David Owens of Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Graduate School of Management outlines what his research has shown him are the the most common hurdles for innovation that a company might encounter:

- Failures of innovation are failures of ideas, and to meet this challenge companies need to train people to use the tools and processes that help them “think differently” and enable them to become better at generating and recognizing good ideas.

- A company’s social climate will determine whether an innovation succeeds.

- The company or organization needs a strategy for innovation.

- Innovation fails when a firm competing among a group of rivals in an industry fails to produce something customers want.

- For an innovation to succeed, it has to be technologically feasible.

He says: ”By learning to analyze these constraints in advance, turning from retrospective analysis to proactive strategy development, you can dramatically improve your chances of innovation success.”

Pop star Cee Lo Green will make about $20 million this year. His hit single “Forget You” (actually it’s not “Forget”, but another shorter word beginning with the same letter) became the 12th most downloaded track of all time. But his music sales represent only a small proportion of his earnings. The New York Times calculates “F*** You” earned him about $700,000. The other $19 million or so come from a variety of projects and deals.  Cee Lo‘s management company, Primary Wave Music, has come up with some very creative ways to make money for Cee Lo without relying on music sales. Not so long ago sales of recorded music were the mainstay of any musician‘s earnings as a hit single would lead to big album sales and plenty of cash, but now with the demise of the album artists like Cee Lo have had to look elsewhere. Primary Wave’s CEO Larry Mestel says album sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie. A stream of TV appearances, endorsement deals, TV commercials have traded on and built Cee Lo‘s brand. He’s been a judge on TV talent show “The Voice”, has his own shown on cable network Fuse, appeared on Saturday Night Live and been in TV commercials for 7-Up, Absolut Vodka and M&M’s. Next year he will have his own show, “Loberace“, in Las Vegas and will star in a Mark Burnett produced TV show in the UK called “Cee Lo Takes the UK.” What Primary Wave is doing for Cee Lo is the model for the future of the music industry, and is a good lesson in creativity and innovation for many other industries that are seeing their worlds changing through technology. Necessity breeds invention, and without invention we might find ourselves being forgotten.

Without a culture of creativity in a business and without resorting to just copying other people’s ideas (hello China), innovation becomes impossible. And innovation is what drives growth in the good times, and survival in challenging ones.  The President of Ohio-based bathroom fixtures company Moen, David Lingafelter, is convinced that innovation driven by creativity is what has helped his company survive the recession. Interviewed earlier this year he said they don’t just follow trends, they also try to create them. Once a year Moen designers get together to sketch out products that don’t yet exist.  “They’ll sketch for an afternoon, and they’ll bring ideas to each other,” he says. “They’ll work off of the energy of one another. You’d be surprised at what comes out of that. If you’re working around a bunch of people who love to do it, energy gets created. It feeds on itself. If you say we’re going to make the same chrome faucet, turn the lights out and run the machines, no one wants that. Whether it’s our product development process, whether it’s functionality innovation, whether it’s style uniqueness, all of that stuff excites people.” Escaping from the everyday reality to envision future possibilities are clearly a key part of innovation for Moen and should be for all businesses.

Bjork has released her new album, Biophilia - which was partly recorded on an iPad – as a series of apps, becoming the world’s first “app album.” She described it as a multimedia collection “encompassing music, apps, internet, installations, and live shows.”

Closed stores look ugly for passerby and detract from the streets they are, making them look less attractive and vibrant. That’s why the idea of dressing them up with attractive fake shop fronts, with colorful window displays is such a good one. Fake shop fronts are starting to appear in the South East of England, where the recession has taken its toll and many shops have closed, and are now making their way over to the US. As well as improving the appearance of the shopping street, they would also seem to have the benefit of inspiring would-be tenants what the store could look like when occupied. One company that is creating these fake fronts is Shopjacket and prices start from just a few thousand dollars.

What is it about the Zuckerberg story and how he founded Facebook that is drawing so much interest? The obvious answer is that he has become the world’s youngest billionaire at 26 years old and people would love to know how he did it. The film of course is a more than a story of building wealth – that would be boring – it’s about the network of friends and collaborators that helped Mark Z build his business. He doesn’t come across too well in the film, but as a geeky and duplicitous, though brilliant nerd, with no social skills and a chip on his shoulder because his girlfriend dumped him. Part of the story is about him apparently stealing the idea for Facebook from two twin brothers from Harvard who had approached him to work on a similar idea, as well as his dealings with his Facebook co-founder and how over time he was squeezed out of the company. But, the impression we are left with  should not be that it was all about the idea for Facebook that mattered, and Zuckerberg’s success is due to being opportunistic: that misses the point. Zuckerberg succeeded because he did what all great entrepreneurs did: he saw the beginnings of an idea, no doubt inspired by the twin’s idea, and from it created a big bold vision that nothing would deter him from. He put all of his energy and ability into making it happen because he saw its huge potential. A key part to staying true to the vision was the advice of Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, who like Zuckerberg saw the potential of Facebook to be absolutely transformation in the role the web can play in people’s social lives.

