One of the consequences of life speeding up it that people have less and less time to think. The culture of business has also shifted to the point where instant communication
and solutions are deemed more important than real insight or rigour – both of which
require periods of study and reflection.

This lack of thinking time and the transience of so many subsequent solutions is also related to a lack of thinking spaces. Most modern offices are designed to accommodate as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost. This is considered efficient.
The eighteenth century (sweat) factory model still dominates but there are a host of new aural and visual distractions. But sterile open plan offices do not open minds. So are most desk jockeys flogging a dead horse?

Of course there’s always a brainstorming room with brightly coloured walls, beanbags and felt pens. But as one marketing director recently said to me “if I have to sit in that room one more time making mission statements out of playdough I’m going to kill myself”. Other more inventive solutions to cubicle culture include ‘collision areas’ like cafes and staircases where employees are encouraged to exchange ideas serendipitously.

But imagine if instead of designing formal spaces to create unplanned meetings or mixing up departments you mixed up whole companies? What if, instead of putting five companies on five floors of a building, you mixed up the whole building? What would happen to thinking if someone from Orange telecom was sitting next to someone from Apple computer?

The Green House Project is a nursing home that works on a similar principle. Retirement homes are usually sterile, soul destroying places. Bill Thomas got so fed up with these temples of loneliness that he built something different — the Eden Alternative. Eden encourages residents to use their creativity and accommodates 120 residents, along with 12 cats, 6 dogs, 1,000 pot plants and a Vietnamese pot bellied pig. The building also houses a kindergarten and a disused courtyard has been turned into a playground. Children play, birds sing and the dominant sound is of life, not death.

Historically the relationship between space and thinking was well known – but they don’t make Cathedrals like that anymore. Nevertheless, some people try. The new Strata Centre at MIT by Frank Gehry is intended to stir the creative juices and inspire people to think a little differently. As Mr Gehry himself puts it “if you keep out the light, the mice are dwarfed.” Could the same be true with ideas? Likewise the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stamford University has been built on the premise (if not the promise) that the architecture of a laboratory can influence a scientist’s level of creativity and productivity.

Other organisations that have experimented with the idea that intelligently designed spaces can influence ideas include ad agencies like Chiat/Day in LA who attracted considerable media attention in the 1990s with it’s innovative office.Unfortunately, the icon design managed to alienate the very people it was intended to inspire when staff found out that personal desks and equipment had been banned and that desk space had to be reserved like a restaurant table (as Virginia Wolff said, we also need a room of our own). Nevertheless, the space was ahead of its time in some areas like the neighbourhood (village) layout and the coffee house atmosphere it engendered. Whether the building made the ads any better is a moot point. It certainly built awareness and helped to attract talent – at least until the talent found that they had to store their files and personal belongings in their cars.

Other slightly misguided attempts to design cathedrals for the mind include an office for a media agency in London where all staff sit at a giant 66 ft communal table (no privacy), an email company which had a real lawn in the middle of the office (no water) and a company that created ‘snow’ each morning using shredded waste paper (no point). There’s even a theory that people are more creative if they remove their shoes and socks although I’ve yet to find a company that tests this on a daily basis.

But is the quality of work genuinely related to the nature of the space you’re sitting in? Looking at history again the answer would appear to be no. Great artists have not generally worked in inspiring studios sipping fine champagne. They rent the cheapest space available and then struggle to pay for it. Perhaps this is the point.

Maybe the reason that so much innovation is so mediocre is because companies devote too much time and money to it and people get too comfortable – 70% of all major innovations and discoveries didn’t come out of a garage by accident (actually they did, but that’s another story).

So perhaps we’re all focussing on the wrong problem. Maybe you can’t make offices inspiring places (or design fake ‘garage’) and we shouldn’t even try.

Research by the Roffey Park Management Institute (UK) says that most insights and ideas occur away from the office. They either happen in neutral locations (going for a walk, in the car or, in my own case, on aeroplanes) or they happen at home (in the bath, in bed or in the garden). Interestingly, none of these places involve coloured beanbags, felt pens, great architects or teamwork. They’re just places were individuals are ‘dreaming and drifting’ and thinking about something else other than work.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to make offices more interesting. Maybe the solution is to let individuals design their own spaces in the sense that they’re allowed to personalise their immediate surroundings. Given the rarity of privacy and quietness these days maybe we should try to bring back the idea of personal offices and not look too discouragingly at people who spend hours looking out of the window.

Back in the 1990s Asda (a UK supermarket now owed by Wal-Mart) gave people signs to hang on their doors (offices had doors back then) that said “Quite please. I’m having an idea” Perhaps in the future people will be given thinking breaks to take their brain for a walk.
Or how about reinventing tea breaks or the afternoon siesta? Trends often signify unmet needs so it’s interesting that while only 20% of US companies allow staff to sleep at work, one wide-awake company called Metro Naps in New York is offering stressed out executives a midday rest facility at their sleep station at $14 for 20 minutes.

What can you do to your space to increase the quality of ideas? Here are five ideas:

1. Sit next to someone you don’t know and tell them what you’re working on.
2. Instead of taking work home, take bits of your home to work. Personalise your space.
3. If ideas elude you, don’t just sit there. Stop and do something totally different.
4. If your office doesn’t feed your mind find a favourite place that does.
5. Constantly refresh your space. Bring in outsiders like artists to change it.

