WisconsInnovation

Image via CrunchBaseCrowdsourcing is a effective way to get the visibility and funding needed to launch a great idea. Like Kickstarter, Indiegogo a crowdfunding social site, requires the entrepreneur to provide details on the project - I think this works best with a video as well as text based details and images. In the case of LuminAid, they have all three.

They had some additional help through other social channels. They had a friend who leveraged the blogger community and was successful in getting the product featured on the gadget blog, Gizmodo and several others.

The ran a promotional campaign on FaceBook, and have chosen to maintain a business page for the product. In the effort of sustainability of a social business effort, these two are students or recently graduated but are responding actively to commentors on the page. Their website is current with a regular blog for updates.

The also made use of email as an outreach campaign, but the information doesn't indicate if this was done to a purchased mailing list or contacts shared via Columbia University who holds the patent and licensees it back.

According to Open Forum interview

“From there, the word spread and we raised $10,000 in six days,” says Stork.

In the end, they have a wonderful and useful product that can truly make a difference in a disaster relief situation and beyond. Their product brief on Indiegogo was direct and to the point - it clearly outlined the problem and their solution. The choice of video and images were excellent and helped extend the impact.

Even though the campaign for funding is over, I want to buy some to help others. What do you think?



LuminAID: An Inflatable Solar Light -- IndieGoGo: LuminAID: Give Light, Get Light

About the Project

LuminAID Lab is proud to introduce the LuminAID light: a solar-rechargeable, inflatable lamp that packs flat and inflates to create a lightweight, waterproof lantern. Safe, sustainable, and portable, the LuminAID light provides up to six hours of LED light, ideal for disaster relief situations, recreational use outdoors, or in the home as an extra light source. Our mission: make light more affordable, sustainable, and available for everyone.

A few new pieces of legislation, PROTECT IP Act and SOPA, are currently being voted on in the House this week. Although these bills are meant to stop online piracy, they have the potential to seriously change the internet and stifle innovation. I don't want to push a political agenda on anyone so I recommend doing your own research. Here is one article that I found helpful and fairly unbiased.

The New York Times recently published an article about a crowd sourced timeline from Science Times of what people predict to be reality in the coming years. Think cancer will ever be cured? The timeline predicts that will happen in 2023. How about making cash illegal? Readers predicted this will also happen within our lifetime, 2056. Finally, everyone's favorite, artificial intelligence. According to the timeline this will happen by 2063. Here are some other predictions the timeline made:

2012: COMPUTER ON A CHIP
2013: ELECTRONIC INK
2019: ONLINE SCIENCE
2019: UNIVERSAL MEDICAL DATABASE
2022: HALO OF DATA


This is a great example of how firms are using open source publishing and incorporates how innovation will change our lives going forward. It is a pretty interesting timeline and something fun to think about.

This is an interesting article about HP's failed attempts at developing a lasting WebOS mobile platform. Instead of scrapping the WebOS mobile platform, HP has decided to open-source its development. I think this could be a successful move for the company. Unable to develop an attractive, lucrative WebOS mobile platform on their own, open-sourcing the project may be just what the company needs.

Social Business is the biggest thing to happen to enterprise software in many years. Jive brings the innovations of the social consumer web to the enterprise. You get the great social features and user experience you love in your favorite consumer apps – while at the same time meeting stringent IT requirements. Jive allows you to:

Twitter Joins Facebook, Google, Launches 'Brand Pages' for Marketers | Digital - Advertising Age: Twitter is looking to strengthen its relationship with advertisers by launching brand pages that will be unveiled today as part of a more comprehensive redesign.

Twitter's existing brand pages have been under the radar, especially compared with the buildup around Google brand pages, which were launched last month. But Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain said that he's spent the better part of the past year meeting with chief marketing officers, and brand pages were a recurring and frequent request.

Wendy's Note: Nope I wasn't on the list of partners to get access to the Brand Pages but I did get on the #newnewtwitter version right away. This really isn't innovation, its also ran to copy Google+ and Facebook.  I am waiting for Twitter to really take the next big leap to incorporate the next new idea. Something that someone hasn't done yet.

Here are the companies who were in the initial launch:

Twitter is launching brand pages with 21 marketers: American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell , Disney, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, JetBlue, Kia, McDonald's, Nike , PepsiCo, Staples, Verizon Communications Wireless, NYSE Euronext, Heineken, Subway and Paramount Pictures, specifically for the release of "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol." It has also partnered with some charities and individuals that it hasn't disclosed. 

 Do you suppose the only way for innovation is to create a new brand and separate from the existing Twitter?

