Can you train people to innovate? Financial analyst Barry Ritholtz has shared a helpful slide set titled “Innovation can be trained” that’s worth reading. Printing and then tacking individual slides to your cube walls can be used as a daily reminder that organizations can create cultures of innovation. It’s based on the work The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
The Next Don: How VCs Plan For The Future
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/06/the-next-don-how-vcs-plan-for-the-future/
the way that VC firms groom their talent isn’t all that different from how the older Corleone groomed his sons.
Here are the facts: the number of active VC firms are shrinking. There are now just over 800 active VC firms. Compare this to the 1,100 in 2002 when there was a boom of new firms rising from the ashes of the dot-com bust.
We sat down with a number of leaders at various firms who have managed to pass the baton and thrive for decades.
Transition and Tradition
The next guard will lead a world much different than their predecessors.
Projector Screen Paint screen paint projector screens projecto screen material projector screen portable projector screen says:
This article provides clear idea in favor of the new visitors of blogging, that actually how to do
running a blog.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s idea of productivity is a bad fit for many other workplaces
http://www.citeworld.com/business/21694/google-productivity-one-size-does-not-fit-all
Yahoo’s telework ban continues to be a source of curiosity and discussion in many business and social circles
The situation could have been rectified without a complete telework ban
Why Google does it this way
As noted recently by Greg Lindsay of the New York Times, Google believes that centralizing its workforce and designing its offices to encourage random encounters between employees from different areas of the company increases the chances for serendipitous encounters and discussions. In theory, this creates a breeding ground for nurturing ideas that might otherwise languish isolated in a single team or department. Random encounters and random idea-sharing frees ideas from that existence and may even result in major new products or programs.
This model of workforce creativity and productivity is the polar opposite to the concept of employees working from home or other remote locations on a daily basis. It also runs counter to traditional office designs where employees predominantly meet or congregate with only other members of their team or department or spend much of their time isolated by cubicle walls and office doors — structures that Google has deprecated and removed.
An Arizona State University study published last year
indicated that something as simple as larger cafeteria tables can increase idea production simply because of larger and more diverse lunchtime discussions. A 2004 study that took place at the defense contractor Raytheon also seems to verify Google’s belief.
But other studies
actually demonstrate overall productivity gains as employees move out of the office.
Employees that have long and stressful commutes tend to arrive at the office already on edge and stressed before the workday has even begun. Brandy Fulton VP of human resources for Citrix noted that the impact of such a commute can actually cause a drain in productivity
there is no guarantee that employees from different parts of a company will have substantive conversations that result in brilliant collaboration.
Not every workplace is a Google
Creative problem solving and innovation are traits synonymous with Silicon Valley. When you consider the big names in the Bay Area – Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Cisco to name just a few – it’s easy to imagine employees dedicated many hours every day toward creating new and innovative technologies.
there are millions of jobs where employees are slogging through work that pays the bills without creating “the next big thing” in their industry. That isn’t a value judgment. These jobs make our 21st century society function
Even in innovative companies, a corporate culture may not place as much value as Google does on chance encounters. Organizations may measure value more in things like products sold, cases closed, audience added or retained, legal or marketing battles won, or information taught or transmitted.
Google’s desire to create serendipitous encounters afor Google. That doesn’t mean it will work elsewhere.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Murphy and his lesser known friend Hobson
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/analog-ic-startup/4411484/Murphy-and-his-lesser-known-friend-Hobson
Many people are not familiar with a Hobson’s Choice
A Hobson’s choice is really no choice at all, and nothing is worse than no choice. Usually, Murphy and Hobson go together. Here’s how. For example, Murphy’s Law hits a company’s engineering development schedule. The engineer, realizing he is way behind schedule, says nothing. Then, right when the deliverable is due, he tells his manager he is behind schedule, and there is no way to recover. This is a Hobson’s Choice in business.
I hate Hobson’s Choices.
