In the next five years, our lives will change through technology innovations in the following ways:

• It will be easy for you to be green and save money doing it: Innovations in how we use our electric utilities will allow us to have a connected home where our consumption can be monitored to better use energy.

 

• The way you drive will be completely different: cars will now come with an intelligent computer where they all talk to each other and can sense where most traffic is and avoid collisions while also intelligent traffic systems will control traffic in cities.

 

• You are what you eat, so you will know what you eat: advances in software technology will give you detailed information of where the food you’re buying comes from, you’ll have information about the food before you eat it.

 

• Your cell phone will be your wallet, your ticket broker, your concierge, your bank, your shopping buddy, and more: How about your phone becoming your best friend? Literally your phone will let you know information of your surroundings, where to eat, shop,fun, etc.

 

• Doctors will get enhanced “super-senses” to better diagnose and treat you: Technologies will allow doctors to gain more insight with their patients with the use of sensors that will enhance their visual and hearing abilities. Other technologies will give doctors a plethora of information in the form of you medical records while also comparing them with other patients and in effect give them a more precise diagnosis and better treatment for you.

This is only the second year, and comparing last year’s list to this one you can see a trend where everything is becoming more connected. The connected world .

Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn’t have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems. Ideo creative director Bennett shows how his firm works to reframe the everyday realities of its diverse clients to create results that truly make a difference. From hospital design that takes the patient’s-eye view (staring up at the ceiling) to toy storage that responds to how children see the world, the answer, he says, is very often to be found in the question.

What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to these questions, and his answer is influenced by his faith as well as by his scientific turn of mind: We can train our minds in habits of happiness. Interwoven with his talk are stunning photographs of the Himalayas and of his spiritual community.

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues. In a time when “content” is not confined to a film canister, Lessig has a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.

Ideas sometimes grow out of irritation. One person was bugged by his inability to remember important dates such as anniversaries, birthdays and so on. He was always a day late with presents. He made his bug into a challenge and created a product: vacuum packed canned roses to be stored and used for emergencies.

After you make your "bug list", select the challenges that you find most interesting. Remember that a worthwhile problem for one person may very well be boring to another. An accountant and a salesperson will not likely be stimulated or challenged by the same problem; indeed two people in the same discipline may not be challenged by the same problem.

Only you can identify the kind of challenges that will stimulate and drive you.

BENEFITS

It is important to give yourself a compelling personal reason for the coming up with new ideas to solve your challenges. Weigh each challenge for personal benefits before you commit yourself.  The best ideas come from those hungry for success and those who cultivate the spirit of enterprise.

Before you decide which challenge to resolve, make a list of the benefits that may be gained if you are successful in developing a creative solution. What are the direct benefits: money, pleasure, recognition,  property and so on. What are the indirect benefits: new skills, knowledge, attitudes, etc. Do the benefits outweigh the costs in terms of your time and energy? Which challenges would be the most rewarding to resolve? What problems or situations do you want to accept personal responsibility for solving?

If you feel that it’s not necessary to realize any personal benefits before you dedicate yourself to solving a challenge…just lean your head sideways and watch the sawdust pour out of your ear.

After you decide what challenges are most interesting and likely to yield solid benefits, it is important to accept the challenge. To accept a challenge means to accept responsibility for generating ideas as possible solutions to the problem. The more you accept responsibility and dedicate yourself to generating ideas, the higher your probability of reaching an innovative solution.

There are different levels of commitment to different problems. Some problems need total dedication, others may need total effort. Whenever I think of total dedication, I’m reminded of a story I once heard about a samurai who had the duty to avenge his overlord’s murderer. When he had cornered the murderer and was about to dispatch  him with his sword, the man spat in the warrior’s face. The warrior sheathed his sword and walked away.

Why? Because the spitting made him angry, and if he had killed that man in anger it would have been a personal act. He had accepted the responsibility to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance. After you decide what challenges are interesting and will yield you solid benefits, it is time to state those challenges in the most useful way possible.

Imagine 5 brilliant entrepreneurs sitting down to consider new ideas. They can’t get started until someone proposes something. But where does the proposal come from? How do they decide what problem to solve? Who decides the focus? How do they determine the goals? If they try to come up with new ideas without having a specific goal, they could consume an infinite amount of time with no purpose.

Before you start looking for ideas, you need to know what your goal is. A problem is nothing more than opportunity in work clothes. A successful businessperson pays attention to problems, converting the problems into opportunities and deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing. These opportunities become productive challenges.

Anyone can learn how to pay attention. As a focusing exercise, select a color at random and spend an entire day looking for items that are that color or contain it. For instance, if you choose red you will discover an incredible number of red objects: cars, books, clothes, houses, shoes, hats, etc. Familiar objects will become new again, reds will become richer and you will find that your perspective toward “red” has been dramatically changed. By tuning in “red” and tuning out other colors, you allowed to understand the color red more deeply.

Unless you set your business problems down in writing, your attention is constantly shifting and you become indecisive about what you should focus on. Listing problems in a way for you to decide which ones are worth solving. It transforms a body of information into a set of components that can be restructured, checked and searched. Start keeping a journal of problems that you find to be personally interesting and that would be worthwhile to resolve. The following questions may help you get started:

What would you like to have or to accomplish?

What business idea would you like to work on?

What do you wish would happen in your job?

What business relationship would you like to improve?

What would you like to do better?

What do you wish you had more time to do?

What more would you like to get out of your job?

What are your unfulfilled goals?

What excites you in your work?

What angers you at your work?

What misunderstandings do you have at work?

What have you complained about?

What changes for the worse do you see in the attitudes of others?

What would you like to get others to do?

What changes would you like to introduce?

What takes too long?

What is wasted?

What is too complicated?

Where are the bottlenecks?

