Fresh Takes on Innovation

When BrainStore holds a creative team, we invite not only the necessary participants (clients, targets and lateral thinkers) but also a bunch of specialized freelancers who are trained for key functions during our specially designed idea finding process.

Louis de la Taille is a Paris based illustrator who was recently involved in a CreativeTeam we organized in Belgium. The talented designer has put his BrainStore experience into a brilliant comic for his blog.

Enjoy his genuine view on the event. And thank you, Louis, for letting us publish this.

Source: atravers.blogspot.com

In an article in the Evolutionary Psychology journal, Andrew and Gordon Gallup, of the State University of New York at Albany, present interesting findings of their yawning-experiments. Yawning, they conclude, cools the brain, accelerates blood circulation and thereby increases attention.

According to our hypothesis, rather than promoting sleep, yawning should antagonize sleep. It has been widely believed that yawning in the presence of others is disrespectful and a sign of boredom (e.g., witness the fact that many people cover their mouths when they yawn). However, according to our account yawning more accurately reflects a mechanism that maintains attention. Likewise, when someone yawns in a group setting as evidence for diminished mental processing efficiency, contagious yawning may have evolved to promote the maintenance of vigilance.

In an interesting article for The New Yorker, Steven Shapin reflects on the innovation hype, quoting a recently released book by David Egerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.

Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

What seperates mankind from animals is the extensive use of tools. We define ourselves through technology. But it’s more the uses of technology that characterize a society - rather than the tools and gadgets, Shapin states. Lots of inventions did not have any affect on our way of life, though when we look back, we tend to look at a sequence of breakthrough innovations, thereby constructing a biased “technology-driven-history”.

Are you interested to know who invented and created all the things that make our lives easier? From Aluminum Foil to the Zeppelin? www.about.com has a nice contribution from A-Z with details about each invention. This way you can learn that the scissors have been invented a long time ago in Egypt, that the Sandwich was an invention by John Montague

John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718 -1792) was the originator of the name sandwich. John Montagu loved to eat beef between slices of toast. Eating his “sandwich” allowed the Earl to have one hand free for card playing.
According to Infoplease Encyclopedia, John Montagu was a British politician who served as secretary of state and first lord of the admiralty, and earned great unpopularity for his charges of obscenity against John Wilkes. He presided at the admiralty during the British defeats of the American Revolution. The Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands were named after him by Capt. James Cook.

Go, learn!

The book The IdeaMachine that I wrote three years ago and was published by Wiley in German and English, is now available in Korean. The cover is a bit crazy, with an apple that has “swallowed” a goldfish. I wonder where they got this idea, but it looks very nice. The editor has changed many of the illustrations to fit the needs of Korean readers.

As an IdeaFactory, we have been talking about it for years and years, and it keeps coming up as a solution in many idea finding projects: Electronic Paper. It should have a similar look and feel as “normal” paper, but also have the ability to change and update content. Just imagine a newspaper that updates itself during the day, as events unfold and change. Pretty cool, huh?

My beloved Economist just has published an article in its technology section about the evolution of ePaper and what we can expect of it in the future. And it seems to be the case that we will pretty soon see the first applications that really work.

The Economist reflects the Lessons From Apple: Buy clever ideas, pursue simplicity, ignore focus groups and fail wisely.

Apple has no “invented here”-policy. Instead they welcome innovation from the outside. They acquire good ideas and boost their potential by adding their own twist: outstanding design, simplicity and usability. Having the courage no to listen too much to user demands is another key to come up with unexpected, clever products. Of course some products fail, but the core idea might be successfull in a second or third implementation.

The BrainStore IdeaMachine just has run exactly 1000 projects. We have developed ideas for as varied a client base as car manufacturers, producers of agricultural products, retailers, fashion brands, chemical companies, construction companies, NGO’s, Government agencies, watch companies, banks, multinationals, individuals and many many more.

What unites these clients is that they are looking for great ideas in the shortest possible time and want to have ideas that take into account the diversity and needs of all their stakeholders. On www.brainstore.com/feedback you can view 100 statements of people (clients, freelancers, partners) who have experienced what the IdeaMachine can do.

Based on the knowledge from the first 1′000 projects BrainStore has now started building custom-made in-house company IdeaMachines, allowing companies to make better use of employee and stakeholder input. The outcome: Amazing results, fast, precise and from within your organisation.

Everything that is spoken, written, shaped or painted during a BrainStore CreativeTeam has to be captured and stored, so that it can be used for further digital processing. Our minutetakers take care that everything is accurately put into the database.

They work at glass tables, which are a great help, when flipchart-input has to be transcribed: Just put the paper on the floor and read through the glass.

This little flash tool lets you make a nice flower and share it with others. Trust me, it beats an hour with your psychotherapist.