Hobson’s Choices usually result from fear, lack of communication, a weak manager, or a weak employee. These are all preventable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Accelerating Innovation with Standards
http://www.synopsys.com/Company/Publications/SynopsysInsight/Pages/Art8-standards-IssQ1-13.aspx?elq_mid=4289&elq_cid=303473&cmp=Insight-I1-2013-Art8-Email&elq=ed0ed32f05624b27b9d75e948e09e76d
It is often said that standards and innovation are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of creativity. Some boldly claim that standards stifle innovation, imply conformance to certain norms, and innovation occurs only when you break such norms and think “outside the box”. I disagree and would like to demonstrate my conviction by showing examples of how standards have not only enabled innovation, but also accelerated innovation.
Here are several other examples without going into much detail: the continued evolution of system-level design tools and methodologies are possible because the lower levels of design abstraction are isolated through standards, the migration/mapping of designs to newer semiconductor processes is accelerated because cell characterization is standardized in various data formats such as Liberty and ITF, and even higher level interfaces such as Universal Serial Bus (USB) have continued to see innovation as the preceding versions became ubiquitous for an increasing number of applications and gadgets. As one traces the history of innovations in an industry, it is easy to see the emergence of one or more standards that played a key role and influenced the direction of the innovations.
One final thought – standards are not static. Standards evolve as technology demands – sometimes even in anticipation of the demand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Accidental engineering: 10 mistakes turned into innovation
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/serious-fun/4412399/Accidental-engineering–10-mistakes-turned-into-innovation
Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “Name the greatest of all inventors: Accident.”
Here we take a look at 10 major discoveries, inventions, and inspirational moments that were, for the most part, come across by accident.
tomi says:
Patent system has been plaguing innovation for years. Instead of fighting each other on patents, western companies should carry on innovating.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/voice-of-the-engineer/4412829/Are-you-an-introvert-or-an-extrovert-
Some of the best engineers I know are introverts, many of whom wish they could be more extrovert like, which our society often holds in higher esteem. But being an introvert can be underrated. There’s something to be said for a vibrant mind, unobtrusively chewing on problems until they are solved. That’s not to devalue extroverts, of course. Many problems solutions come faster through group discussion and sharing.
Comments:
Extrovert engineers become managers. You can probably tell which is which from the time tagged in their comments. Real engineers are more likely to read/comment in their own time, rather than “company time”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video Blog: We May Be Geeks, but We Control the World
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=262662
People who attend technical conferences like Design West are often mistakenly labeled as geeks. Do you even know what the real meaning of a geek is? Check out my video blog and I’ll fill you in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You’re Dead To Me
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/05/12/1851206/ad-exec-learn-to-code-or-youre-dead-to-me
“In a widely-read WSJ Op-Ed, English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages. “
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You
If you’re at all interested in media, technology or related fields, please learn a little computer programming.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578470900844821388.html
I’m constantly searching for talented new employees, and if someone with the right skills walked into my office, he or she would likely leave it with a very compelling offer. The problem is that the right skills are very hard to find. And I’m sorry to say it, dear graduates, but you probably don’t have them.
In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities.
According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.
I don’t mean that you need to become genius programmers
Coding at such a level is a very particular and rare skill
What we nonexperts do possess is the ability to know enough about how these information systems work that we can be useful discussing them with others. Consider this example: Suppose you’re sitting in a meeting with clients, and someone asks you how long a certain digital project is slated to take.
Unless you understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you’re familiar enough with the principles and machinations of coding to know how the back end of the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably wrong. Even if your dream job is in marketing or sales or another department seemingly unrelated to programming, I’m not going to hire you unless you can at least understand the basic way my company works. And I’m not alone.
If you want a job in media, technology or a related field, make learning basic computer language your goal this summer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
May 13 2013
You Can Do Too Much Due Diligence
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/05/you-can-do-too-much-due-diligence.html
I was interested in making an investment in Feedburner.
As part of our investment process, we do a bunch of fact gathering/checking work that is called Due Diligence in the vernacular of the VC business. So my partner Brad Burnham and I put together a list of leading blogs and online publishers who had popular RSS feeds at the time.
