Included in TIME's 50 Best Inventions of 2009 is a device developed by one of our own, Wisconsin Doctoral Student - Adam Wilson. The device monitors brain activity through electrodes allowing someone to "tweet" by just thinking. Read more here

It has long been debated whether or not marijuana smoking enhances creativity. My post here is not to argue for one side or another, but to present two studies that find opposing results.

The first article from Psychiatric Quarterly did a study on 316 college students who reported their marijuana use (or not) measuring creativity, authoritarianism, anxiety, social desirability, and acquiescence. They found that With increased frequency of marijuana usage, creativity and 'adventuresomeness' scores increased significantly, while authoritarianism scores decreased significantly.

The second article from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found very different results. However, they only tested 16 college males, and were actually given cookies with THC or placebo before they were tested. This raises some skepticism about their results from their small sample size, and whether or not subjects should be tested while high or sober.

There are numerous more articles out there, and no conclusion has been reached. Decide for yourself!

A few days ago I came across an article in Business Week that discussed the relationship between failure and innovation. The article was written by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón of Maddock Douglas- a company that invents, brands, and markets products "for companies driven by innovation."

The article not only discusses the fact that failure is often a prerequisite to innovation, but also offers advice to employees who want to get their co-workers and companies on-board with their innovative ideas.

Check out this encouraging article: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/nov2009/ca20091124_903257.htm

Since we are going to be talking about innovation clusters in class this coming week, I thought people might find this interactive cluster map interesting. It shows innovation clusters all around the world and then categorizes them based on momentum/growth and diversity. You can also browse based on region alone. Enjoy!

Given our recent discussion on Wikipedia, I thought this article from today's Wall Street Journal might be interesting. It seems even Wikipedia is not immune to bureaucracy and convoluted rules systems.

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur.

Wikipedia is extremely popular with the public, but not so much with the volunteers who run the site. They're quitting, raising questions about the future of Wikipedia, says WSJ.com Senior Technology Editor Julia Angwin.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to "the sum of all human knowledge," the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.

Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit venture, acknowledge the declines, but believe they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors. "We need sufficient people to do the work that needs to be done," says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation. "But the purpose of the project is not participation."

Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

"Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment," contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."

Wikipedia's struggles raise questions about the evolution of "crowdsourcing," one of the Internet era's most cherished principles. Crowdsourcing posits that there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations.

But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world's largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule -- and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp.

“ I have an entry on Wiki on some stuff that happened to occur in the 1500s. Some of the commentary/corrections that were done were most helpful in filling out the article, but the amount of stuff that one had to go through hardly justifies the effort when it is volunteer time that I am contributing out of my life. ”

"People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. "Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It's too many cooks in the kitchen."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who is chairman emeritus of the foundation, acknowledges participation has been declining. But he says it still isn't clear to him what the "right" number of volunteer "Wikipedians" should be. "If people think Wikipedia is done," he says, meaning that with three million articles it is hard to find new things to write about, "that's substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."

Mr. Wales says his top priority is to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia's articles. He's pushing a new feature that would require top editors to approve all edits before they are displayed on the site. The idea is to prevent the kind of vandalism that in January declared Sen. Edward Kennedy's death months before his actual passing.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia, which is written and edited by voluteers.

Mr. Wales, a onetime options trader in Chicago, founded Wikipedia in 2001 amid frustration that his effort to create an online encyclopedia was hampered by the slow pace of copy-editing and getting feedback from experts. He saw Wikipedia as a side project -- a radical experiment with software that allows multiple people to edit the same Web page. The term "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word for fast.

The collaborative software fostered a unique form of online governance. One of Wikipedia's principles is that decisions should be made by consensus-building. One of the few unbreakable rules is that articles must be written from a neutral point of view. Another is that anyone should be able to edit most articles. One policy serves as a coda: "Ignore all rules."

