Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Alph Bingham is talking about Globalization 3.0: Globalization of the individual. When he headed west to graduate school, he packed up all his belongings and hit the road. When he arrived, they asked him to skin poisonous frogs. They had to figure out why it was yellow, so he and his colleagues were taking pigment out, taking toxins out, and nothing really added up. He felt like Edison: “I now know 1000 ways NOT to make a light bulb.”

Somewhere between sitting down and hitting his chair, the answer hit him… it was more of a Eureka incident rather than a slow discovery. That led to the question of, how do you organize a research business? For too long, we’ve followed the Edison model (perspiration-based approach). So Alph and his colleagued asked if you could organize for Archimedes?

They looked at the Internet, and decided to put the problems in front of everyone, in hopes of producing Archimedes-like events more frequently. The result was InnoCentive. They took challenges from Fortune 500 companies and posted them online (like the old west wanted posters). The net result has been that one-third of the posted problems have been solved. He calls the company a Medici-attractor.

Peter Gloor is here to talk about Swarm Creativity. His journey started 20 years ago as a grad student when he was hacking some software for IBM. He became a banker, worked in industry, but in 1997, he returned to a paper he had written on his CyberMap software, and decided to start a company based on it. It didn’t work out, but was a great learning experience on how not to organize a company. He’s getting back to the core idea with iQuest Analytics. He’s not the CEO this time, just the crazy chief geek. This time they are applying the cybermap concept to people.

The lesson they learned from analyzing social networks was “Don’t be a star, be a galaxy.” The real measure of value is “betweenness”; the person who is a galaxy is more powerful (imagine if you connect to only two people, but those two people are George Bush and Bill Gates).

Roger Mandle, the President of RISD, is speaking about the Art of Innovation. As much as he is an administrator, he wonders if he’s an artist? After all, he’s steeped in arts: his parents and children were/are artists, he’s educated in art history and studio art, and he went on to teach art.

He wondered where innovation comes from, and thinks it’s: inspiration, personal passion, a firm and genuine belief that drives your vision, an open and receptive mind and eye.

He eventually came to realize that RISD was his work of art: like film/painting/performance, the school is a living product of groups of people. Its mission is like the meaning of a work of art (what does it add up to?). The audience are students, museum visitors. (Think like artists, get out of the way so others can do their thing.)

Frans Johansson (”The Medici Effect”). His talk: “my journey to the intersection.” Mother African American/Cherokee, Father Swedish, grew up in Sweden. Went to Brown, studied environmental science, brought together the science communities by founding the Catalyst magazine. He recognized John Donoghue whose department was the first to support the magazine. Went on to Harvard Business School, started a company that did well until it didn’t, and was inspired to write The Medici Effect (it was going to be called “Intersections”). He was again inspired by Donoghue’s experiments with thought-controlled devices. So he started searching for stories “at the Intersection”, and contemplated how the Medici Family supported artists from all over the place, and sparked the Rennaisance. Frans found:

• All new ideas are combinations of existing ideas.
• Not all idea combinations are created equal.
• People and teams that break new ground generate and execute more ideas.
• Medici Effect is simple combinations: the more stuff you bring together, the more possible combinations you have.

Dean Kamen came up to talk about FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). The problem he discussed was the decline of science knowledge in the US. Even though we’re talking about this now, it’s a problem that’s been going on for a long time.

The US responded to this problem with standards, testings, computers in the classroom, and more, but it didn’t fix it. This stated the problem as supply and demand. Kamen wanted to look at it as a Demand and Supply problem, which is the basis of FIRST. He made it more like sports: coaches not teachers, nurture not judgment, cheerleaders, etc. He went looking for sports stars of science. They formed FIRST. They set up a robotics competition in cooperation with engineers from major corporations, and the engineers said they got more out of it than the kids. In the fifth year, they outgrew their digs in Manchester, and moved it to Epcot Center. Five years later, they even outgrew Disney, and set up regional events with the finals at the Houston Astrodome! The next year they were at the Georgia Dome.

38% of the kids on the teams were women and minorities. Their “little league” uses the Lego Kits.

Brandeis University Study, funded by the Ford Foundation: FIRST participants are 50% more likely to attend colege; 3x more likely to major in engineering; 9x more likely to have freshman year internshps. Female participants were 3x more likely to pursue technology and engineering in college.

Announcement: RI will be the first state in the US to make FIRST available to every high school. Kamen will challenge every other state to follow RI’s lead.

Saul Kaplan kicked things off with a re-cap of the previous day. I appreciated his focus on the interactions in the hallways and reception afterward. This is the part of conferences that has always appealed to me.

He introduced today’s host, Walt Mossberg. Always nice to see a native returning home. Walt reminisced about the things that made Rhode Island great, such as fried dough. He invited Congressman Jim Langevin up on stage who opened the event and introduced his friend Dean Kamen as “an inventor and entrepreneur with a social conscience”.

Langevin mentioned that Kamen is currently working on a device to create potable water that will be the size of a steamer trunk. He challenged Kamen to invent a wheelchair that was more than a wheelchair; a true mobility device that did more than just moved around on four wheels… and then proceeded to show us Kamen’s invention, Langevin’s own wheelchair called the iBot.