What we heard was surprising. Not one of them was willing to hand over their RSS feed to a third party for analytics and monetization.
we decided, we could not invest in something that the big publishers would not support.
About six months later I ran into Dick at an industry conference. We decided to grab lunch together and during lunch he said to me “you know those dozen publishers you called?” I said “yes, what about them?” He said “every single one of them is on Feedburner now.”
I was pissed. How could that be?
So what did I learn from this lesson? First, trust your gut. I was using Feedburner and knew it was a very useful service. I felt that others would see that too. They did, but it took some time. Second, I learned that a service can get traction with the little guys and in time, the big guys will come along. I have seen that happen quite a bit since then. And finally, I learned that you can do too much due diligence.
Business talk « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog says:
[...] Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business? article tells that most of what is called innovation today is mere distraction, according to a paper by economist Robert Gordon. Innovation is the most [...]
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do Developers Need Free Perks to Thrive?
http://www.datamation.com/careers/do-developers-need-free-perks-to-thrive.html
Cutting back on perks may seem like a smart business move—until developers start leaving the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
14 Ways To Reward Your Motivation
http://www.buzzfeed.com/miller64/14-ways-to-reward-your-motivation
Tomi Engdahl says:
Research gap threatens innovation, experts warn
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4415088/Research-gap-threatens-innovation–experts-warn
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – The innovation pipeline could run dry from a lack of federal funding in basic research and the decline of big corporate R&D labs, said a panel of experts at an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ethernet.
They lamented the loss of AT&T Bell Labs that gave birth to the transistor and the decline of Xerox PARC, the birthplace of Ethernet. By contrast many of today’s largest tech companies, such as Apple—accused by Congress this week for failing to pay taxes on billions in revenue—conduct virtually no basic research, they said.
“When I was at Xerox people were not preoccupied with raising millions in VC funds– we had free reign to make breakthroughs come true,” s
“You have to have breakthroughs, but today who will fund them,”
“The thing that concerns me the most is we have lost the lead in big industrial research—we would never have had the transistor without Bell Labs,”
Google and Microsoft “are the two companies that can afford to have a research arm” today, Estrin said. But both lack the broad sweep of Bell Labs and the former IBM Research “so there’s a big gap today,” she added.
“Apple is unbelievably innovative and occasional does applied research, but I don’t think they ever believed in investing in basic research”
The big corporate labs trained academics in how to be innovators
Tomi Engdahl says:
Geek Pride Day: There’s a little Geek in all of us
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/now-hear-this/4373868/Geek-Pride-Day-There-rsquo-s-a-little-Geek-in-all-of-us
“Geek” is no longer an insult. It is no longer a derogatory term that brings to mind a friendless weakling. Under newer slang usage, it’s a complimentary term to be used with pride, a term to be celebrated, as it describes intelligence, success, and technical know how.
What better day to celebrate being a geek than Geek Pride Day. No, Geek Pride Day is not an official holiday.
Geek Pride Day is every May 25, a day picked to mark the release of the first Star Wars movie on May 25, 1977.
Geek Pride Day’s origins are a little foggy. Some say it started in Albany, NY, back in 2006 when a group of geeks gathered in a bar for the “Geek Pride Festival.”
According to a 2012 phone survey of 1,008 Americans age 18 and older by, conducted last month in recognition of Geek Pride Day, 54% of Americans rated geeks to be extremely intelligent. That’s an increase from 45% of respondents in Modis’ 2011 survey.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Europe has fallen far behind the United States in Asia and the exploitation of innovations. Intelligent cities, knowledge of the recycling economy and a number of developing countries can also bring back to the top of innovation, believes that the European Union’s Committee of the Regions Markku Markkula.
“Digitalization has already been accomplished in a all around change. Policy makers should take advantage of available opportunities, and to promote the dissemination of digital services, all citizens of the information society skills development as well as mobile applications for productive entrepreneurship, “Markkula said.