Why are so many companies struggling to innovate today? This Harvard Business Review blog entry by Ron Ashkenas attempts to inform managers of the importance of having every employee in a working to innovate. Ashkenas believes, "organizations require innovation on all fronts." This means moving outside simply innovating the main product. To do this, he believes firms need to have all their employees, including sales, supply chain, packaging, etc., seek new ways to innovate on their processes.
This is crowd-sourcing the employees for innovations in the company. Shouldn't employees already be doing this? The problem appears to be that firms only encourage engineers and scientists to innovate, leaving other employees to follow their normal methods.
To solve this problem, Ashkenas recommends three steps for building a culture of innovation:
1) Identify and implement an innovation in your area
2) Once employees have confidence that they can innovate incrementally, work together to identify a more ambitions innovation.
3) Make an atmosphere that encourages people to develop and experiment with new ideas
By successfully completing these three steps, a manager can crowd-source their employees for innovations just as many user innovation companies would source from their customers.

Hacking and modifying software is becoming more popular than ever. According to a recent story in Wired, the new Android software which is set to run on the Kindle Fire has been hacked already, even prior to its official release. This story really shows how eager the hacker community is to solve their own problems and contribute to open-source initiatives.

Fonera Fon is a hotspot router that allows people to share their internet connection in exchange for free WiFi at locations across the world -- but there's more. By sharing your connection you can make money; the more people that join your network, the more money you make. Here's a video if you want to learn more. It is a pretty interesting concept. I am a huge supporter of free global wifi, as I'm sure many of you are. It seems through various blogs people are indeed making money using the Fon Router.

While writing our final research paper for another class this week, my group members and I decided to use an application called "Dropbox" to share files and edit our paper. Dropbox allows users to "drop" any file or document into a designated folder that is then synced with Dropbox's internet service and to any other of the user's computers/devises. These files can also be shared with other users who have Dropbox, and are invited to join a "folder."

In class we have talked a lot about 3D printers and have experienced one first-hand. More and more, 3D Printers in the last few years have materialized in the marketplace, and consequently prices have dropped. Along with this desktop manufacturing revolution, the software that goes along with such a machine is beginning to prosper as well. An example of 3D printing software is from a company called Autodesk. Here is an article from The New York Times concerning Autodesk and some of its software, as well as its announcement to offer its consumer software free of charge to bolster awareness and hopefully improve the software itself.

While we are still in the midst of our class presentations, I thought our class would enjoy this TED Talk on using Dance to convey a message instead of using PowerPoint. This is certainly an innovative presentation itself, but the idea is even more remarkable. The speaker (John Bohannon) claims that by using PowerPoint, we are distracted by pictures and reading words on a slide and never fully understand the message. Do you think dance can convey any idea, or does it have limits? When watching the video, do you find the dancers just as distracting as a PowerPoint? Read some of the comments to get an idea of what other experts (dancers, scientists, etc.) think!

This article does a good job of outlining how Lego struggled with the notion of opening up its innovation model and listening to its adult customers. Similar to Microsoft and hackers of the Kinect, Lego had to decide, "Do we sue them or embrace it," when faced with hackers of their Mindstorms products. Ultimately Lego embraced user innovation and saved their company. This article also discusses how adults have left high paying jobs to become "Lego Ambassadors" or Lego artists and make their own designs.

I recommend watching this video interview by host Erik Michielsen of CaptureYourFlag.com. It's interesting to hear Mike talk about his battles with larger B2C companies about engagement with social media for innovation and how they have changed their perspective. Two years ago, they were thinking that social media was a flyby tactic. Now they have changed their minds and are using more avenues to integrate into the entire product cycle.
Today, in working within the B2B space and with many manufacturers who have technical products, the same story resurfaces.

What they say is, "It's a waste of time and resources. It's an incredible time sink. That is our intellectual property we might be sharing. " Ironically, in the same breath those same companies tell me that they rely on word-of-mouth, referrals, and relationships to get the work they do. Strange that the statistics show that 90% of B2B executives refer to online networks for recommendations of companies and products to work with.

What is your experience?

This article discusses how Tumblr, a blogger website, allowed their users to sign up and receive phone calls from company employees who informed the users on various talking points of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Afterwards, the users were connected to their U.S. representatives to voice their opinion on the act. SOPA, if passed, has the potential to severely limit the amount and type of information Tumblr, and other websites such as Youtube and Reddit, would be allowed to post on their site. This move by Tumblr to employ users to fight this act rather than typical corporate lobbying is an innovative approach utilizing customer collaboration.