Not so long ago companies created departments to create innovation. But the result was often that innovation was turned into a state secret. The only people who knew what was going on (and therefore the only people who could really contribute) were the chosen ones inside the innovation department. Not surprisingly, this approach limits both the quantity and quality of ideas so companies have started to search for new ways of developing new ideas.

One new idea is distributed or open source innovation where customers (or anyone else for that matter) are the co-producers of the products and services they consume.
Open source software development began when one smart individual realised that he wasn’t half as smart as all the other people he knew if he put them together. The open source movement worked in software because the original motive was altruistic — the end product was given away for free — and people thought they were on the side of David fighting a mighty Goliath (or Bill, as most people know him).

This is networked innovation made possible by the Internet. Ideas (or problems) are made freely available to anyone that cares to look at them. The result is smart software with the bugs ironed out in record time.

Recently the idea has been transferred to all manner of projects ranging from an open source encyclopaedia (www.wikipedia.org) and collaborative industrial design (www.thinkcycle.com) to open source aeroplane design, cola recipes, film scripts and beer. The latter was developed with the help of some self-appointed beer aficionados (found on the Internet) who created everything from the name of the beer to its packaging and advertising. Even NASA has embraced the idea by using volunteer scientists (or ‘clickworkers’) to identity and catalogue craters on the surface of Mars.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity for open source innovation lies with pharmaceuticals. One of the problems with traditional pharmaceutical R&D is that the patent system effectively blocks outside insights or enhancements to a particular discovery or invention. It also means that there is little or no incentive to develop drugs aimed at people (or countries) with little or no money to spend.

There are some other parallels between open source software development and pharmaceuticals research. Both tend to employ young researchers who are keen to be involved with ‘big vision’ projects and professional status is often seen as being more important than financial reward.

So how can open source principles be adopted by commercial organisations? In some ways open source can be thought of as a suggestion box scheme – albeit one with a giant transparent box. A topic is posted on a website and anyone from industry experts to members of the public can contribute to the solution. Everything is transparent in the sense that all ideas are shared and discussed in public. In some instances people will do this for nothing, while in others they will ultimately have to be paid in some way.

Some detractors argue that open source innovation is little more than giant focus groups but there are big differences. The first is sheer scale. Focus groups rarely involve more than a hundred people. Open source can involve thousands and still turn things around faster than more traditional approaches. Second, focus groups usually ask people to react to ideas. Open source asks people for solutions and allows ideas to build cumulatively. Third, focus groups rely on a representative sample of people who are ‘ordinary’ and by definition uninterested. Open source relies on people who are articulate, passionate and enthusiastic.

Another point, articulated by both John Kao and Ross Dawson, is that traditional innovation can be compared to classical music whereas the open source model is more like Jazz. Classical innovation is usually driven by a single leader with a team following detailed notes. The end result is faithful in letter and spirit to the original objective.Open source, in contrast, involves individuals improvising against a background score. Sometimes there is no leader or set framework and the results can be quite unexpected.

A good example of a company moving towards an open source approach is Procter & Gamble. The company has an objective to generate 50% of new product ideas from outside the company. P& G’s Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment process (CPFR) is a collaborative and transparent process that allows P&G’s customers and suppliers to improve its supply chain. Another example is P&G’s use of the virtual technology market yet2.com. P&G lists every one of its thousands of patents on yet2.com in the hope that it will facilitate connections and ideas from the outside.

OK, so how can you use the open source model to kick start innovation within your organisation? Here are some thoughts to get the ball rolling.

1. Innovation is not a department — make sure it’s job #1 for everyone.
2. Bring back the company suggestion box — but make it virtual and transparent.
3. Don’t just ask for ideas — clearly formulate the problem and then ask for solutions.
4. Seek out and attract enthusiasts for your product and collaborate with them.
5. Give away your product for free to people that might help you to improve it.

Can anyone be creative? Companies and consultants alike say the answer is yes.

The British Government for one says that we are all creative and it’s education and workplace environments that are at fault for not providing enough recognition or encouragement. This is a fashionable argument, but is it true?

I would argue that some people are blessed with natural gifts, while for others circumstances and training shape what they’re good at. We can’t all be good at everything and therefore, by definition, we’re not all creative.

However, in meritocratic societies, there’s a belief that deep down we’re all the same and we can all be good at anything if we just put our minds to it. This applies to creativity too. Some consultants would have us believe that if companies would just adopt the right culture, and if employees would just follow the right processes, the floodgates of creativity will open. In other words, all companies can be creative if they just put their budgets to it.

There are a number of problems with this belief. First, even if it’s true that we can all be creative, we can’t all achieve creative greatness. You can teach anyone to play the piano, but you can’t teach anyone to be musical or be a concert pianist.

Having said this, in my experience the problem inside most organizations is not coming up with more creative ideas. It’s usually finding ways to find the ideas you’re already got and filtering the good ones from the bad. I was once involved in a one-day ideation workshop for Campbell’s which yielded over 450 new ideas. But the best idea by far was an idea they’d thought of themselves a year before and done nothing with.

Secondly, there’s widespread confusion between creativity (the ability to see things differently and have original ideas) and innovation (the ability to make new ideas actually happen). Or as William Coyne, Senior Vice President for R&D at 3M Inc once put it: “Creativity is thinking of new and appropriate ideas whereas innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas within an organisation. In other words creativity is the concept and innovation is the process”.