So what lessons can we learn from the Zuckerberg story:

1. Ideas are two a penny, it’s what we do with them that counts.

2. Often there isn’t one single ‘big idea’ when it comes to business, it’s a combination of many small ideas  that make something compelling.

3. Creating a vision to where you want your idea venture to go is key.

4. Execution is everything. Facebook works because it fulfills a basic human need and is easy to use.

5. Collaborate with people who share your vision and offer skills you don’t have.

The OneDown mousetrap swings upright from horizontal due to a rodent’s own weight to clearly indicate that it has been trapped. There is no risk of snapping the fingers and creating any mess or smell as the trap doesn’t kill the mouse and can easily be deposited outside. OneDown was a Gold Award Winner, and was created by the DSK ISD International School of Design in India. See original post here.

The quality of sound delivered through typical ear bud headphones devalues the music according to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who as a solution have created a line of high end headphones called Beats. In this article in the Financial Times, Iovine describes how he is trying to raise the bar in sound quality. “The people we work with spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year getting the sound exactly right.” But then, says Iovine, his emotions rising, much of what has been so carefully captured in the studio recording process has to be “dumbed down” or compressed by 20-25 per cent to be copied on to a CD, before being further compressed into an MP3 file format for playing on a computer or mobile phone with a sound processor likely to have cost just 50 cents. Sound quality is lost at every step of the process. “That’s like taking the Beatles master [recording] and playing it through a portable television,” he says with revulsion. Ramping up the similes, he points out that 80 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds listen to music at home through computers whose speakers, typically, “make the helicopters in Apocalypse Now sound like mosquitoes”.

“This is only the beginning of something huge,” Dr Dre claims. Iovine concurs: “Beats is a headphone now but it’s [also] an idea to fix the ecosystem of music.” Together, they intend to develop music’s answer to the Blu-ray disc or 3D movie, a premium technology that helps a business hurt by illegal downloading.

I liked this blog post from entrepreneur Chris Dixon and decided to reproduce it in its entirety. Thanks Chris.

Developing new startup ideas

March 14th, 2010 | careers, product design, startups

If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it.  Be the opposite of secretive.  Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones.  Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea.  Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn.  The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero.  The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

Every conversation will contain some signal and some noise. Separating the two is tricky. Here are some broad rules of thumb I’ve developed for how to filter feedback based to the profession of the person giving it to you.

1) Employees at relevant big companies. These people are great at providing facts (“Google has 100 people working on that problem”) but their judgment about the quality of startup ideas is generally bad. They tend to have goggles on that makes them think every good idea in their industry is already being built within their company.  For example, every security industry person I talked to thought SiteAdvisor was a bad idea.  (If it wasn’t, they think, someone at McAfee or Symantec company would have already built it!)

2) VCs. VCs are good at telling you about similar companies in the past and present and critiquing your idea in an “MBA-like” way:  will it scale? what are the economics? what is the best marketing strategy?  I would listen to them on these topics but pretty much ignore whether they think your idea is good or bad.

3) Potential customers.  If your product is B2B, remember you’ll be selling to that person 2-3 years from now and by then the world and their priorities will likely have radically changed.  If your product is B2C, it’s interesting to hear how regular consumers think about your product but often they really need to use it fully built and in the proper context to really judge it.

4) Entrepreneurs. This is the one group I listen to without a filter.

Even though I have no intention of starting a new company for a long time (if ever), I still keep my idea spreadsheet and update it periodically.  Some of the ideas I wrote down a few years ago are now companies started by other people (some successful, some not).  A few I had the chance to invest in. It’s interesting to compare my notes and ratings of each idea with how those companies have actually performed. I also keep a list of “on the beach” ideas in case I have time in between startups. These are mostly non-profit ideas.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get to those but they are particularly fun to think about.

Nokia has unveiled the first pedal-powered phone battery charger. According to the Financial Times cyclists will be able to plug their handsets into a charger mounted on their handlebars and connected to a dynamo that harnesses electricity from the wheels. It would take two-and-a- half hours for a cyclist riding at 15km an hour to fully charge a battery, the Finnish group said. It is hardly the kind of technological breakthrough that is likely to worry Apple, as Nokia struggles to find an answer to the US group’s iPhone in the crucial smartphone market. But the bicycle charger highlights efforts by Nokia to shore up its dominant position at the lower end of the market in the developing world, amid rising competition from cut-price Chinese handsets.