Can you think of examples of innovation we have discussed in class that could have been improved or weakened based on the environmental elements of the context?

In one of my classes, The Management of Teams (MHR 401), we are discussing creativity in teams. One of the most important factors for accomplishing effective creativity is the environment in which teams operate. Although it is not a new concept for firms to be interested in innovation, growth, and high performance, many companies are beginning to go about such success in a different manner: collaboration. Regardless of the individuals, resources, and tasks, it is difficult to effectively and efficiently collaborate without a supportive environment.

In New Product Development, we frequently discuss examples of innovation that may seem a bit out of our reach at the moment, but collaboration within the business environment is something that should be of interest to everyone with previous work experience or in the midst of a job search. If you're interested in learning more about different tactics companies are using to generate teamwork and collaboration in the business environment, check out "Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything" (http://www.wikinomics.com/book/).

Image via WikipediaIf you haven't had a chance to review this report done by Thrive you should to see how Madison faired.> WS

Madison Region Community and Economic Development Blog - Advance Now - Thrive: State of the Madison Region

Here is a link to an article published by The Economist on the nation's most innovative companies and what industries the operate in.

Here is an interesting article from Wired.com discussing how Microsoft transitioned from comparing open source software with a "malignant cancer" to embracing and starting its open source division.As we discussed in class, this shows that open source programmers aren't living out of their mom's basements anymore. I found it interesting when it says that Linux isn't their main competitor anymore, but rather Google.

It's interesting to see that a tech firm as powerful as Apple, who is notorious for closed software programs like OSX, has joined the open source movement. Apple recently made their software for compressing music files open source.

With technology's advancement, the internet is become available to more people each day. As of March 31, 2011, Over 2 billion people were connected to the internet.

Infographic: The Most Valuable Digital Consumers | Nielsen Wire

If you like statistics that might support your push to move your company into the social/mobile/local space, print this infographic and take it to your executive team or business owner.

In early October, leading Japanese toilet manufacturer TOTO unveiled its latest innovation: a motorcycle that runs on human waste. How? Well, the seat of the bike is literally a toilet, fully equipped with a roll of toilet paper too. The company says that the waste is turned into biofuel which powers the machine.

Any buyers? Doubtful. Regardless of the intentions of this initiative, it is a reminder that ideas need to be tested and evaluated before heading to market.

Dear White House: Please Tell us the Truth About E.T.
Petitioners Seek Everything From Boosting Raw Milk Sales to Legalizing Pot
By LAURA MECKLER

Check out the article above to see how our government is using the ideas of crowdsourcing to help determine what people really want.

People can submit petitions for anything they feel is a large issue of today. Petitions are asking for a large range of things from legalizing marijuana to finding out the truth about E.T. The government has posted about 200 of these petitions online for the public to view. It's interesting to see niche interests get attention this way. The White House intends to form a committee to evaluate each petition. Could this be a form of designing applied to government?

From September 25-27, I had the opportunity to travel to New York City for NBC's Education Nation Summit as a representative of my student organization, Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda. About 250 of the nation's educators, professionals, politicians, and leaders (as well as a few studens) convened from around the country to discuss our current educational system and what we can do to improve it. More information about the event can be found here.

A very interesting part of the entire two-day summit was the competition hosted by NBC which featured three different student teams that had proposed new, innovative ideas for the classroom - the Innovation Challenge. The winning team, Class Dojo, won $75,000 from Citi based on their interactive program allowing teachers to better control behavior in the classroom. It was very interesting.

Another speaker at the event, Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, really mirrored exactly what we talked about in class regarding user innovation. His story is unique. His cousins had problems with math so he started out by tutoring them. However, as busy students, they didn't always have time to meet, so Khan would record his lectures and upload them to YouTube for them to view later. His videos started to get very popular (millions of views).

Khan now has over 2,800 videos ranging from remedial addition to advanced calculus. He is operating as a non-profit by choice. His videos take the 'shame' that students could have by asking the same questions over and over again. They can now watch his videos dozens of times until they understand it.

I thought these were simply genius, and I wasn't expecting to see much innovation at this conference. It really was a great experience, and I loved my first trip to NYC!

This article is about how Matt Rutledge came up with the website, Woot, which sells products in small bursts and prides itself on being absolutely, painfully honest with its customers.

Matt Rutledge launched Woot.com based on a simple concept: The site would sell only one product a day until the inventory ran out or the clock struck midnight, whichever came first. Rutledge saw it as a way to unload overstocked merchandise from his Dallas-based wholesale consumer electronics business. From the start, the site prided itself on honesty: If a vacuum cleaner was a putrid shade of green, Woot said so. Soon people came to the site just to read the snarky product descriptions. Today, Woot has four sites, 1.5 million registered members, and sales of $117.4 million.