“Only a small part of the cities and companies to make optimal use of research results. It is to make significant changes, and targeted funding in such a way that the latest research data into the local and regional level. Key factors are the small and medium-sized enterprises, which produce findings of practical applications, “Markkula believes.
In addition to finding new partners is also needed on the recycling of old ideas to new owners
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/eurooppaa_kammetaan_takaisin_innovaatiorattaille
Tomi Engdahl says:
The next corporate revolution will be power to the peons
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239783/The_next_corporate_revolution_will_be_power_to_the_peons
‘Bureaucracy has to die,’ says business consultant at CITE Conference (see video)
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Intel have something in common: They all came late to the mobile revolution.
Why? Because they’re companies where management is top-down and responsibility for innovation and change is concentrated among executives with strict bureaucratic control over workers.
That’s got to change, Gary Hamel, a consultant and management educator at the London School of Business, said at the CITE Conference and Exhibition here this week. And he was not alone in his belief that the next revolution in corporate America won’t be technological, it’ll be social.
Businesses are on the cusp of a leadership revolution because millennials moving into the workforce are “the most authority-phobic” generation in history, Hamel said.
“Now, we have a generation with a completely different set of expectations — and probably the most core expectation they have is that if you’re a leader, it’s only because people are wiling to follow,”
Tom Petrocelli, an independent industry analyst, how to best to use technology. Internal social networks, for example, allow lower-level employees to collaborate on innovation. But 40% of knowledge workers never even use them to collaborate because the networks were rolled out without a use case.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teardown: The Engineer’s Mind
http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4415695/Teardown–The-Engineer-s-Mind
For this twist on the usual technical teardown I thought I’d turn the tables on ourselves a bit and cleave a piece off our recent Mind of the Engineer Study to provide a view of your perception of the engineering mind. So this one’s all about you: What you think of you, and what you think others think of you. There are some surprises, some affirmations, and of course some fun twists.
Some quick observations include that we generally see ourselves as being risk takers, extroverted, humble, and smart and having a wide range of interests
For many, Figure 2 will be rather amusing. We think we’re risk takers, humble, ambitious, and have a wide range of interests, while we think others view us as risk adverse, borderline arrogant, not so ambitious, and have a very narrow range of interests. Could it be that we’re a bit misunderstood? Maybe even feared? For example, we think others view us as smarter than even we think we are! Is that even possible?
Just look at the findings, have some fun with it
Tomi says:
Hello Finland, where the innovation?
The company’s management system is an important part of innovation ability. An open, inclusive and fair management to improve the ability to come up with a new, over-control makes the reverse.
Still, even good people are not the same thing as a good team. Among other things, because even the best business plans do not always work.
Innobility is innovation management training program, which provides knowledge and skill base for innovation management methods and ideas, as well as the practical application of the teachings.
“All the organizations of innovation and long-term success is based on two things, the employees’ personal innovation and innovative capacity of the organization. Both are necessary and both must work to support each other, “wrote Kontiotuote.
Neither of these conditions is not in order, he says now.
Management could learn more from the makers.
Taneli Tikka called for leadership, leadership, rather than management. Immediately followed by the confidence and inspiration.
“Integrity, honesty, openness.”
“The negative control destroys everything, but even worse is the negative inertia.”
Small startups doing things in a different way than a large corporation, similar to Peter Vesterbacka.
“Startup is not even a legacy of culture. But if there are known where we are going, it is a lot easier. People have to trust that yes, we won. ”
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/haloo+suomi+missa+innovointi/a903794?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-16062013&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Managing complexity and reducing risk
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/mechatronics-in-design/4416516/Managing-complexity-and-reducing-risk
This column, over the years, has had the theme that human-centered, model-based design is the most direct path to insight and innovation. The innovation diagram (Figure 1) shows the added importance of viability and sustainability, and also introduces the need to manage complexity.
We are now surrounded by high-risk technological systems in all aspects of our lives. Is the potential for catastrophic failure inherent in the system itself, or in the way the system was designed?
What kinds of systems are prone to system accidents? To answer this question, you need to consider two concepts: interactiveness and coupling.