The Wikimedia Foundation employs a staff of 34, mostly in San Francisco, to run the site's computers, guide its planning and serve as its public face. In its fiscal year ended in June, it reported expenses of $5.6 million. It funds its operations mostly through donations. Earlier this month, it launched a campaign to raise $7.5 million from users.

Wikipedia's popularity has strained its consensus-building culture to the breaking point. Wikipedia is now a constant target for vandals who spray virtual graffiti throughout the site -- everything from political views presented as facts to jokes about their friends -- and spammers who try to insert marketing messages into articles.

In 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote about his own Wikipedia write-up, which unjustly accused him of murder. The resulting bad press was a wake-up call. Wikipedians began getting more aggressive about patrolling for vandals and blocking suspicious edits, according to Andrew Lih, a professor at the University of Southern California and a regular Wikipedia contributor.

That helped transform the site into a more hierarchical society where volunteers had to negotiate a thicket of new rules. Wikipedia rolled out new antivandalism features, including "semiprotection," which prevents newcomers from editing certain controversial articles.

"It was easier when I joined in 2004," says Kat Walsh, a longtime contributor who serves on Wikimedia's board of trustees. "Everything was a little less complicated.... It's harder and harder for new people to adjust."

In 2008, Wikipedia's editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to data compiled by social-computing researcher Ed Chi of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Nina Paley, a New York cartoonist who calls herself an "information radical," had no luck when she tried to post her syndicated comic strips from the '90s. She does not copyright their artwork but instead makes money on ancillary products and services, making her perfect for Wikipedia's free-content culture.

It took her a few days to decipher Wikipedia's software."I figured out how to do it with this really weird, ugly code," she says. "I went to bed feeling so proud of myself, and I woke up and found it had been deleted because it was 'out of scope.'"

A Wikipedia editor had decided that Ms. Paley's comics didn't meet the criteria for educational art. Another editor weighed in with questions about whether she had copyright permission for the photo of herself that she uploaded. She did.

Ultimately, it was decided that Ms. Paley's comics were suitable for the site. Samuel Klein, a veteran Wikipedian who serves on the board of trustees, intervened and restored her contributions. Mr. Klein says experiences like Ms. Paley's happen too often. Mr. Klein says that the Wikipedia community needs to rein in so-called deletionists -- editors who shoot first and ask questions later.

The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seeking to increase participation, but that growing the overall number of participants isn't its main focus.

"The early days were a gold rush," says Ms. Gardner, the foundation's executive director. "They attracted lots and lots of people, because a new person could write about anything." The encyclopedia isn't finished, she says, but the "easy work" of contributing is done.

To attract new recruits to help with the remaining work, Ms. Gardner has hired an outreach team, held seminars to train editors in overlooked categories, and launched task forces to seek ways to increase participation in markets such as India. The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site, slated to go live in the next few months, that aims to make editing easier for contributors who aren't computer-savvy.

She says increasing contributor diversity is her top goal. A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

Much of the task of making Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers falls to Frank Schulenburg, the foundation's head of public outreach. An academic, he began contributing to articles about French philosophers on the German Wikipedia in 2005.

"The community has created its own language, and that is certainly a barrier to new participants," he says.

One of Mr. Schulenburg's first projects, called the "bookshelf," is an effort to gather the basic rules for contributing to Wikipedia in one place for newcomers. He hopes the new multimedia bookshelf will be the Wikipedia community's equivalent of a high-school civics textbook.

In Germany, to recruit more academics, Mr. Schulenburg had devised an educational program called Wikipedia Academy. In July, he conducted the first such program in the U.S., for scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. His goal was to entice the scientists to contribute.

Wikipedia already attracts lots of academics, but science isn't its strength. By its own internal grading standards, the article on Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of microbiology, for example, is lower in quality than its article on James T. Kirk, the fictional "Star Trek" captain.

For the July event, Mr. Schulenburg got about 100 scientists and NIH staffers to spend the day listening to arguments about why they should bother contributing to Wikipedia, despite the fact that it doesn't pay, won't help them get a grant or even win them applause from their peers.