One of the main problems with innovation is that companies fail to make this distinction. Creativity is embraced because it sounds like fun (and appears to be low cost). But if you open your mind too far your brain will fall out. So companies embrace creativity (ideas) and hope that innovation (action) will happen by osmosis.

And this is where it really starts to fall apart. Some companies seem to be incapable of implementing anything new — or if they do it’s usually taken so long that the opportunity has usually passed them by or the idea has been diluted so far it’s invisible.

For example, companies like Unilever have known about the fresh pasta opportunity for ages but done almost nothing about it. The development of Mars ice cream is another well-known example of a great idea being put on ice for years.

The main enemy of ideas is not risk but inertia.

Companies also think they can be great at both creativity and innovation when generally they’re either good at one or the other. The trick is to know which you’re good at and then to go outside for the other. However, doing this involves a level of self-knowledge and confidence that many companies lack.

The good news is that even if a company is hopeless at coming up with new ideas
they can employ all sorts of people for almost no money to do it for them — which probably says something about the value of ideas without implementation.

Alternatively you can employ a consultant to put a process in place to help you generate and capture more ideas yourself. This will probably work quite well if what you’re after is a constant flow of incremental innovations (continuous improvements to existing products and services). However, if you want to change the world you’re probably better off looking somewhere else. Rules are precisely what paradigm shifters break.

Real originality has never emerged from a formula – it generally comes from small companies, inventors, entrepreneurs and mavericks working in back of garages and garden sheds. So what can you do if you’re seeking this sort of radical innovation?

Maybe the trick is not to try and act like a small start-up by imitating their ‘processes’ (which most of them don’t have), but simply to seek out their ideas and reapply them to your own situation. Procter and Gamble call this ‘find and re-apply’. Unilever call it ‘creative swiping’. I’d call it innovation transfer.

Better still, rather than stealing their ideas, simply buy them (licence their idea or just buy the company). The one thing the small ideas guys usually don’t have is precisely what the big guys are so good at – the skills to turn a new idea into an innovation. Corporates have the experience to get new ideas into market. They also have the knowledge to scale them up if they’re successful and the legal resources to protect them.

So don’t always think that you can do everything yourself.

According to James Andrew and Harold Sirkin at the Boston Consulting Group there are three approaches to innovation: the Integrator approach, the Orchestrator approach and the Licensor approach. Again the trick is to know which you’re best at and work out what suits the specific situation or market.

Most big companies try and control everything (the integrator approach), but this takes time and money. So much time and money in fact that urgency and focus have a tendency to disappear. However, this approach can suit big companies in established markets where a core skill or brand that can be leveraged.

The second approach is to join forces with other companies to implement an idea (the orchestrator approach). This reduces the risk (and the returns) but it’s a smart move when you’re dealing with an idea that’s outside your comfort zone (e.g. a new technology or new distribution channel).

The final approach (the licensor model) is to simply sell your idea to someone else.
This suits ideas with a strong intellectual property component where you’re too busy
(or you lack the necessary skills or brand credibility) to implement it yourself.

So, to sum up, don’t confuse creativity with innovation. Identify what you’re good at and then stick to it. Most individuals and organizations are not great at everything and it’s a sign of strength to get some help or co-operate in the area where you’re weakest.

Here are a few tips and suggestions to increase your level of creativity and innovation.

1.Work out what your core skill or offer is and innovate around that area.
2. Don’t look for new ideas until you’re exhausted your supply of old (existing) ideas.
3. If you’re having trouble sorting your ideas use an idea matrix. Click here for example
4. If an idea’s great but just doesn’t fit, don’t waste it — try selling it to another company.
5. People and markets naturally reject new ideas so think about paths of least resistance.

Time famine is a well documented trend that’s driving a plethora of innovations. One of my favourites is the guy on eBay who is selling pre-loaded iPods to cash rich time poor individuals. Presumably it won’t be too long before this person discovers market segmentation and you’ll be able to buy iPods pre-loaded with specific bands or genres of music.

Other interpretations of this trend include a move towards portability by food companies like Mars who are keen to get a ‘share of mouth’ from people who no longer have time to sit down and eat (in the US15% of all meals are now eaten in cars).

Take newspapers. One reason why they’re are a declining market is because people no longer have the time to sit down for breakfast to read them. A solution is to change the method of delivery to something more in line with modern lifestyles and routines. Hey presto online newspapers. Some of these e-papers allow you to customise what you receive. Not quite the ‘Daily Me’ but it’s getting closer. Or if you prefer your news made from trees there are still several ways to save time. If you live in Switzerland there’s 20 Minuten — a newspaper that can be read in less than 20 minutes. In the UK there’s a magazine called The Week that summarizes the top stories from the previous week’s newspapers.

Too much information (TMI) is a close relative of Time famine. Some people are now so overloaded with information during the day that they can’t cope with an overly long menu at night. So in London there’s a restaurant called Clark’s with barely any choice at all. They do most of the thinking and all the cooking for you. Salt restaurant in New York works along similar lines. Indeed, it can only be a matter of time before someone opens a restaurant with absolutely no choice at all — they’ll choose all the food and all the wine for you.

TMI also has a couple of distant cousins — Too much choice (TMC) and Too many options (TMO). Again these trends are spawning a host of new products and services centred on the need for edited choice. Examples include retailers using lists of the 100 best books of all time and magazines writing about 50 places to see before you die. There’s even a shop in London called Microzine where the merchandise is ‘curated’ by the owner and a store called Hype in Sydney that searches the world for the very latest and greatest sneakers.

