I’ve added two cool blogs to my COOL STUFF section.  They’re a yin yang combo for innovators.  They’re both of a legal bent, but from totally different points of view.  Yes, I know, legal stuff.  Bear with me here:

Patent Pending Blog:  about patents. Obviously.  This blog is a great reminder of how there’s really very little new under the sun.  It’s good, clean fun, too — who wouldn’t want to read about Harry Houdini’s Diving Suit?  And look at those gents in the illustration above.  They’re cruising around in a rolling iron yurt, discussing the state of their stock portfolios.  Think of it as a collection of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness, Antique Edition.

Business Bankruptcy Blog:  no, I don’t enjoy looking at traffic accidents.  But this is important stuff for innovators know about, because business viability and sustainability are key to getting stuff done in the world. 

I think if you make the Bankruptcy blog, VentureBlog, Feld Thoughts, and The Economist a part of your regular reading schedule, you’ll be way ahead of the new venture business curve.

I believe that a strong emphasis on personal happiness is the hallmark of an innovative culture.

Tal Ben-Shahar teaches a class at Harvard on positive psychology, and out of this class has created a nice list of principles for enabling happiness. 

Here are his flow-inducing tips:

1. Give yourself permission to be human

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account

4. Simplify!

5. Remember the mind-body connection.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible.

While his list is couched in the language of personal happiness, I
think it’s a wonderful one to keep in mind when you’re navigating your
way through the workplace.  After all, organizations are made up of
individuals, so why not apply the same principles for happiness to life at work?  It’s not as if work is really a different mode of existence from everyday life.  Or at least, it shouldn’t be.  How can we make individuals, teams, groups, and entire organizations happy in their work?  That’s when innovation starts.

Bruce Nussbaum and Seth Godin have got me thinking about some ways to "fix" air travel.  As a boy reading about medieval history, I used to wonder what it was like to have bandits on the roads.  Now we know.  The ultimate solution would be to "fix" the root causes of the hatred which drive people to blow each other up, but short of that, how might we improve the current situation?

I agree with Seth that we can do — and will have to do — a lot without getting on airplanes.  The state of world affairs is going to sell a lot of Halo systems and iSight cameras alike.  My friend Anthony Pigliacampo runs his cool startup company on Skype.  The tools are already there, and they’re going to get pushed hard.  Expect lots of innovation in this space.

But what about the airplanes?  What happens when we have to move atoms and not bits?  I just brainstormed with my buddies Ryan and Omar for three (3!) minutes and it’s clear that opportunities abound (just to be clear, and to preserve the reputations of the two gentlemen, some of these ideas (the stupid ones) are mine and mine alone) :

1. Brand Differentiation:  can an American airline step up and provide a substantially higher level of security than what government agencies can provide?  How much would you (or your company or your insurance agency) pay to reduce your flight risk?  What a great way to differentiate a brand.
2. Process Improvement: there’s a human threat on a plane, and there’s a threat from the stuff we haul on board.  Why not separate the two?  Fly bags on a second airliner.  What if FedEx picked up your bag the day of your flight and delivered it to your final destination?  Lease a laptop from Apple and automatically have one available at your final destination with all your data synched up?  I’ve had bags transported for me between hotels in Japan and it’s cool. 
3. Asset Improvement: what’s the civilian airliner equivalent of an A-10 Warthog?  Could a catastrophic incident be contained to merely dangerous?
4. Business Model Innovation:  what’s the low-end disruptive business model which utilizes small jets to ferry smaller groups of business travelers to all the places they currently go?  Reduce the size of the target.

And so on and so forth.  The current situation is unacceptable, some good thinking and some guts could make it better.

"[W]e must consider the possibility that if Design
Thinking is critical, maybe restricting it to designers and protecting
them from business people is not actually the most productive avenue to
pursue. Perhaps eliminating the need for protection by turning business
people into Design Thinkers would be more effective.

… Rather
than supplementing modern analytical management with design
sensibilities, it is time to integrate design into management practice.
The job of executives isn’t to protect designers from line management,
but to help line management become Design Thinkers. It is time for the
management discipline of Design Thinking.

To create a Design
Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in
which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a
deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm’s product
means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an
emotional and psychological level… It must create an operating environment by which line managers
experiment with new ways of delighting the customer, realizing fully
that some new ideas will fail, but that in failing these efforts have
valuable benefits. Even failed experiments help convince customers that
the company is aiming high, and the feedback will help them come up
with newer, better approaches.

…The great firms of the 21st century will be those that
recognize the goal isn’t to supplement analytics with design; it is all
about integrating design and management."

