In a recent BBC News article Technology reporter Jonathan Fildes talks about an extraordinary experiment conducted by Professor Sugata Mitra from India.

10 years ago, he started researching the way children teach themselves and each other with the use of computers and completely without teachers. The experiment started in a slum in India, where Mitra put a computer into the wall of his office and surveyed the children of the slum interacting with the machine.

Today, he has introduced similar experiments in many countries, with great success.

I very much loved the following part of the article:

“I wanted to test the limits of this system,” he said. “I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.

“I told them: ‘there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won’t be surprised if you don’t understand anything’.”

Two months later, he returned.

Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.

“Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease – we’ve understood nothing else’.”

Kids apparently can teach themselves pretty much everything without adult interference, but one thing was highly interesting throughout all experiments: The kids need to be in teams or groups, gathering around a computer. The experiment won’t work as well when a kid just sit in front of one computer.

The power of self-organisation and of teamwork is truly amazing.

When talking about Innovation and the crucial factors for a company becoming more innovative, there are three key ingredients we have discovered need to be in balance:

Obviously, you need a framework or process to make sure that great ideas can be captured and also actively developed within the organisation. There are a number of processes or frameworks, and to pick the right one depends on your current needs, size, culture and other factors, but it is clear that in order to create great content you need to have an underlying system that can be followed and understood by everyone in the organisation.

No matter how fantastic the stuff is that you create using that framework or process, you also need two other key ingredients: Awareness and an enabled team. Both ingredients are cultural and are crucial for your innovation success.

Let’s first talk about enabling, because it seems more obvious. You need to enable each individual in the organisation to use the framework or process and to be able to take on the right roles at the right times. There are people providing the process, others preparing the different steps or stages that lead to implemented ideas and ultimately to innovation, and the ones that participate in different process steps.

It is important that each individual on the team understands what their role(s) can be and what their responsibilites are when taking on that role. For instance, a person that participates in a process should know that his or her ideas are welcome, no matter how small, silly or indadequate they may seem at that moment. At the same time, people providing the process should know that they should refrain from coming up with ideas themselves, but rather provide the right framework in which the idea community can come up with suggestions. This provides a very agile environment in which ideas can grow.

Of course, enabling also involves just plain learning about the tools that are used in the process, how to use them and how to contribute a maimum of results in the process.

With awareness, the story is rather different and not so obvious. In our work during the last 21 years we have met many organisations that had the need to create great content, and they also provided the enabling factors for the team to make use of them, but somehow the ideas that were generated in the process were not implemented, or just the most boring ideas were implemented, or they were implemented halfheartedly. What had happened? Why did these teams not take action on the great ideas they had created in the process?

It took a long time until we realized that these teams were missing the third key ingredient: The awareness that indeed, if they wanted to innovate, they had to be prepared for drastic change. They needed to see that it was not enough to come up with great ideas, they also had to overcome the angst of taking action on those ideas by implementing them. This third, very human factor, is crucial in achieving real innovation culture that does not just involve processes and skills, but also an open mind and a sense of urgency for change.

Whenever we work with companes who are looking to create innovation, even if they “just” order an idea for a new name, we work hard to make sure that all three key ingredients are a part of the process we go through together, because only then innovation will get implemented and lead to success in the market.

Did you ever ask yourself why key players in a market are – often fairly quickly – replaced by unexpected, sometimes even unknown competitors? How can it be that big companies, even whole industries, miss big trends, fail to invest in them, and go the way of the dinosaur? The answer is likely: Because their business model was disrupted.

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, distinguishes between incremental and disruptive innovation. Incremental innovation improves a product in an predictable, steady way: Every new version is a little bit better, a little bit more effective, a little bit cheaper. Remember the bulky CRT monitors we had on our desks? Every year, their resolution became a little bit higher, and the screen size a little bit bigger.