Why is all this happening? Basically it’s because trends like speeding up, customisation, consumer choice and instant communication spawn counter trends. People no longer have the time (or the energy) to make informed decisions based upon a rigorous examination of every alternative — so they’re paying other people (and technology) to edit the choice for them. This is giving rise to manufactured simplicity – a new industry of professional ‘sifters’ that sort information for other people.

Some companies are fully aware of these trends and do their best to make things as easy as possible for their customers. For some this means stripping out unnecessary functionality to create products like washing machines with just a couple of simple buttons.

Other companies are relying on more technology to create simplicity, which seems like a contradiction and ultimately a recipe for disaster to me. Cars are a case in point. There’s clearly a market for the latest gizmo loaded, computer controlled wonder wagon. But surely there’s also a market (retirees for example) for a car that’s built as simply as possible. A car that just goes from A to B and when it doesn’t is easy and quick to fix.

This need for editing applies to corporations too. Procter and Gamble own over 250 different brands but 50% of global revenues and profits come from just 12 of them.

Meanwhile, some consumers are creating their own simplicity by switching off as much technology as possible. MIT graduate Eric Brendle opted out and moved to the countryside without any technology at all. This created so much time to think that he managed to write a book called Better Off: Flipping the switch on technology.

I recently met an individual who had removed the voicemail on his cell-phone because it was creating more work. His argument was that if something was really important the caller would always ring back.

Other manifestations of this desire for simplicity include the Slow Cities movement (a spin off from the Slow Food movement), downshifting and no email Fridays. There’s even a book about going slow rapidly racing up the worldwide best seller lists (In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré).

If you sell a product or a service to time starved, information flooded, stressed out customers what can you do to make their lives a little easier? Here are some thoughts:

1. Listen to what your customers want ahead of what R&D say they can do.
2. Think about time consequences — remote call answering doesn’t benefit customers.
3. For some companies nostalgia is an emotional short cut to eras that denote simplicity.
4. If you use lists remember to keep them really short.

In his classic 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the people who achieve “fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.” In other words, when it comes to innovation, organisations can be disabled by experience and specialisation.

Both Einstein and Picasso were at their most original in their early years – the young Einstein invented the special theory of relativity in 1905 when he was just 26 years old. In 1907 a 26 year old Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and effectively invented cubism.

Of course the idea of youth was itself new in the early 1900s and it wasn’t until the 1950s that someone ‘invented’ teenagers. But some companies still haven’t quite caught up with the idea that it’s young people (a company’s staff and customers) that are the most likely to invent the future.

There are plenty of reasons why the most innovative people in any organisation are the newest recruits. Young people tend to have the most energy and the most confidence. They’re also ‘outsiders’ and have little respect for tradition or orthodoxy. Their lack of experience can also be an asset because they’re not restrained by history or preconceptions. Older employees, on the other hand, know that it has all been tried (and failed) before.

This lack of experience was something that Seymour Cray (an early designer of high-speed computers) seized upon. Cray had a policy of hiring young fresh faced engineers because they didn’t yet know what couldn’t be done. A company called Fresh Minds (www.freshminds.co.uk) works on a similar principle. They supply freshly minted graduates to some of the world’s top companies.

Another issue is that the longer you work for an organisation, the more you adopt groupthink and the further removed you become from real life (how customers think, feel and behave). I once worked with one of the largest automotive companies in the world who wanted to understand how people really bought cars. In one meeting we innocently asked a group of 35 senior executives when they had last bought a car on their own with their own money. Not a single person could remember. In contrast, the younger employees who were not given cars had a real grasp of reality as a result.

Another car company, Toyota, once put together a ‘board’ of children to advise them on product development. Hasbro has done the same with toys and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre once asked some school kids to attend a series brainstorming sessions on the future of technology. Indeed, as Grouch Marx said, “a six year old child could understand this — quick, get me a six year old child”.

Just after the American Civil War a doctor called George Beard got interested in whether there was a connection between age and creative ability. He found that there was and that creativity peaks around the age of forty. Moreover, he estimated that 70% of global creative output came from people under the age of forty-five.A few years later another study by Harvey Lehman observed that, whilst the finding was true, the relationship between creativity and age varied according to discipline.

Conversely, it’s also some of the oldest employees (and especially those that are closest to retirement) that have the best ideas because they have little or no responsibility for the outcomes. They’re not restrained by the practicalities of implementation and they no longer care what anyone else in the organisation thinks about them. Mix these people up with some young minds and the results can be explosive.

So what are the practical lessons here for innovation teams?

1. Involve some of the newest recruits. If you don’t know any find some.
2. Think like a kid yourself sometimes — keep asking why?
3. Hire curious people and don’t always get hung up on experience.
4. Plug into the brains of older employees (even those that have retired).
5. Mix innocence with expertise (new ideas often favour youth, whilst development and execution often suit experience).

Finally, ensure that teams are multi-disciplinary. This doesn’t just mean getting someone from marketing and someone from R&D. Involve customer service, customer complaints, sales, finance and production. And whatever you do, try not to put together a group where everyone is the same age, the same sex and went to the same school. Because, guess what? they’ll probably all have the same idea.

