Wouldn’t it be great to work in a place where it was okay to wear a sign like this on your back?  At least when working toward evolutionary or revolutionary innovation outcomes?  I know I would like it.

This photo is from Russell Davies’s blog, and here’s how he describes it:

This is the sign on the back of those blue London ‘driver under
instruction’ buses that London Transport use to teach bus drivers how
to, er, drive buses.  It’s incredibly disarming. It would be good if someone could attach
this message to the internet and then maybe everyone would be nicer.
We’re all still learning.

Thanks Russell.  We are all still learning — especially if we’re growing.

Last week I found myself answering some routine questions around the usual "why Silicon Valley and not [insert locale here]?"

And I gave all the usual answers:  great universities, great people who come and stick around, high housing prices that make one desperate to build equity, cluster effects, and a positive (or vicious, depending on how you look at it) cycle feeding all of the above.

But I neglected to mention San Francisco.  Shame on me.  Yes, I think San Francisco, with all of its entrenched looniness and bohemian iconoclasm, is like a little innovation gallbladder injecting creative bile down into the capitalist digestive tract that is Silicon Valley.  Call it trickle down innovation, or a spark plug effect, but I truly believe that all the free thinking (and doing — lots of doing) up there makes a difference down here in the ‘burbs.

In case you doubt me, please turn your gaze to Exhibit A:

7TH ANNUAL’BYOBW‘
BIG WHEEL RACE
FREE OUTDOOR EVENT
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 8th 2007
4 PM
TOP OF LOMBARD ST, SF
BIG PEOPLE ON KID’S TOYS
NO RUBBER WHEELS
HAND-MADE PRIZES
FUN!

Wow!  Look at all this innovative stuff my friends are up to.  This is all so fun, I’ve gotta share it with you:

• Bob just shipped ArseMail.  Send one to a friend.
• Reilly was kind enough to post this crashtacular video on his magazine’s blog.  The management here at metacool recently instructed us to make dramatic cuts in the number of violent, automotive-themed videos on display, so I’m having to resort to asking my friends to post the killer videos I stumble upon.  Oh, what a pity to see a tasty Glas GT barrel rolled.  Oh, and be sure to wear your seatbelt when carving up a roadcourse in your Beetle.  Yikes — remind me never to drive a car with swing axles or a trailing arm rear suspension.  Oh wait, there’s one in my garage.  Never mind…
• Brian is starting to market Golaces.  I love this product, and have them on my "New Beetle" Converse shoes.  They turn any lace shoe in to a slip-on, and they’re a promotional marketer’s dream.  Brian is a former student of mine over at the d.school, so this stuff makes me especially happy.
• Russell is starting a conference called Interesting2007, scheduled for June.  Where does he get the energy to do everything he does?  And how is there enough time in the day to do it all?  And with such panache?  Good on you, Russell.  I want to go — sounds like there will be good cakes served.

How cool is it to live in a time where everyone can have a website to show what they’re up to?  Life is good.

Above is a tasty brew I stumbled upon in the course of some world travels.  Fermented brew plus Kona coffee.  Who knew?  It tastes pretty good, actually… like good coffee.  Iced coffee, that is.

You can either invent something new to the world (hard to do), or you can borrow liberally to build a better mousetrap (easier to do).  Taking an ingredient out of its original context is a good way to innovate, and it can result in some potent outcomes:

• Yield-management practices from the hoteling industry applied to air travel changes the way tickets are priced and sold
• Your chocolate sticking out of my peanut butter
• A big motor squeezed in to a small chassis (the BMW 2002) creates a new category of car, the sports sedan
• Cato and Nash
• A commodity hard drive married up to a Walkman-style player gives us — you guessed it! — the iPod
• Tango and Cash
• The caffeinated doughnut

That’s a very short list — thousands of innovative products have come about from taking two known but separate ingredients and kapow! slam! zoom!  putting them together in a way that creates value.  Slamming, smashing things together comes from making cross-industry connections.  And in an interesting way, it’s a good strategy for reducing risk.  While unknown in the context of your competitive environment, something like yield management science or Cash or a big car motor is something already tested and proven and evolved by others.  So you’re less likely to end up with arrows in your back.

Who wants more risk than necessary, anyhow?  Mix it up.

Hi.  Lots of great name ideas streaming in for the "KGB" part of CIA-KGB.  Here’s a sample:

• Keep Getting Better
• Killer Great Branding
• Knowledge Generating Beauty
• Kindling Gregarious Behavior
• Know Go Bot

I like ’em all.  What I’ve learned is that the name needs to be of parallel structure to CIA, which stands for "Creating Infectious Action".  If you have any more ideas, let me know.  We’ll decide the name soon.

A must-read about Toyota: From 0 to 60 to World Domination

How does Toyota win?  By coming an evidence-based culture with an eye to the long view.  By investing in incremental innovations to build long-term brand equity, and investing the payback in revolutionary innovations like the Prius.  By paying attention to technical details and to the humans who design and build the cars and those who service and drive them.

It seems simple, right?  Realization and implementation are so tough.

I love this post from Guy Kawasaki:  Is a Business Plan Necessary?

For all but the most incremental of innovation efforts, a comprehensive business plan is shot in the dark.   You’re guaranteed to be 100% wrong.  So why try to be 100% right and successful in planning a business venture, when what the humans who will make or break you really only care about something which is 70% "good" execution?  Don’t get me wrong — a business plan is really valuable as an exercise in logical thinking.  But to mistake it for an exercise in producing a tangible reality is to build castles in the air. 

Don’t waste your time.  Build to think.  Just do it.