The world of systems can be organized according to two largely independent variables: loose versus tight coupling and predictable versus baffling interactions. Loosely coupled, predictable systems include assembly-line production and most manufacturing, while tightly coupled, predictable systems include rail transport and dams. Loosely coupled, complex-interaction systems include R&D firms and universities, while tightly coupled, complex-interaction systems include nuclear plants, aircraft, and space missions.
There are no answers here. Engineers must manage complexity and prevent catastrophic failures. Interactiveness and coupling are two concepts that should aid engineers in accomplishing that goal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/06/20/why-study-humanities-what-i-tell-engineering-freshmen/
What’s the point of the humanities? Of studying philosophy, history, literature and “soft” sciences like psychology and poly sci? The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, consisting of academic, corporate, political and entertainment big shots, tries to answer this question in a big new report to Congress. The report is intended to counter plunging enrollment in and support for the humanities
Titled “The Heart of the Matter,” the report states: “As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic—a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support.”
I find this a bit grandiose, and obscure.
They don’t see the point of reading all this old impractical stuff that has nothing to do with their careers.
We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that’s fine.
But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day.
The humanities are more about questions than answers
Tomi Engdahl says:
The power of thinking big
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/analog-ic-startup/4417391/The-power-of-thinking-big
was recently in a new product idea meeting at Touchstone, and Greg was proposing his latest idea. Greg and I have worked together, on and off, for over 20 years, and Greg has always thought big ever since we met. Today was no different…
“This product will capture 50% of the market for this function because it is so much better than anything else out there.” Greg passionately says to the team. Greg is right. If he can design what he is proposing, we will be very successful in this product category.
Greg designs the IC in what seems like a day, and he begins running simulations. Lo and behold, his new idea and architecture work just as he proposed. We are likely to win big!
Greg’s genius has always been this combination of shooting for stars, and being a super-talented designer capable of pulling it off. Many times he comes up short, but he wins big when he gets to within 80% or so of what he is aiming for. And, those big wins more than make up for the failures.
The beautiful thing about Greg is he never lets these momentary setbacks stop him from thinking big.
One more thing about thinking big is you need an environment that allows you to think big and fail. Yes, that’s right. The environment must allow you fail and not get your head chopped off. There is no faster way to stop innovation, creativity, and thinking big than chopping someone’s head off if they fail.
To win big you have to think big. You have to be willing to accept that you may fail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seek inspiration
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/signal-integrity/4417372/Seek-inspiration-
Tomi says:
Why does Yahoo! buy failed startups? It’s the only way it can get good developers
The acqui-hire isn’t bad business
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/2/4583284/marissa-mayer-buys-failed-startups-yahoo
Mayer isn’t buying these companies for what they built; she’s buying the engineers who built them.
As Bloomberg Businessweek noted in its recent profile of Mayer, every time she’s bought a startup, “Yahoo has locked up engineers with two- to four-year contracts and set them loose to build apps and hire more mobile developers, according to two people familiar with Yahoo’s deals who weren’t authorized to speak for the company.”
Wouldn’t it just be cheaper and easier to hire programmers on the open market or right out of college? Actually, no. The competition for developer talent in Silicon Valley today is insane.
Things are especially hard on the hiring front for a company like Yahoo, which still has a reputation as a dot-com dinosaur
here is a peculiar ecosystem in Silicon Valley. The best programmers often want to be entrepreneurs, so they go out and raise venture capital funding. If their startup fails, the VCs who backed them want to recoup as much of their investment as possible. They work to find a soft landing at a big tech company, which is mostly interested in the talent. This exchange, dubbed the acqui-hire, is what keeps the wheels turning in Silicon Valley.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Surveillance: The Enemy of Innovation
http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/08/05/surveillance-the-enemy-of-innovation/
When we think of government surveillance, we worry about our liberties, about losing a private space where no one knows what we do, say, think. But there is more. Total Surveillance is the enemy of innovation, of anything that threatens public or private incumbents.