Albert Einstein said that “if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. In this vein, here’s a list of some of my favourite ideas and innovations from the past 18 months, together with a few comments and suggestions. Work out for yourself which are sublime and which are ridiculous.

• A company in Japan has developed a bicycle that pumps up its own tyres. Kinetic energy from the wheels drives small pumps hidden in each wheel hub. Has anyone applied this idea to automobiles, buses or trucks?

• If you’re the type who likes to live dangerously, especially on holiday, then you might be interested in Dogtag insurance. The UK based company covers a huge range of sports from scuba to snowboarding. Using a unique dog tag identity tag, which is worn around your neck at all times, emergency medical staff can confirm that you are covered for medical insurance and will instantly know of any medical conditions. It looks pretty cool too. Why can’t other ‘invisible’ products be given a physical presence?

• A Swedish company has developed an organic alternative to cremation. The problem with burning bodies is that the process releases toxins into the atmosphere. Freezing bodies to —196C and then shattering them into very small pieces (and then removing the water and metal content) is deemed a safer alternative.

• Pet owners these days don’t like the idea that their pet might die before they do, so Procter & Gamble has created an Iams (petfood) branded MRI scanning service for cats and Dogs. The company is also launching a pet insurance service to pay for the US $1,200 scans. What other human innovations could be transferred to animals or vice versa?

• Dulux in the UK has created a paint that makes it easier to re-paint white walls. The paint starts off pink but dries white making sure you don’t miss anything.

• A group of rather inventive cultural activists called the Carbon Defence League recently put together a web site (www.re-code.com) featuring the bar codes of everyday supermarket items — only with all the prices reduced! Visitors to the site could print the bar codes onto stickers and re-price their weekly shop. What else could you print for yourself?

• How do you know if your toddler is wearing the right sized baby shoes? One way is to make shoes with transparent soles so you can take a look at their feet. Genius.

• A Japanese phone company (NTT DoCoMo) has introduced a smart tag that allows shoppers to interrogate clothes mannequins. If a suitability-equipped phone is held next to the tag information such as price, colours and sizes is instantly downloaded to the phone. Given our thirst for information (and our lack of time), surely this technology could be used elsewhere?

• We’ve seen transparent cameras and see through staplers. Now a transparent canoe has been designed for people who want to see what lies beneath. Not recommended if you live in shark infested waters.

• A US car safety group has come up with the novel idea of printing expiry dates on the walls of tyres. What else could use by dates be applied to?

• Triangular taps produce the smallest drips, according to mathematicians at Harvard University. The discovery should influence inkjet printer design and may increase printer resolution. Could the idea work with pens or needles?

• In what has been referred to as a trend for ‘creative sentencing’; a judge in the US has ordered a woman driver who killed a man in a car crash to carry a photograph of the victim in her wallet.

• Forgotten you door keys again? No problem with a domestic door lock that operates by fingerprint recognition. The system recognises up to 20 different prints.

• Headblade is a razor specially designed for shaving your head (which, of course, is a different shape to your face).

• What if, instead of typing your name into google, you could scan in a picture of your face and find out how many times your photograph or image appears. This could be used to monitor illegal surveillance or usage.

• Known criminals in south-east London (UK), are likely to get a big surprise with the installation of street cameras linked to facial recognition software. Similar technology is being used in a hockey stadium in Utah.

• Lick’ems are the world’s first glow in the dark popsicles. They’re sold in selected dark venues like night-clubs. Is there a market for other glow in the dark foods or drinks?

• Idea from Japan — selling cheap voice recorders to forgetful old people. How else can we stop people forgetting?

• Sony and another Japanese company, Toppan, have invented a paper disc that can hold 25 gigabytes of information. This is five times the amount that can be stored on conventional DVDs. The paper disc has an added security advantage because it can be shredded, burned or simply torn up.

• Radio Your Way is a normal AM/FM radio that, thanks to an in-built timer, allows you to record radio programmes in the same way as your VCR. Brilliant. Why has nobody thought of this before?

• Virgin Atlantic Airways has an in-flight bar and massage service while Gulf Air has a ‘Sky Nanny’ service on selected flights. What else remains to be introduced on-board aircraft?

• An author in the UK is being paid by Ford to feature a Ford Fiesta in her new novel (but are they putting copies of the book into new Ford Fiestas?).

• Given all the technology fitted to modern cars, it’s remarkable that the gauge in conventional fuel tanks, which is linked to a float sensor, is still inaccurate. ‘Empty’ could mean anything from nothing to a gallon or more. Touch Sensor Technologies has developed a gauge that uses technology usually found in flat electronic keypads.

• What’s the biggest problem with glass? Fifty years ago it was the fact that it broke. These days it’s the fact that it gets dirty (cue nanotechnology and self-cleaning glass). Another less obvious problem is the fact that you can see through it. Transparent glass is energy inefficient so what’s really needed is glass that’s transparent in winter (self-heating) and opaque in summer (self-cooling). An innovation called Smartglass does both.

• Quiet steel is a metal that makes much less noise. The idea is to place a 0.001-inch layer of polymer between two sheets of metal (in a similar way to safety glass). Quiet steel absorbs vibrational energy and cuts down on noise in everything from cars to computers. Could the idea work in reverse? — maybe there’s a niche market for noisy versions of quiet products, for example a noisy wristwatch.

