Fresh Takes on Innovation

After our very interesting project in Kuala Lumpur in December where we generated ideas on how to make this world a planet of entrepreneurs, we are now in Africa with the UNECA (UN Economic Commission for Africa) and the African Union.

The Conference lasts for three days and looks for ways how R&D in Africa can be boosted and collaboration North-South and South-South can be increased.

BrainStores task is to develop 15 - 20 ideas with the conference participants, who are members of Parliament of African States, Scientists, delegates of UNECA and other UN Organisations as well as representatives of other organisations and associations.

To read more, visit www.uneca.org/sciencewithafrica

We are having a great time here and are impressed with the diversity, hospitality and positive spirit of this wonderful continent.

This Pipe takes the BrainStore Blog, passes it thru a Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr for Inspirations. The photos appear in date order.

Clone the “BrainStore Blog Inspiration” pipe and fit them to your interests. And even begin to use flickr.

Pipes is a free online service from yahoo that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. Learn more…

Lift08 is a three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies. Entrepreneurs, investors, and private sector professionals gather in Geneva to talk about tomorrow’s most important trends.

A small delegation of our brains is at Lift08. Their workshop this afternoon, will provide an insight into Industrial IdeaProduction, highlighting the different steps «manufacturing - proto-industralization - industrialization - digitalization – virtualization» along the model of the world’s first IdeaFactory BrainStore.

We are looking forward to an interesting discussion with the participants.

We’re having a very exciting pre-Christmas season this year. After celebrating our first branch office in Frankfurt only 2 weeks ago, a delegation of BrainStore staff is - as I am writing - constructing a mobile idea factory in the Kuala Lumpur Conference Center.

This morning, as the 3rd Global Knowledge Conference - better known as GK3 - will open its gates, our idea machine will start operating. Together with 120 Young Social Entrepreneurs from all over the world - and with the assistance of some 2′000 conference participants - we will produce ideas on how to make this planet a world of entrepreneurs by 2020.

We’re here since Saturday for last minute preparations - by now we know our way around the KL shopping malls (they’re huge!) and IKEA. But our favourite view are the Petronas Towers - simply stunning.

Conference participants have started arriving in the last 24 hours - the place is filling up and there’s a definite buzz. We’re slightly jetlagged and exhausted, but definitely excited about tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted!

This is propably the most high tech bar in the whole world. The IBar finds out which drink you’re having by using sensors that calculate the glass shape and then link it to the content of the glass. So if you drink a prosecco, the IBar will recognize that because you won’t usually have a whiskey on the rocks in a similarly shaped glass.

So what’s happening, I ask myself, if you’re drinking a cosmopolitan… How will the bar recognize that you’re not having a Martini? Will the IBar identify it because of the customer’s gender? Men don’t usually drink cosmopolitans, or do they now? What if the guest is a gay man or a female whiskey amateur?

But experts say that within a few years we’ll be using it to pay for our drink by simply placing a credit card on it. They also say the interactive device will be able to upload pics and videos from your mobile to show off to other bar guests in the same way. Plus punters will be able to flick through food menues, special drinks offers and jukebox tracks on the multitouch bar surface.

The first ever iBar was this week installed at London’s swanky Soho nightclub 24.

When working with individuals who are not trained in creative problem solving techniques, you need to work with a variety of methods and triggers. One of the fun and efficient tools we invented at BrainStore is the BrainRace. For a specific question - e.g. “what would be a great new claim for this new coffee machine” a variety of subquestions is generated (e.g. “claims that appeal to wiches”, “claims that sound warm”, “claims that are scary” etc.).

Then, the participants get a clipboard and a form with ten lines to write down 10 ideas. Loud music is played, and the participants write down 10 (legible) suggestions on their form. When they have 10 suggestions, they have to run a defined parcours (about 50 meters) as fast as they can, until they reach the “control table” where their form is checked (are there 10 ideas? are they legible?).

If everything is fine, they get an “OK” stamp on their form and they get a second form, where they write another 10 suggestions.

Whenever there is a BrainRace going on in our IdeaFactory, a lot of the staff come down to our great yard (where this exercise usually takes place) and cheer for the participants.

What happens during BrainRace? The Brain actually shuts down, people focus on the competition and thus write down the first ideas that come to mind. This way, we collect subconcious and silly inspirations that can be very useful when later combining these inspirations to ideas.

BrainRace always is a highlight at every CreativeTeam and is a lot of fun as well as a good wake-up exercise in the morning or after lunch.

The age of stern intellectual property rights and patent protection seems to be running out. Instead, we are witnessing research & development departments opening their books of data in order to co-create with customers, partners and even competitors. While some business leaders still try to guard their secrets, a paradigm shift has already taken place toward a ‘culture of sharing’, as labeled by Don Tapscott, head of Toronto based consultancy New Paradigm and author of the upcoming book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”.

More and more enterprises opt for more than controlled crowdsourcing. Modern business executives seek strength through mutual and highly transparent mass-collaboration. As Captain Kirk in Star Trek, they are often forced to lower thier shields so as to let in, explore and adapt alien cultures.

However, despite its growing acceptance there is still much uncertainty about a reasonable modus operandi for public participation in precious R&D projects: Which intellectual property should be made accessible to the public and which insights are better kept restricted? How to secure the continuous participation of third parties? and hence: If and how to compensate contribution?

Lots of questions to find answers to. Finding these answers is exactly what we do here at BrainStore. Any comments from the masses?

The MindLab is a specially designed room to stimulate the process of brainstorming. All walls are made of white boards which you can write on, then wipe clean and rewrite. The ultimate room for creating new ideas, no matter how much space you need and no matter how you prefer to create your ideas. If your inputs extend the vertical, no problem, write on the ceiling of the MindLab. If you want to crawl around and take your brain for a walk, no problem, start your red line in the corner on the floor. Whatever your strategies are in brainstorming, with the MindLab it’s possible.

In a short but very funny video, David Ngo tells us about his thoughts on how to achieve true innovation in design. The keyword is process. Instead of waiting for a flash of brilliance, the design process applies several steps like needfinding, brainstorming, prototyping, formgiving and critiquing in order to come up with something that is new, functional and nice to look at.

These steps are pretty close to what BrainStore has been doing for almost 18 years: collecting inspirations, compressing them into ideas and selecting the ones worth going on with.

Via Swissmiss

The Paleo-Future Blog found this engraving from the Library of Congress Archives (look here for High-Resolution Data). It’s an excellent brainstorming on flying machines from 1885.

Other findings you can explore on Paleo-Future include an article on the wireless telephone, dating from 1910 or some funny excerpts of the Closer-Than-We-Think! Comic Strips (1958-1963), depicting how the future was most certainly going to look like.