His audience was skeptical about the lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors. "One of my concerns is not knowing who the editor is," said Lakshmi Grama, a communications official from the National Cancer Institute.

Several participants started contributing to Wikipedia right after the event. The NIH says it is considering whether to adopt formal policies to encourage its staff to contribute while at work.

Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At this year's meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of the demographic shifts.

"The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying," said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on "smarter metrics" such as article quality.

He said he disagreed with dire views about the project's future. "I don't expect to see Wikipedia follow the rule of any curve or any projection."

Read this interesting article by Ajit Kambil, G. Bruce Friesen and Arul Sundaram on how customer co-creation can only be successful if properly managed:

How Customer Co-Creation is the Future of Business

"We live in an era of rapid innovation." I'm sure you've heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

An article in BusinessWeek Magazine seeks to explain America's economic woes in the past decade due to a lack of innovation, that Michael Mandel says, merely got hung-up for a while until costs can be reduced, margins increased, and breakthrough innovations happen outside of core IT.

The computer world is always searching for the next technological breakthrough that will again revolutionize the industry. The innovation that seems to show the most promise today is cloud computing. What exactly is cloud computing? Like its name, it is not easy to pin down. Fundamentally, though, it is an emerging computing technology that uses the internet and remote servers to maintain data and applications. Through cloud computing, people and businesses can use applications without installation and access their personal files from any computer with internet access.

Cloud computing can allow for greater efficiency as it centralizes storage, memory, processing, and bandwidth. Users can save money on infrastructure and applications. Clouds offer great flexibility – you only need access to the internet to reach all your files. You can expand your computing capabilities at the drop of a hat and contract them again just as easily. End-users and start-up companies can use cloud technology to get inexpensive access to sophisticated technology. The opportunities for innovation appear endless for both large companies to offer platforms and smaller firms to provide cost-effective access to their applications.

At the same time, cloud computing comes with some real risks. By outsourcing data storage, security risks increase. Not having data on internal servers means that you are at the mercy of someone else. If their system goes down, you cannot access your information. Finally, there is the possibility of becoming locked in with one company due to technological incompatibilities. These are all very real dangers associated with a technology that is in its infancy.

Is cloud computing going to change the world? Is it going to be a good tool to have in your toolbox? Only time will tell. Read more in a recent Economist article.

Companies often must walk a thin line between great, new innovation and huge, expensive failure. This is a really interesting article from the Harvard Business Review that is a must read for anyone thinking of introducing a new product or idea. Read the article here: http://www.dallascap.com/pdfs/KnowingAWinningBusinessIdeaWhenYouSeeOne.pdf

This is an interesting article from this month's edition of Fast Company. Kerstin Hanson is a Business Innovation Manager for the Volvo Group in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is a short article, but gives an example of how the love of innovation can lead to a great permanent job! Check out the article here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/fast-talk-motivate-with-measurements.html

A great find on interesting stories of products created through accidents or unique origins. A few of the stories we have discussed in class already, such as the microwave and post-it notes. But the article includes penicillin, the bra, teflon, and more. It provides a simple description of the item and the story behind its accidental or so conception. 

this is a really good video my marketing TA showed my discussion last semester. It is basically a series of astounding statistics about the population, globalization, technology improvements and links between them and more. It is about 5 minutes and worth watching, for interests sake. It never explicitly states what this all means, but leaves it ambiguous for the viewer to decide or engage in discourse. 

For many firms, innovation is a critical driver of growth and profitability. Excellent examples of firms that have grown and profited via innovation include 3M, Apple, and LG. Traditionally, the innovation process at most firms has largely operated as an internal function in which the planning, research, development, launch, and marketing of a new product is largely conducted by its employees. While this internal approach has produced many successes (e.g., Post-It Notes, iPhone, LED television), most new products developed via this traditional approach fail to deliver on their objectives. Thus, an increasing number of firms, including 3M, IBM, and Procter & Gamble are supplementing their traditional internal approach with external innovation efforts that incorporate the know-how and wisdom of millions of individuals across the globe.