• A German supermarket chain has opened a store in Austria aimed at older shoppers. The stores feature permanently large prices — and if you still can’t read them there are magnifying glasses available on each isle. The aisles are also wider than normal, the shelves lower, the floor non-slip and the lighting anti-glare. Some of the trolleys are also designed to hook onto wheelchairs while others double as seats. What would a Gen Y supermarket look like?

• Scientists in New Zealand have invented a fruit sticker that changes colour when fruit is ripe. How about food packaging that changes colour when the food is off?

• The US department of Energy has suggested that oil companies think about adding perfumes to diesel fuel to cover up its foul smell. The odour of diesel is one of the main reasons why the fuel is not more popular, especially among female drivers. Meanwhile Bentley has created a branded smell to be applied to all new models (the smell of money presumably). Is there anyone out there with another smelly product that could be made to smell sweeter?

• A UK company is the first car insurance company to publicly admit using lie detection technology to reduce false claims. The DigiLog ‘voice stress analysis’ technology analyses a caller’s voice looking for stress indicators such as raised voice tone (lying creates stress that affects blood pressure which in turn narrows the larynx).

• With a touch of sublime insight, an Australian department store (David Jones) put a breast cancer-screening clinic in its lingerie department. Where could you put a screening unit for prostrate cancer?

• Mitsubishi has developed a product called the i-glass. This is a wineglass with an embedded microchip and radio frequency coil in its base that sends a message to the bar when your glass is empty.

• First came the self-heating sake can in Japan. Now a South Korean entrepreneur has invented the world’s first self-cooling can. Self-heating and self-cooling drink cans have been done, so what else could the idea be applied to? How about hot (or cold) face or hand cloths in a can?

• How can you stop graffiti on the railways? One solution, adopted by the Newcastle Metro in England, is to play 24-hour classical music on station platforms. A similar idea would presumably work if you played rap music to get rid of anyone over the age of 40.

• Corus Steel in the UK has produced what it claims is the world’s first square tin (which looks a bit like the old Spam tins to anyone old enough to remember). The benefit of the new tins is that they use 20% less space than conventional round tins.

• A Japanese company (the Fuji Spinning Company), has launched a range of vitamin enhanced clothing. Each garment has added extracts of seaweed and caffeine, which are supposed to make you thinner by massaging your bottom. Other smart clothes include T-shirts with added vitamin C and vitamin enchanced underwear. On a more serious note (but not much), other clothing companies are producing business suits that block electromagnetic radiation (from cellphones) and stress reducing clothes impregnated with aromatherapy oils.

• Police in Stoke-on-Trent in England are being asked to do all their paperwork in fully marked police cars outside the houses of regular criminals.

Can biology teach us anything about innovation? The essence of Darwinism is that progress is created by adaptation to changed conditions. What starts as a random mutation can also spread to become the norm through a process of natural selection.The same is surely true with innovation. New ideas are mutations created when two or more old ideas combine. For instance, Virgin Atlantic Airways is what happens when you cross an entertainment company with an airline business.

Virgin is also a good example of mutation and adaptation. The music retail business was created when a postal strike threatened to shut down the fledgling mail order record company. Virgin Atlantic was the result of an unsolicited approach from outside the company. Virgin Blue (a low-cost airline in Australia) is a similar story.

In my experience, what makes Virgin innovative is a strong sense of self, an ability to experiment, the skill to cross-fertilise ideas and a willingness to change. The company has largely grown, not through the unfolding of some master plan, but through an accumulation of learning and ideas caused by threats, accidents and luck.

So, if external events and adaptation are the driving forces of biological evolution, is it possible to develop an innovation process that seeks out accidents and mutations?
This is an idea being developed by companies like Brand Genetics in the UK www.brandgenetics.com and Dr Ron Alexander in Australia.

The list of things created by accident is certainly impressive; Aspirin, Band-Aid, Diners Club, DNA Finger Printing, Dynamite, Inoculation, Jell-O, Lamborghini cars, Microwave Ovens, Nylon, Penicillin, Velcro and Vodafone to name just a few.

However, one of the defining characteristics of business is a preoccupation with orderly process (“if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”). So it’s hard to imagine corporate cultures embracing randomness, or agreeing with John Lennon who said:“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”.

Accidents are born of experimentation, but automotive and fashion are almost the only industries that publicly experiment with radical mutations. What, for example, is the soft drink industry equivalent of a concept car at the Detroit Motor Show?

Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, www.zara.com is a classic example of experimentation and adaptation. Store managers send customer feedback and observations to in-house design teams via PDAs. This helps the company to spot fashion trends and adapt merchandise to local tastes.

Just-in-time production (an idea transferred from the automotive industry), then gives the company an edge in terms of speed and flexibility. The result is a 3-week turnaround time for new products (the industry average is 9 months), and 10,000 new designs every year – none of which stay in store for more than 4 weeks.

The analogy of biology also leads to an interesting idea about whether companies are best thought of in mechanical or biological terms. Traditionally we have likened companies to machines. Organisations are mechanical devices (engines if you like) that can be tuned by experts to deliver optimum performance.

For companies that are looking to fine tune what they already do this is probably correct. A product like the Porsche 911 evolves due to a process of continuous improvement and slowly changing environmental factors. The focus is on repetition. Development is logical and linear.

