Here’s a cool idea:  hold an eight-hour hackathon for your offering or business.  Get a lot done.  Innovate.  Hackathoninnovation, in other words.

The people over at FeedBurner did this recently, and got a whole bunch of stuff done.  Sure, this is easier done if your offering is a piece of web software, but I’d argue that the spirit of a hackathon can be applied to everything from your corner Dairy Queen to the Pentagon.  It’s the innovation equivalent of working an extra weekend shift on the manufacturing line to get it cleared of WIP.  It’s all about turning off the WiFi, switching off Outlook, closing the meeting calendar, and getting stuff done.  It’s about really focusing on the important stuff, rather than on the urgent or routine.

Racers get the idea of a hackathoninnovation — they have to do it all the time.

What could you hack today?

I’m starting to write another column for BusinessWeek Online, this time on something around the subject of happiness and innovative behavior.

I need your help. 

What are your thoughts on this subject?  What stories do you have for or against?  Please comment below or drop me a line.

Many thanks.  Mahalo.

It’s always interesting to see the kinds of complementary products that spring up and form the ecosystem around successful offerings such as the iPod Shuffle. 

Here’s one you probably didn’t expect:  iBelieve

"For the longest time ideation was about throwing out as many ideas as
you can.  We’ve realized pretty quickly that it’s really not about a
bunch of ideas, it’s about really good strategy, alignment and
business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding… the ideas are
no longer just about the product, they’re about new business models and
how you go to market, and what’s your supply chain like."

– Sam Lucente

Now, some of my best friends are in the venture capital industry, but Dave Hornik’s creative connection between Narcissistic Personality Disorder, your average VC, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is just too funny to pass up:  VCitis

The airline Song is dead.  As Seth notes on his blog, Song was a superficial attempt to create a new airline with a new value proposition.  The superficial part was that it was more about the "brand is who we say we are" approach than the much more real "brand is what we do" approach.

The cool part of Seth’s post is his insight that this event can be looked upon as a total failure, or as an opportunity to learn.  If you can do the latter, and treat everything as an experiment to be learned from, no matter if the outcome is "good" or "bad", then you’re well on your way to a process of creating ventures that starts to look a lot like design thinking.

"If you have any talent, or any occupation that delights you, do it, and do it to the hilt.  Don’t ask why, or what difficulties you may get into."

– Richard Feynman

My colleague Tom Kelley is writing about innovation this week over at Fast Company Now.   

You can hear a podcast of on interview Tom did on NPR about his new book titled The Ten Faces of Innovation.  If you’re at all interested in becoming a better innovator, the podcast is 45 minutes very well spent.  The book is worth your while, too!

This past Monday was a Good Day for the Stanford "d.school".  Monday was the day it became the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.  Plattner’s incredibly generous and visionary donation means that all of us at the Institute can now really focus on our primary mission of training leaders who use design thinking to solve big challenges.

The Plattner Institute was rung in with a big celebration at Stanford’s Frost Amphiteater, attended by such luminaries as Plattner (shown above), Stanford President John Hennessy, Professor David Kelley, and Executive Director George Kembel.  As Kelley remarked to the assembled crowd, "Bravo, Hasso!"