Look at this amazing invention by designer Andrew Bosley: The Brainstormer. Turn one of the three wheels or just press “random” to get a new and absolutely crazy suggestion for… well… I don’t know, but the design is awsome!

What about using this as a real tool for coming up with combined solutions, for instance for products or services? Or even just as a tool for decision making, for instance on how to spend your free time.

UPDATE: We have a winner! Congrats to Axelle who was the first to guess (on Facebook) that BrainStore was in Strasbourg today.

Here’s where we held the Idea Event! For more pictures, check out our photo album on Facebook.

Last month, we started a new contest here on Brainstore’s blog called “Where in the World is Brainstore?”  Why?

In the past 20 years, we’ve been all over the world.  We’ve traveled to four continents, holding our Idea Events everywhere from Zurich, Switzerland to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Washington D.C. in the USA.

So since we get to have so much fun traveling, we thought we’d share the fun and give you all a chance to win prizes as well!

So Where in the World is Brainstore?

Today, we’re actually holding two Idea Events simultaneously!  One at our Idea Factory in Biel, Switzerland… and one somewhere else in the world.

Where?  We’re not telling!

Instead, we’re going to give you several clues and see if you can guess!

The first person to guess where BrainStore is today will win a copy of The Idea Machine in English or German (your choice).

Ready?

Here are your first clues:

• In the mid 1400’s, this city’s newly-build Cathedral – named after the city – stole the title of “World’s Tallest Building” from the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• This city was the location for a bizarre plague where hundreds of citizens took to the streets and danced without stopping for days until many of them died.  The cause of “plague” is still a mystery.
• 1988 was a big year for this city – it celebrated its 2000th birthday!
• This city was the first one to have it’s entire historic city center classified a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

We’ll post new clues periodically until someone guesses the correct city!

Go!

This year, Biel/Bienne in Switzerland, where BrainStore is located, hosted an art event called “Utopics”

This art exhibit in the public space dealt with ideas like new nations, utopical concepts of society, the invasion of public space and new concepts of the way we could live together in the future.

Among the artists were Antoni Wojtyra and Anni Wu, who worked together in this exhibit as “W&W” and proposed the concept of
“ideally“, an art gallery that does not sell artwork, but rather offers it to someone in exchange of a wish.

The artists in the gallery were not allowed to sell their art, but they had to formulate a wish. Visitors of the gallery could offer to fulfill the wish of the artist and propose how they would do that.

Antoni Wojtyra had created a neon work of art called “let’s hope…“. His wish was at the same time simple and comlex. He wanted people to finish the phrase “let’s hope…” and to choose from those phrases the most meaningful for a future art exhibit.

BrainStore offered to collect the phrases for Antoni, and received the neon in exchange, which now hangs in the check-in at BrainStore in Biel and greets visitors with the challange to finish the phrase.

This Christmas, BrainStore sent this challenge to everyone who has been working with us as a client, partner, freelancer or staff. We want people to express their hopes for the future, for this world, and even for themselves.

Within 12 hours of having sent the Christmas greeting we had already collected more than 500 phrases. Among them are many that express the wish for a better humanity, for world peace and the end of hunger and war. But there are also more personal ones like “let’s hope she calls me” or “let’s hope for a kiss”.

From all the phrases, Antoni will choose a few ones to be part of an exhibition in late 2010 somewhere in the world. He will put the “let’s hope…” neon in the center and the finished phrases as neons around it. Antoni is currently also collecting phrases in Vancouver, among people who usually are not seen as very hopeful: The homeless, the drug addicts, people living on the margins of society.

BrainStore will choose one phrase to be made into a Neon and will offer it to the person who contributed the phrase.

You can contribute here:

in German

in English

There are all kinds of enemies to a good idea. To just name a few: The focus group, the legal department, the budget, the input of the Creative Director, the deadline…. you make the list.

Fabulous San Francisco based Illustrator Scott Campbell has created a series of subtle and humorous illustrations for the independent film group “Show Off” in Portugal, showing the idea and its enemy in the form of – for instance – Titanic and the Iceberg, Little Red Riding Hood and the Woolf or Marie-Antoinette and the Guillotine, advertising the creativity of “Show Off” film group.

Amazing talent and a great idea! Loved it!

Thanks to you Jan, for the link.

Did it ever occur to you that animals do not innovate? And why that is? I mean: You could talk to your cat and tell her an idea and she might even react to it, but she will never ever come up with an idea for herself.

Small kids though will come up with ideas as soon as they can talk and listen. The will reinvent, propose new things, mix and match ideas that they have seen and heard.

So what’s the difference? One explanation could be Malsows “Hierarchy of needs” pyramid. Humans want to fulfil not only their most basic biological or physical needs if they can get higher up in the pyramid and cover safety, belongingness, esteem and – highest in the pyramid – self actualization.

Of course, the way up in the pyramid leads through ideas. To get a level up, you need to be inventive, create opportunities, implement. And that is what sets humans apart, I guess.

On the other hand, maybe it is sometimes easier to be the cat …

The Ideamachine, the BrainStore process to generate, evaluate and implement ideas at lightning speed, is now also on twitter. Follow @ideamachine to get more background on ideas and innovation. Yay!

In our daily work with clients, we are often asked what the difference between creativity and innovation is, or when a creative invention or idea actually deserves to be called an innovation.

There are many ways to explain, but I have never found a better collection of explanations than on the blog Lateral Action by Mark McGuinness, a creativity and innovation consultant. He actually took a short article by cartoonist Hugh McLeods blog gapingvoid and has peppered it with his own thoughts.

It makes for great reading and really helped me with the very important distinction between our inner force (Creativity) and the (hopefully) successful result of this creativity (Innovation).

If indeed we can harness creativity and ideas and develop them in a way so they can become truly great ideas with additional value, then, and only then, the result is innovation. And then it is more than just the buzzword many use today without really knowing what it is all about.

By the way, Hugh McLeod also has coined the expression “Create or Die” which I find to be very appropriate for our current economical times.

For the start of 2009, here is an organisation that is truly inspiring and important: All Day Buffet is an incubator for social innovation. They connect, develop and launch purpose-driven ventures. Last October they organised “The Feast”, a conference for social innovators. They also do a lot of work in New Orleans, which will become the Capital for Social Innovation thanks to the fact that after Hurricane Katrina everything had to be built there from scratch, and a lot of people took this as a wake-up-call to reinvent how things can be done. The next Feast conference, is, infact, taking place in New Orleans on February 6, 2009, so hurry there if you are a purpose driven entrepreneur or just interested in seeing exciting projects that deal with social innovation.

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!

Where our hands brought us to
In the course of history, human beings have changed the world as no other species. Apart from our intelligence, our creativity and our mind, human tools are mostly our two hands. They are the ones executing our intellectual superiority!
Dolphins form the cognitive spearhead in the animal kingdom. Where else would be those cute water mammals today if they had been able to use their resources and to craft tools with their hand-like fins?

Handcraft in the computer age
A modern design studio uses a mixture of precise handcraft and modern computer technique. Black-and-white and color sketches still are done by hand with pen and paper. Once scanned, they can be refined and changed on the computer with an electronic stylus before the drawings of front back and side are processed by the modelers. A team of „sculptors“ then starts to create a clay model.

IdeaFinding by hand
If hands are involved in intuitive idea finding methods, they supply our brain with very many inputs. They boost brain associations in search of new ideas. They are construed to the activation of the unconscious, of knowledge you would not think of. This method is supposed to leave dreary routines. Idea finding by hand activates the potential of entire groups and forms the basis of the following compression phase of the handmade ideas.