Robert Ballard: “Born in Wichita, Kansas, where all oceanographers come from”. As a child, Ballard was spellbound by the idea of walking on the bottom of the ocean (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). From that point on, he was fascinated by the bottom of the ocean. In college, he ended up in ROTC and eventually became an Army intelligence officer. He got a visit one night from a Navy Officer bearing an envelope transferring him to the deep diving submarine at Woods Hole, which finally took him to the bottom of the sea.

As a grad student, he kept on, exploring hydrothermal vents, meeting tube worms. There is more biomass in earth than on it (that’s why we need to look inside Mars, not on it). There’s also more history in the deep sea than in all the museums in the world. The state of preservation is phenomenal.

All well and good, but the problem was that they were using very old technology. Average depth of the ocean is 12k feet. 50% of it is deeper than that. A typical dive was 2.5 hours down, 2.5 up. “A 5 hour commute in a freezing elevator with no bathroom.” Plus, it’s dark down there. So they weren’t getting a lot done.

Eventually, he learned about fiber optics. This suddenly opened up the opportunity for telepresence. It’s not as if you actually get out of the submarine! In 1981, he published a cartoon in National Geographic that showed the concept: a robot that had everything his sub did, but without his body. The next step, hook it up to a satellite, and it’s everywhere.

He loves Rhode Island. The RI inferiority complex: stuck between Massachusetts (”where the smart people are”) and Connecticut (”where the rich people are”). But, “we’re going to kick the butt of the other states because we have a real creative engine here”

But how to deal with resistance to the idea? Ballard got the opportunity to define the “Ocean Blueprint for the 21st century”. To go where no one has gone before on planet earth. We have no idea what we’ll discover, so there’s no point in having a science crew. So, he got a small ship, loaded it with hardware (not much room for scientists). So that forced the scientists to stay on the beach. The plan is to make this ship, base it in Quonset, and go where no one has gone before. If you voted for Proposition 9, you supported the Inner Space center at the Bay Campus (Instead of “Houston we have a problem”, it’s “Kingston, we have a problem”). This will not only hook up the scientists, but also the kids.

RI schools are Internet 2 compatible, and this will bring “America’s first ship of exploration” to the kids.

Mary Pat Ryan started with a story about how her car got stolen; not surprising, living in NYC… except the car was garaged. It just disappeared. Even though it was covered by insurance and she got a new car, she had an emotional attachment to the old car, and started wondering what that was. At the time, Sirius was launching, and she was at IMAX at the time. An experience with the audio track of an IMAX movie led her to be more interested in the theatre of the mind, so she made the jump to Sirius.

What will kill a company faster: bad idea or bad execution? She thinks an idea only becomes an innovation if a great execution takes it there. Exploit the “pockets of passion” in your teams to make your ideas wonderful. Allow their passion to live in the company.

Cool. Jeneanne Rae’s slides are illustrated by explodingdog.com. “How a train rocked my world”. She was tasked with dealing with the new high speed train for the northeast corridor. Remember the old image of “Amtrak”? Late trains, stodgy. At Ideo, they assembled a team; it was their first US services project, first brand build, first big government contract, first “customer journey framework”, first assessment of diffs between products and services. First train!

Customer journey:

learning-->planning-->starting-->entering-->ticketing-->
waiting-->boarding-->riding-->arriving-->continuing

Too much focus on riding ignored the totality of the experience! For example, there was no car rental facility at the Route 128 terminus (continuing!), so Acela had to delay opening it until it could be established. (Her notion of the customer journey reminds me of the Reader’s Journey, which is at the center of how a Head First book is organized).

They had a huge prototype of the train car in the Ideo offices, would try using it in wheelchairs, check out the bathroom experience. Amtrak kept bringing people from different parts of the company through the prototype, and the prototype became a device by which people in Amtrak could communicate with one another. This prototype also sat in Union Station for a long time so the public could explore it.

We have now made a big shift to a services economy. Tipping point was in 1987. This is going to require us to be more sensitive to customers, and is good news for designers. The bad news is that people aren’t ready for this: service companies aren’t ready to engage in conversations with their customers, aren’t prepared to innovate. But many companies will rise to these opportunities to innovate, and it’s time for us to all play.

Josh Koppel is talking to us about album art: brandished Some Girls album. Showed the interactive design of it. People would stare at it for hours.

15 years later, we got the CD. Not a terrible experience, but a step down. Now we’re in another format change… All we get is a 16k JPEG.

But some albums have more: PDF liner notes (pretty miserable to use, actually).

Developed a new kind a liner note: TuneBook, flash-based, plays in iTunes. More interactive, like a DVD title page, but more interactive.

Warner Bros. dug it, convinced Apple, now it’s in iTunes.

It was all going great, lots of business. But then iTunes 7 came out, and it stopped working!

So it was time for something else. The user focus was never on iTunes anyhow. The user experience is on an iPod now, and so is his new software. Rotate, zoom, even move the faces, and call up lyrics. The demo was pretty amazing.

He said he didn’t want his kids growing up not knowing what Mick Jagger looks like.