This externalization initiative can come in many forms, ranging from bringing lead-users more actively into idea generation activities to turning the entire new product development process over to one’s customers. An intriguing middle ground is the recent rise of on-line innovation brokers such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and IdeaConnection. In essence, these organizations serve as middlemen between firms seeking solutions (i.e., seekers) to specific innovation challenges and individuals interested in offering solutions (i.e., solvers) to these challenges. On average, online innovation brokers claim that their services solve nearly half the challenges posed by seeking firms. Thus, a growing number of firms across several industries (e.g., pharmaceutical, chemical, textiles, packaged goods) are employing these brokers. For example, the challenges currently posted on InnoCentive’s website include firms seeking innovative solutions for new uses for cotton, more sustainable packaging materials, and new insulin delivery systems for patients in developing countries.

Online innovation brokering services such as InnoCentive are a great example of the opportunities afforded by globalization. These opportunities are particularly exciting because they provide potential benefits to both firms seeking solutions with their innovation activities as well individuals capable of providing these solutions:

Benefits to Seekers

Access to an expanded knowledge base. Innovation brokers provide seeking firms with access to the wisdom and know-how of thousands of individuals, many of whom are well qualified experts in one ore more scientific disciplines. For example, InnoCentive currently has more than 160,000 registered solvers (across over 80 countries), 40% of whom have a PhD. Thus, there is a good chance that one or more of these experts will be able to generate a suitable solution to almost any innovation challenge.

Low cost solutions. The recruitment and hiring of a scientist or an engineer into a firm can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in addition to the cost of his or her salary and bonus. Moreover, once hired, employees require substantial administrative and training costs and may be difficult to fire if they perform below expectations. In contrast, innovation brokering provides a considerably lower cost option, as most solvers are rewarded between $10,000 and $20,000 for a winning solution. In addition, seekers are typically under no obligation to pay this reward if none of the submitted solutions meet with their approval.

Anonymity. Because online knowledge brokers act as a conduit between seekers and solvers, firms concerned about protecting their privacy can remain anonymous. Indeed, most solvers have little or no knowledge of the identity of the seeking firm. This anonymity reduces the likelihood of competitive response and helps a seeking firm protect its intellectual investments.

Benefits to Solvers

Democratization of innovation. Under the traditional approach to innovation, solutions are largely generated by a small group of high-level managers, many of who attended elite universities. Thus, this process is somewhat totalitarian in nature. Online innovation brokering democratizes the innovation process by opening it up to the masses. Anyone with access to the Internet can become a potential solver, as registration at most online brokering services is free and easy. As a result, these solvers come from all walks of life and reside not only in advanced economies such as the USA and South Korea but also in such emerging economies as Ghana and Vietnam.

Obtainment of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. As noted earlier, in exchange for a winning solution, solvers typically earn between $10,000 and $20,000. Although these amounts are rather incremental for most firms, they represent substantial earnings for many individuals. In addition to financial remuneration, successful solvers gain valuable additions to their resume and increase their employment value to other firms. On top of these extrinsic rewards, many solvers report that they intrinsically enjoy the process of formulating solutions and view their efforts as a means of improving society by helping create new products and improved processes.

As illustrated by this example, globalization is dramatically changing the economic landscape and empowering individuals to perform activities that were formally conducted within a firm. While some may view these changes as a challenge, they also represent a substantial opportunity for forward-looking firms and individuals.