However, if you’re seeking to revolutionise a product or market the biological model is an interesting thinking tool. In this context biology reminds us that random events and non-linear thinking cause developmental jumps. Unlike machines, living things have the ability to identify and translate opportunities and threats into strategies for survival. A good example is Mercedes-Benz working with Swatch watches to create the Smart car www.thesmart.co.uk

Creative leaps are usually the result of accidental cross-fertilisation (variation) or rapid adaptation caused by the threat of change. Hence the importance of identifying an enemy, setting unrealistic deadlines and using diverse teams to create paradigm shifts.

The later is a route employed by MIT who mix different disciplines together. As Nicholas Negroponte puts it: “ New ideas do not necessarily live within the borders of existing intellectual domains. In fact they are most often at the edges and in curious intersections”.

This is a thought echoed by Edward Be Bono who talks about the need for provocation and discontinuity. In order to come up with a new solution you must first jump laterally to a different start or end point.

For example, if you want to revolutionise the hotel industry you need to identify the assumptions upon which the industry operates and then create a divergent strategy.
This could lead you to invent Formule 1 Hotels www.formule1.com (keep prices low by focussing on beds, hygiene and privacy), or another value innovator, easyHotel www.easyhotel.com (keep rooms cheap by making guests hire their own bed linen and clean their own rooms).

What else can you do to create these jumps? A good place to start is to look at the edge (fringe) of existing markets. Here you’ll find the misfits and the rebels. Companies that see things differently. People young enough not to realise that new ideas are impossible, or old enough not to care.

How else can you use a Darwinian approach to innovation? Here are five ideas:

• Look at the big evolutionary picture — what are the driving forces?
• Create mutations – unusual combinations of people and ideas.
• Look for new ideas and conditions that could disrupt your market.
• Treat accidents as opportunities for divergence and adaptation.
• Co-operate with other companies (create mutually beneficial eco-systems)

Finally, remember the words of Charles Darwin:“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.

My columns for Fast Company are being migrated to the new Fast Company.com website. In the meantime I’m posting as many of the originals as I can find here. Be aware that some of these go back to 2004 and many ideas have moved on to say the least. ‘Columns’ also includes various other magazine and newspaper writings.

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There’s nothing like being in the right place at the right time. Smart companies spend big money on research and development to ensure that their offerings are up to date — and to make sure they don’t miss out on lucrative new opportunities. Traditionally, this practice has been the sole stomping ground of qualitative and quantitative research firms, but not any more. After all, nobody anticipated that trendspotting itself would become a trend. Of course, forecasting and analyzing trends is not new. Automobile manufacturers have strategically planned the colors of new makes and models for decades, and fashion designers use forecasting to predict what we’ll wear three or four seasons ahead. What is new is the emergence and widespread adoption of trendspotting by organizations outside such industries. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Campbell’s Soup, Lego, Marks & Spencer, Virgin, and ICI all use trend forecasting as part of their innovation processes and as a way to anticipate what their customers will want in the future. Why is this happening now? Many business leaders have lost confidence in traditional consumer research methodologies, especially when applied to innovation. This also ties into a general decline of trust (itself a major trend), the increasing acceleration of business, and the quest for certainty and security. There is also the belief that, in a scientific age, it should be possible to predict what’s going to happen next. Companies are therefore constantly looking for new ways to ensure that they don’t become the victims of change and end up with a warehouse full of unsold inline scooters. Remember the Razor? That’s why trends can be double-edged swords. On the one hand, they are very useful. They can provide a strategic framework for innovation and help organizations keep existing products and services relevant. But being aware of trends — developing and otherwise — is not foolproof.

An American prostitute called “Kirsten” has had sex with the Governor of New York.
He’s now very sorry and she’s now very famous. It’s happened before and it will happen again. And let’s be honest, this kind of behaviour does have certain precedents (or is that presidents?) in the White House. But the real story here isn’t about sex or infidelity, it’s about the making of celebrity and, in particular, how different generations view privacy.

How “Kristen” got outed is unclear. Once her real name became known there was almost no candid detail about her that the media — or anyone else with an internet connection — didn’t know about. Ashley Dupre’s MySpace page has already received five million hits. We know what she likes and what she thinks. We also know she has 1,799 ‘friends’ — or 1,798 if you exclude an ex Governor known as “Mr Clean.”

It is alleged that “Mr Clean’ got caught is because of a phone tap, which is touchingly old-fashioned. However, it is doubtful whether this is the only evidence. No form of communication is safe these days. Neither are digital payments. Assuming he didn’t pay in cash for ‘services rendered’ there will be a data trail linking “Mr Clean” to “dirty” Ms Dupre. If the media is lucky there might even be some ‘material’ evidence that makes its way into court – or perhaps onto eBay. In other words, privacy in a digital and connected age is dead. Gen Y knows this and doesn’t care. Gen X and the Boomer Generation either don’t realise or are horrified.

As for the young Ms Dupre (22), she probably can’t see what all the fuss is about.
After all, posting personal material on a social networking site like MySpace is de-rigour these days. It’s the way young people keep in touch. These are places where Gen Y hangs, shops and expose themselves safe in the knowledge that their privacy-obsessed parents have no idea what they’re doing. It’s a way to see and be seen and to keep in touch with friends, especially if you have 1,799 of them.

But in Cyberspace nothing ever dies. If you upload something there is no guarantee that you will ever be able to get it back again. It could be cut and pasted and appear on countless other websites and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Equally, whilst you might deactivate an account on a social networking site but there is no guarantee that personal information will be removed from the website’s servers.