In what ways are you insufficient?

What wears you out?

What in your job turns you off?

What would you like to organize better?

In what ways could you make more money at work?

The mere act of writing a challenge may trigger your mind to create something meaningful to fill in the gaps and solve it.

Technorati Tags: inspiration , innovation , creative strategies , creative techniques , challenges

MAKING IT HAPPEN

Look at the world around you. Developing creativity requires the same amount of thought and attention as developing any other skill. Although some people do seem to be more innately creative than others, it’s wrong to think that some individuals have and other’s don’t. Creativity is a natural form of human expression.

Take a look at the world you’ve created around yourself. Your home and workspace are a creative expression of who you are and so are the social networks you’ve created for yourself. All these things are evidence of your creativity. All any of us needs to do is recognize that creativity takes many forms, become aware of the process, and work on making it a conscious activity.

Useful Techniques

• Brainstorming. Brainstorming generates a free flow of ideas, associations and concepts, however foolish at the outset. Energy generated by the brainstorming group is contagious, fostering creative leaps and jumps.
• Finding the zone. Artists, athletes and craftspeople often experience the phenomenon of being in the creative zone, a state in which it’s almost as if they were running on automatic pilot. This usually happens when people are totally absorbed in what they are doing that their creative energy takes over and generates its own momentum. Total concentration seems to switch something in the brain that enables pure, unrestrained expression.
• Stimulating the creative side of the brain. The right side of the brain is where intuitive and creative abilities reside; the left side is where logical thinking takes place. A number of techniques exist that enable you to switch consciously from left side to right, thereby enabling you to tap into your reserves of inspiration and innovation.
• Relaxation/Meditation. Logical thinking generates beta waves in the brain. Relaxation/Meditation techniques produce alpha waves, whose positive effects include creative thought. The alpha state has been found to be an exceptionally good way to enhance learning, as it clears the path for new thoughts and inspirations. Listening to soothing, uncomplicated music is another way of tuning your brain into a different wavelength.
• Doing something out of context. Being creative is about breaking habits and being open to new thoughts and experiences. Try something that you’ve never done before, something undemanding like going to an event that you normally wouldn’t go, or taking a different route to work. You’ll be surprised at how such a simple change can open the creative floodgates.

COMMON MISTAKES

You don’t keep an open mind

People who don’t have time for, or don’t value, creative talent often miss out on the flow of ideas that might just contain the germ of the next big thing. Allowing creative energy the freedom to express itself without restraint or censure is the best way to reap it’s benefits.

You don’t do a reality check

Just because and idea is exciting doesn’t mean it will be useful! Build a reality check into your development process to ensure that only those ideas that are viable actually end up in the market.

You’re not receptive enough to new ideas

Sometimes ideas are dismissed simply because they threaten the status quo or challenge long held, never questioned values. Always ask yourself “On what basis am I rejecting this idea?” If your dismissal is coming from habit or old assumptions, step back and think again.

You give up too easily

Don’t expect too much of yourself too soon. Be patient and give yourself exploring time before abandoning the effort. Rewards are often immediate, but if they aren’t, or you feel you need support, seek a friend, teacher, mentor who can help you unleash the latent power of your right brain.

Technorati Tags: innovation , creativity , inspiration

• Competing for the Future
• Leading the Revolution

Technorati Tags: innovation , management

So what is service innovation? An example is the story of Thomas Edison, the inventor and innovator who came up with the lightbulb. People don’t tend to think of the related service innovations—getting lightbulbs into houses and schools, setting prices for the electricity services to keep them lit. That’s all service innovation.

More recent examples, though most people wouldn’t think of them under the phrase, are outsourcing and the shift toward self-service.

Why you haven’t heard much about Service Innovation until now, is because it is more difficult than Product Innovation.

There are more dimensions to service innovation than there are to product innovation. Service innovation can be a new service concept, it can be a new way to interact with customers, a new way of service delivery or a technology innovation supporting either one of the three (concept, interaction or delivery).

Service innovation is very different depending on the type of organization. There are differences between the different verticals, resulting in a “silo-approach” for service innovation, as suggested in HBR of February 2005 by Henry Chesbrough. Service innovation is also very different for government than for commercial organizations and again different for not-for-profit organizations. We need to work on a set of tools that are universal over the different silo’s.

A third reason for this difficulty is that other issues are important to services. When designing and developing a new service, organizations need to think about trust, about increasing a sense of transfer of ownership and about experience. Changing the method of payment, can not impact the design of a product, but it is a major change in the development of a service.

These are only a few of the hurdles to service innovation, but I am convinced we are moving closer to solutions. More academic work, books and articles, government initiatives and small companies who work around service innovation are appearing globally. There is a future!

Here are some principles to help you innovate in the service arena:

• Create a clear challenge statement, expressed in terms of a customer need, not a business need, that focuses on the “white space.”
• Do strong ideation: a well-designed, well-facilitated process that includes participation from many departments and disciplines and sources of edge-thinking.
• Emphasize developing concepts that combine multiple elements of innovation (from your business model and IT platform to the channel) to increase the impact and distinctiveness of the idea.
• Use techniques and structures that counter-balance the natural forces of criticism and risk-aversion.
• Employ a design that is guided by a base behavioral model of the customer’s underlying needs.
• Communicate high aspirations for the overall customer experience to stretch the design team’s thinking.
• Use customer-centric analytical tools to measure the customer experience.
• Make creative use of tangible artifacts to reinforced a distinctive experience, the way an ADT lawn sign signals that service or the way Mini Cooper’s roadside assistance service is signalled by its window signs.

I’d like to hear your comments on this.

Here are a few links to:

- Consortium of Service Innovation

- Service Research & Innovation Initiative

Technorati Tags: innovation , service innovation