Building strong brand connections is an important goal of most marketers today. Typically, brand connections are believed to depend upon the actions taken by a firm (e.g., delivering outstanding service, crafting high quality products, etc.). However, it is also possible that some brand connections may also depend upon the characteristics of a firm's customers. For example, a large body of consumer research has shown that some consumers are more materialistic than others. So, are highly materialistic consumers more likely to be attached to brands than those who less materialistic? This was the question that my colleagues (James Burroughs @ Virginia & Nancy Wong @ Wisconsin) investigated in a research project that was recently published (June 2009) in the Journal of Consumer Research. Based on ideas grounded in terror management theory (see Ernest Becker's Denial of Death), we suggest that materialistic individuals form strong connections to their brands as a response to existential insecurity. We tested this premise by conducting a national survey among 314 adults as well as an experiment among 125 college students. Our results provided broad support for our thesis and suggest that the fear of death encourages materialistic individuals to form strong connections with their brands. This finding challenges conventional wisdom, which holds that materialistic individuals are weakly connected to brands and use them as superficial status badges. Instead, we found that when materialistic individuals thought about death, they formed deep and strong connections to their brands (across multiple product categories, including cell phones, sunglasses, jeans, MP3 players, and microwave ovens). Thus, our research suggests that materialistic individuals are strongly connected to their brands and employ them as an important source of meaning in their lives. In brief, our research suggests that materialistic consumers with anxiety about their existence are especially in need of the symbolic security that brand connections provide. Given the recent rise in materialistic tendencies along with the media's heightened focus on existential threats, the number of consumers who display this combination of values and motives should increase in the near future.  This research project has also been featured in Obit Magazine.

Customer Co-Creation: A Typology and Research Agenda
Authors: Aric Rindfleisch and Matthew S. O’Hern
[Full PDF]

Summary: Traditional marketing thought and practice largely views new product development (NPD) as an internal firm‐based process in which customers are relatively passive buyers and users. This traditional paradigm is currently being challenged by a new perspective in which customers are active co‐creators of the products they buy and use. In this paper, we identify the origins of this paradigm shift, present a conceptual typology of four different types of co‐creation activity, and offer an agenda for future research of this emerging paradigm.

Marketing Personalization 3.0
Author: Adam Needles
[Link to Full Paper]

Summary: Adam is a thought leader on the topics of brands, marketing, innovation and technology. In his piece Marketing Personalization 3.0 from the blog Propelling Brands Adam describes the potential uses of social graphs and semantic analysis for marketers. Social graphs are an emerging tool used to customize marketing and sales messages based on your contributions and connections on social networks. Semantic analysis is a field of artificial intelligence that attempts to determine the contextual meaning of written language.

Emerging New Product Development at Nokia Corporation
Author: Bjoernar Johansen
[Full PDF]

Summary: This paper reveals many of the best practices at Nokia Corporation for New Product Development (NPD). Nokia is one of the most innovative companies in the world with core R&D values that balance innovation and execution. Nokia achieves it's NPD objectives through its organizational structure, open collaboration model, and pyramid business model of competition that brings remarkably competitive and fresh products to market. In additional to internal NPD innovation, Nokia forms external alliances with research institutions, development communities and co-creates products with consumers through Nokia Beta Labs.

Flat World Knowledge
Author: Mariah Kottke
[Full PDF]

Summary: The paper Flat World Knowledge(FWK) is a case study on discontinuous innovation in the academic publishing industry. Mariah analyzes a revolutionary “open textbook” business model that relinquishes production control to authors, provides choice of content to instructors and offers students greater choice of study materials to purchase. In addition to providing more flexibility, FWK introduces a social framework for students that enables learning to be co-created.

Improving Innovation at Consumer Packaged Goods Companies
Author: Jackie Aperi
[Full PDF]

Summary: Consumer Packaged Goods(CPG) managers frequently struggle to deliver new products that meet consumer needs and create lasting differentiation from competitors. Some of the innovation challenges CPG companies face are risk aversion for mature brands, inarticulate consumers and nearsighted focus on short term profits. These forces can trap CPG's into creating incremental innovations when discontinuous innovation is a more sustainable and profitable long-term strategy. This paper offers three breakthrough tactics to deliver new products that meet consumer needs without increasing R&D budgets.