So if, as a 19-year-old, you appear in a rather explicit amateur video on YouPorn or post drunken photographs on Facebook or it could stay up forever for prospective marriage partners or future employers or to see.

So far, legal cases concerning the issue of privacy online are almost unheard of but it’s surely only a matter of time. I already know of Gen X employers that use social networking sites to research prospective Gen Y employees and only last week I heard of a forty-year-old boss stumbling upon a conversation that one of his junior members of staff was having online about whether or not to quit his “horrible” job.

It’s a tangled world wide web we are weaving.

Maybe this bothers you. Maybe it doesn’t. Your attitude towards privacy will depend on how old you are. If you are aged thirty or forty plus you probably cringe at the thought of allowing the world to peer past the net curtains into your life. How could anyone be so naive as to be a prostitute and have a MySpace page?

But if you’re younger you probably can’t see what the problem is. Ms Dupre will sell her story and gain instant global celebrity. She told the truth about herself and has emerged victorious. There will be a book, a talkshow and a range of politically incorrect underwear.

So what will happen in the future? The internet has removed many of the factors that limit our behaviour offline, but this boundary between real and virtual life will disappear, especially as mobile devices become the primary portals of connectivity.

We will also see the emergence of technology refuseniks. In most cases these will be older people ‘unplugging’ as a way of dealing with privacy concerns or information overload. However, many younger people will also move ‘off network’ because the social pressure to be always online or collect digital friends will create a kind of Facebook fatigue or MySpace malaise. Similarly, younger people will use multiple online personas to protect their identity online.

The good news is that all this digital connectivity will make individuals and institutions more transparent, which will make us more honest, but it will also mean much less privacy. Corey Worthington would understand.

Sorry folks, things have got a bit busy with the launch of my book coming up. I’ll post a few more bits from the book in a while, but in the meantime here’s the latest column I’ve written for Fast Company magazine in the US.

Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead.

There is an element of business, which, as far as I know, has never been written about. Business is like gardening. That’s right; growing a business is like growing a tree. I know this sounds flaky, and I’ve probably lost many of you at this point, but for those of you that remain, consider this: most metaphors about business are about sport or war. This is useful, but the fatal floor in these analogies is that both have an end point in the immediate future. Moreover, the objective of both is to defeat a clearly defined enemy. Aims and outcomes are always fairly clear.

But business isn’t like that and neither is gardening.

Gardening has no end. There is no finish line. It is about a journey not a specific destination. Moreover, whilst business and gardening certainly have enemies, focusing on them too much can divert your attention away from the real game. A good example of this is the historical war between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which, in my view, has all too often shifted attention away from the customer.

The feeling in most organizations like these is that business is a mechanical process. In this context the analogies of war and sport are very apt. It’s all about pre-planned strategies, resources and control within a fairly fixed environment or known set of rules.

But real life doesn’t work quite like that does it? We cannot control everything and it is egotistical to think that we can. So perhaps better metaphors are rooted in plants not machinery, especially as we move away from fixed pyramidal structures to informal (and often temporary) organizational networks.

If you start to think of business ideas as plants, your mindset shifts. In this metaphor you plant a business idea in a patch of soil, which is set within an overall grand scheme or design, water it and watch it grow.

But, as any gardener knows, half your plants won’t grow. There is an early American saying about gardening that you can apply to business: “One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.” Business, like gardening, is about flexibility and persistence in the face of changing external circumstances.

However, even tenacity doesn’t always work. Sometimes plants don’t grow because they have been put in the wrong place or because pests have destroyed them. Either way you have to nurse them back to health or yank them out and start all over again.

Planting things in the right place is vital. According to Ian Davis, Managing Director of McKinsey & Company: “In sectors such as banking, telecommunications and technology, almost two-thirds of the organic growth of listed Western companies can be attributed to being in the right markets and geographies.” In other words, a good business idea in the wrong place can struggle whereas an average business idea in a perfect spot is likely to do well.

Then there’s the opposite problem. Sometimes things grow so fast that they overshadow what’s next to them and they have to be moved if both plants are to flourish. Perhaps the parallel here is with ‘skunkworks,’ where teams are moved away from the shadow of parent company.

For example, the telecommunications firm Vodafone was created by accident as a tiny division of Racal Electronics. Someone, somewhere, was given the green light to plant something and see whether it would grow. It did and Vodafone is now a GB £80 billion colossus that dwarfs its former parent, although I wonder whether this rapid growth would have been achieved if it had been left in the shadow of Racal.

Of course, sometimes things grow so well that, over many years, the soil becomes exhausted and the only solution is to start again. This is not a bad thing. It is just part of a natural cycle. Fields must be allowed to lay fallow every so often if they are to regain their natural health and vitality. This applies to organizations but it also applies to people. Sometimes there is a tendency to think that you’re useless when in fact all that is wrong is that you are working in the wrong place or you are exhausted. So if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired take some time off and take a rest.

Does any of this apply to innovation?

Yes and no. Business is like gardening but ultimately the metaphor falls down because innovations are like weeds. They grow where they’re not supposed to and cannot be cultivated like orchids in a greenhouse. You cannot sow weeds in any meaningful sense, you can only provide the conditions necessary for them to grow, which in many instances means leaving them well alone. Weeds thrive on neglect.

Therefore, if you want innovation in your business, all you can really do is recognise what a weed looks like and allow certain of them to carry on growing even when they are in the ‘wrong’ place in your garden.