Disruptive innovation is not a little bit better – it is radically different. It is so different that regular customers don’t want them in the beginning. These products are often produced by small companies and enter the market in a state that is not competitive for the existing markets. In their search for customers these companies find new, unexpected markets. For example, the technology for LCD flatscreens has been around for a while – but to produce an LCD flatscreen fifteen years ago would have been too expensive for regular screen customers. What did the producers do? They looked for other markets – manufacturers of small devices such as handheld games, musical instruments, or car dashboards, and continually improved their product until it completely replaced the existing technology (or do you still have a bulky screen on your desk?).

The question is: Why don’t the disrupted companies react to the new technology? Don’t they realize what is happening to them? Christensen says, they do – but the decision to bet on the “new horse” would mean to neglect the needs of their current customers: Those that expect a little bit more, a little bit better – not different. They follow their core markets, listen to their core customers, until it is too late to change to the new technology. To turn a company (or an industry) around to adapt is possible, but incredibly difficult, because leaders at the same time have to fight internal resistance and prioritize against their key customers.

At BrainStore, we can help you become one of the innovators – for example through a targeted innovation training or a customized idea event for your company.

A few weeks ago, BrainStore organised a conference about the future for one of our clients. The goal was to give 120 people from this organisation the chance to reflect on the future, to get a sense of urgency and to trigger a desire for immediate action. Because, believe it or not, the Future is approaching with considerable speed, and as companies and organisations we need to ready ourselves for it.

To achieve this goal, BrainStore created an exhibit about the future at the Idea Factory in Biel and invited the participants to go through this exhibit, to write down statements about the future that are relevant to the company, and, based on those statements, to draft future scenarios for the company. Based on the best-rated scenario, they formulated commitments for the different departments of the company. The participants left the Idea Factory with a clear sense of what the future will bring and what they need to do as an organisation and as individuals to be prepared for this future.

Of course, we cannot share any outcome of this project nor our clients name, but what we can and want to show to you are a few of the 11 different stations we created to get people thinking about the future:

Waste not, want not

What participants saw: Lots and lots of trash.Purpose: Innovation creates value. Innovation also creates waste. Everything that humans ever produce eventually becomes trash. What, then, are we to do as consumers? As designers? Europeans generate 71 billion kilos of packaging waste each year. Who participants talked to: Packaging Designer Richard Williams.

The Future Forecast

What participants saw: Nine talking heads on nine different monitors. Purpose: The world’s leading thinkers have a lot to say about the future. How do you know who’s right? In this room, you will hear aligned and contradictory voices speaking from digital podiums. Who participants talked to: No one, but they listened to nine different futurologists and their predictions about the future. It was unnerving.

The New Producers

What participants saw: Two inventions by young students Purpose: To show that young people are not waiting for grownups to create solutions for them – they create their own solutions. Who participants talked to: Two design students from Germany who had created the prototype a product generator that comes up with a product based on different indicators from your body, and a team of highschool students who had created a solar kiosk.

Minus 10, Plus 10

What participants saw: In form of a tunnel, familiar objects that didn’t exist 10 years ago and fictious headlines we might see during the next ten years. Purpose: To show people how quickly the future approaches.

Perception is Everything

What participants saw:A movie called “perception is everything” Purpose: To show that good things can have a bad effect and vice versa: A movie featuring provocative imagery from our world. Economy, commerce, conflict, and social tensions all clamor to be interpreted and understood. Still, not everything is as it seems. What if bad is good and good is bad?

The Real Deal

What participants saw: Eight real, ordinary people from greater London, ranging in age from 11 to nearly eighty.Purpose: To get participants to talk to real consumers, aged from 11 to 90, who had travelled to Biel as a group that had just met 2 days before. The bonding experience for the group was a big important part of the group meeting with the exhibit participants.

After the immersion exercise, the participants then went through a BrainStore Idea Event to create specific ideas on how to act as a company to be ready for the future. They formulated commitments and rated them, creating a specific action plan for the next years.

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!