Microsoft has finally come to accept tinkering with the Xbox Kinect technology. Microsoft's customers have been doing for awhile and it is now embracing it with a new research project KinectFusion. Hackers and Hobbyists have been tinkering with the Kinect since it came out. Microsoft is now realizing that it can gain from its customers contributions and it can revolutionize the way we produce 3-D images.

This recent article from the WSJ suggests that amid worries that we are becoming less innovative, some companies, such as P&G, are rewarding employees for their mistakes or questionable risks.

After reviewing the latest and greatest presentations posted on social product development, I followed an interesting path that led to Aaron Roe Fulkerson (@roebot) and then on to a post on his Corporate Blog for MindTouch called "The Most Powerful Voices in Open Source" (2010).

I enjoy lists and this type of analysis to shorten my curve to finding the thought leaders in new areas of interest. The list is diverse in terms of global leaders. But is open source always just applied to tech and programming?

In past posts, we shared links and interview with Local Motors who is working in an environment of open source, crowdsourcing and cocreating in the automotive space. They are sharing designs, drawings and modifications. I am looking for more companies not in the tech space solely who are part of the Open Source or Open Innovation space.

Can we build a wiki to share? Does a list like this exist?

I had a chance to interview a number of people at Local Motors including the Community Manager, Ariel Ferreira and John Rogers the CEO. The acronym they use for the business is COOL and is explained in this interview.

Of note is the fact that John Rogers indicated that they built the business based on a Co Creation process. It seems to be working quite well for cars.

This is an IBM video that shares how open source innovation and sharing of data helped the chocolate industry, the City of Dubai, and improved the survival rate of premature babies. Don't get me wrong, its certainly a promo piece for IBM, but the stories are worth it. I found myself watching the entire 15 minute video.

The US Department of Defense is know for, among other things, being a poor steward of taxpayer dollars. Remember the $1,000 toilet seat? Wary of these types of cost over-runs, the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) decided to try something a bit different by asking individuals, rather than corporations, to design its newest combat vehicle. Teaming up with  Local Motors, DAPRA sponsored a design competition open to anyone in the world. With a prize offering of $7,500 (about 8 toilet seats), this competition received over 150 design submissions. The winning design, the FLYPMode by Victor Garcia went from concept to prototype in less than six months! This is yet another example, of how innovation by individuals can meet or exceed the innovation by firms.

One of the new social sites that provides a unique way to fund ideas and dreams to fruition is Kickstarter.com. While the site is focused on creative projects proposed by designers, artists. theatrical, film makers etc, the concept of the site is certainly one that could carry over into more technical products. My guess is that a site already exists, I just haven't stumbled on it yet.

I recently met Rob Barros, a Minneapolis based film maker doing a documentary on John Howe, The Architect. Howe is little known, even having done over 50% of the drawings for Frank Lloyd Wright's projects. Barros used Kickstarter to post his project with a movie trailer, description of the project, description of what the money would be used for. Then sent out emails, shared with a Facebook page and it went viral enough to raise the needed $9K for the project in 2 months.

I interviewed Rob while in Phoenix, where he was on site doing some filming, about what this meant to the success of the project in this blog post on funding of creative projects with social media.

I believe incubators and more concepts like this are what will help entrepreneurs in the early stage of forming companies, or selling a product idea to someone else.  Madison would do well to step up the incubator concept like Milwaukee, Boston, and Palo Alto CA, to keep our inventors and creatives in our local area.

What are some social communities you know about that help entrepreneurs get started?

Here's a good example of tinkering a program's code to help do your job more effectively. Unfortunately, Microsoft's Kinect is not open sourced and therefore must be hacked in order to edit the code.

"Hacking Microsoft’s Kinect seems to be a worldwide fad right now, but this latest repurposing might be the most practical ever. A group of graduate engineering students at the University of Washington have hacked a Kinect so it can help doctors perform surgery.

University of Washington’s newspaper, The Daily, details the students' work, which involved writing new code for Microsoft’s Kinect that allowed it to interface with their robotic equipment and basically send feedback about a patient’s body position back through the system. Because of this tracking, the students were able to workout where important internal organs were and prevent the machines from cutting too deep.

“We could define basically a force field around, say, a liver,” said Howard Chizeck, University of Washington’s professor of electrical engineering. “If the surgeon got too close, he would run into that force field and it would protect the object he didn’t want to cut.”