Fresh Takes on Innovation

The idea factory is deserted. Our staff and the blog team are taking a summer break. We will be back with Fresh Takes on Innovation on the 3rd of August.

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has announced the winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). 1096 US and 595 foreign entries from 29 countries competed for the 81 gold, silver and bronze prizes for design excellence in products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts.

Look at all the winners and the Business Week article about the awards.

Assignment Zero a crowdsourced media project reporting on crowdsourcing itself has come to a close. The goal was to “have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.”

Over 80 interviews and feature stories have been produced by a crowd of voulonteer journalists, pro and amateur. They started with a list of topics, broken down in assignments: interviews, research, writing. Each assignment was either open for everyone to contribute and edit at any time or it was an exclusive assignment one could apply for.

The experiment can be judged as a “highly satisfying failure”, as crowdsourcing expert and author Jeff Howe states in a WIRED article:

In the 12 weeks the project was open to the public, it suffered from haphazard planning, technological glitches and a general sense of confusion among participants. […] A mutual embrace of experimentation runs throughout all the interviews, a cheerful admission that the kinds of collaborative efforts enabled by the internet are both powerful and also in their infancy.

A recently released study by the Trinity College of Dublin shows that a quarter of all Britons do not know their own landline number while as little as a third can recall more than three birthdays of their immediate family.

People rely on their cell phones, when it comes to memorizing numbers and dates. Especially younger people, who grew up with the technology tend to outsource memory from their brains to their cells. Don’t use that grey muscle and it will shrink.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

When searching for inspirations and ideas, don’t stick to words: You should also sketch and paint and don’t forget to go 3D! BrainShaping is a creative tool we use in almost every creative team. Using play dough to shape your imaginations is great fun. It’s a change for the mind and an exercise that loosens the atmoshpere among the participants. And hey: when do managers and CEOs have the chance to build whicked and colorful figures without restraints?

A BrainShaping of 20 minutes results in an exposition of quaint and funny figures and prototypes. People are asked to annotate their thoughts and concepts on little flags and to place this flag on their object for better recognition. The 3D material is part of the inspiration material, that is used in later steps of the ideation process, and each single word taken from the flags is entered to our inspiration database of the project.

Check out Jeff Hawkins’ TED-Talk about the brain. There is no reasonable brain theory yet - but Hawkins has some clues where to start. Intelligence, he claims, is not defined by behaviour but by prediction. Our brain is constantly making predictions about our enviroment. It stores sequential patterns and recalls them constantly. That’s what makes you know the end of a sentence before you heard or read it as a whole.

I am thinking about, how Hawkins’ views can be applied to brainstorming. Are we breaking up the straight forward recollection of sequential patterns? We play tricks on the brain by creating exceptional situations. We try to stimulate it so that associations and connotations bubble out of the neocortex. Try doing this with a supercomputer. A.I. still has a long way to go.

A tiny device that generates power out of vibrations has been developed by scientists of the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton, Hampshire. Wobbling magnets inside the device induce an electromagnetical field. 30% of the kinetic energy can be turned into electrical power.

Like a chronometer that is powered by your arm swing, the sugar-cube-sized generator could serve energy to a wide range of low-power devices such as medical implants or sensors. Future applications could include remote controls, cellphones or cameras.

Source: New ScientistTech

What is Creativity? Why do some people have it, and some not? Can it be triggered in every person? Not all the answers, but at least three very intreaguing principles for Creativity are offered by the Critical Thinking Web, a site dedicated to critical thinking, logic and creativity. You needn’t agree with all of the principles, but they are far better than anything I have read in a long time:

• New ideas are composed of old elements
• Not all new ideas are on a par
• Creativity is enhanced by the ability to detect connections between ideas

Mice that have undergone transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) showed growth of new neurons in their brains. Scientists of the City University of New York used a magnetic coil to induce a magnetic field into the brain tissue of the rodents.

TMS, if successfully applied to humans, could help treating memory decline caused by deseases or age.

Check out the article in the NewScientists magazine.

In other brain science news: A portable device using TMS to treat depressions.

Zurich is one of the host cities of the European Football (Soccer) Championship in 2008. The motto of the city for the Euro08 is “we live Zurich”. The city has now launched an idea competition where the citizens of Zurich can suggest activities and actions that should be done during the championship to make Zurich an attractive city for all visitors.