– Roger Martin

Continue reading →

BWJones, who is a card-carrying member of the Union of Unabashed Appreciators of Gearhead Gnarlyness, snapped this tasty photo above of a downhill mountain biker at work in his bike.  In addition to writing a very cool, extremely gnarly blog, Dr Jones focuses on something called metabolomics.  Fan that I am of all things meta, here’s what that means:

Metabolomics is the analysis of micromolecular networks that form the currencies and currents of life.  Every cell exists in a metabolic N-space where mixtures of intra- and
pericellular micromolecules are shaped by cell-autonomous and
non-cell-autonomous factors. No theory predicts these mixtures, partly
due to the paucity of micromolecular profile data from which a coherent
model could be crafted. Profiling with single-cell resolution in
complex tissues is essential to decoding the interactions between gene
expression and environmental signaling.

Sweet.  Now back to that bike.  Look closely at the pedal area.  Interesting, eh?  It’s missing the normal chainring and gear set.  The story gets even more interesting when you learn that bike is a Honda.  For a few years now, Honda has been evolving a fundamental re-think of the bicycle power transfer mechanism.  As is typical of their "just build it" culture, they’re using racing as the laboratory to push forward the process of iterative information creation, which is a powerful way to innovate whenever you’re at the edge of what’s known.

Honda is a master when it comes to innovating on a routine basis.  Yeah, so I’m a pro-Honda cheerleader — hey, I call ’em like I see ’em.  But from the standpoint of routine innovation, Honda is a soul mate to Google, Apple, and other great innovators.  What Honda shares with Google is the ability to routinely go back to first principles on everything it chooses to work on, no matter the market.  From a philosophical perspective, for example, I see very little difference between GMail and a Honda Ridgeline — both took a product category bereft of innovation and redefined the offering from a blank sheet of paper.  Each was a fairly radicial rethink.  For an example of a milder form of ongoing innovation, look at the parallel between a Honda Odyssey and Google Search.  Both are in the business of doing a mainstream activity — carrying people and search — but the each just do it better thant he competition, and they do so transparently and with great simplicity and elegance, so the big middle of the market loves them.

Oh, and by the way, they’re about to apply the same penchant for first principle innovation to the small jet market.  Honda, that is.  Not Google.  Yet.

Dan Pink’s latest column talks about tracking the market performance of design-thinking companies: Who’s your DADI?

My second IDEO-centric post in as many weeks!  My, how I’m violating the self-imposed house rules here at metacool!

If you’re going to be in or near Palo Alto before September 10, and if you’re at all interested in innovation, design, and business, I encourage you to check out a nice new exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center called IDEO Prototypes the Future.  It’s a great retrospective of IDEO’s work over the years, and more importantly, I think the exhibition does a marvelous job of showing our design process in action.  Innovation need not be a mysterious thing; it’s mostly the result of hard work and persistence and optimism coupled with a deep-rooted sense of optimism.  And it doesn’t hurt to have a happy group of people who love working together, either.

If I were to attend, I’d download this podcast by IDEO CEO Tim Brown to my iPod, and listen to his personal gallery walkthrough while I meandered through all the stuff on display.  The coolest part of the exhibit for me was seeing the shopping cart we did for Nightline (shown above) with the Nightline show playing behind it.  There’s a (slightly) younger Diego there building prototypes and uttering something about a "SUV shopping cart", among other things… I used to think my biggest impact on modern culture would be the bazillions of parts made off of my designs for HP inkjet printers over the years, but now I think it’s probably going to be the Nightline video, which has taught lots of people about the human-centric design process in the years since its debut.

So please check it out.  And don’t just trust my word for it (I love IDEO, so I am biased, after all) — see my friend (and fellow We Know member) Ross Mayfield’s blog for another review of the show.

July 18 update:  Robert Scoble attended the opening night on behalf of his new company PodTech (which is why I’m on this podcast) and says that the exhibit "… is freaking awesome.  If you’re a design nut, you need to see this."

"Ultimately, it is not so much the goal that we should be concerned about as much as the process
through which we attempt to achieve it. A return trip to Mars will
require that we invent many new technologies and systems, all of which
will have to perform seamlessly to ensure a safe and successful
mission. Given the amount of uncertainty involved in such an endeavor,
it is naïve to think we can sit here today and identify the date of our
first touchdown and the means by which we will get there. Instead, we
need to adopt a modular, experiment-driven approach, gradually building
and verifying the set of technologies that will be needed for such a
mission, while adapting our plans as we learn more about what
approaches have merit, and which are likely to be dead ends."
— Alan MacCormack

Here is a list of people blogging from Brainstorm.

Steve Jurvetson, who is also attending the Brainstorm conference, provided what is easily my favorite answer to Question #4, "Your most cherished value?"

I’m so happy Steve took the opportunity to talk about the Stanford d.school.  As I like to say when I’m leading classes at the d.school, what we endeavor to teach is the ability to look at the world through the eyes of a child, but matched up with an attitude of wisdom informed by a deep belief in building to think.  That’s the path to innovation.