WisconsInnovation

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.”