This is what we think we know so far: The State, whatever that means these days, monitors and records everything everywhere. We’re assured that this is done with good intentions and with our best interests in mind: Restless vigilance is needed in the war on terror, drug trafficking, money-laundering. Laws that get in the way — such as the one that, on the surface, forbids the US to spy on its own citizens — are bent in ingenious ways, such as outsourcing the surveillance to a friendly or needy ally.
If this sounds outlandish, see The Guardian’s revelations about XKeyscore, the NSA tool that collects “nearly everything a user does on the internet”. Or read about the relationship between the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ
Every day there’s another story. Today, the WSJ tells us that the FBI has mastered the hacking tools required to remotely turn on microphones and cameras on smartphones and laptops
The surveillance and snooping isn’t just about computers. We have license plate recorders and federally mandated black boxes in cars.
And now we hear about yet another form of metadata collection: It seems that the US Post Office scans every envelope that they process
To this litany we must add private companies that record everything we do. Not just our posts, emails, and purchases, but the websites we visit, the buttons we click, even the way movement of the mouse…everything is recorded in a log file, and it’s made available to the “authorities” as well as buyers/sellers of profiling information. It’s all part of the Grand Bargain known as If the Product Is Free Then You Are the Product Being Sold.
We’re now closer to trouble with innovation. In an almost-present future, we’ll have zero privacy. Many will know what we do, what we say, where we are, at all times. This will cast a Stasi shadow over our lives, our minds, our emotions.
Total surveillance protects everything, starting with the status quo.
Is the situation hopeless?
I pray not. But I can’t help but see our laws — the tax code is the prime example — as old operating systems that are patched together, that have accumulated layer upon layer of silt. No one can comprehend these rules anymore, they’re too big and complicated to fit in one’s head…they’re seemingly unfixable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google employees to quit the most fascinating of interest – innovation in the end?
Google’s famous ” 20 percent of the practice “is as good as closed, the workers say. The company’s long-term well-respected and liked most inventive or staff – ie employees the opportunity to use one-fifth of their time in side projects – was one of the main reasons for Google’s innovations.
The practical disappearance could mean in the long run Google’s innovations in dramatic decline, estimated Quartz . Ever have complained to the company’s employees.
Google went public in 2005, and at that time the company’s co-founder Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 20 per cent considered it essential to the practice. It is the result of, among other things, the AdSense advertising program, which now generates about 25 percent of the company’s more than the annual $ 50 billion of net sales.
Other side project born inventions: Gmail, Google Transit, Google Talk and Google News
Since then, among other things, Apple, LinkedIn, and 3M’s and any copies, multiplied by the corresponding-like practices to its employees.
As so often, good practice, however, die slowly. First, the company’s by-laws be amended so that the workers were forced to separately apply for private projects. Thereafter, the company’s senior management is tightened further line in such a way that the middle management can not accept requests for practically nothing.
The practical disappearance takes place largely at a time when Larry Page took over the CEO washed over, that is, until January 2011. In a short time stopped many small projects and sought to focus on big lines. As a result, among other things, Google Labs got to go.
The company still has its own Google X lab developer
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/google+lopetti+tyontekijoidensa+kiehtovimman+edun++innovaation+loppu/a922006
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
http://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/
Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly.
What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects.
This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by Google management that the policy is moribund
Once a pillar of innovation at Google, now verboten
Google is still experimenting, but in less democratic fashion
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s “20 percent time” in action
http://googleblog.blogspot.fi/2006/05/googles-20-percent-time-in-action.html
Google’s “20 percent time” recently came in handy. The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that’s broken, you can use the time to fix it. And this is how I recently worked up a new feature for Google Reader.
So I fired off an email to the Reader team, hoping that they’d be able to add a keyboard shortcut. The team got back to me right away, and they told me how easy it would be to add the shortcut myself. They were right–it was easy, because the internal documentation was good and the code was really easy to work with. Once my change had been reviewed, it went live.
Tomi Engdahl says:
An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/technology/an-inventor-wants-one-less-wire-to-worry-about.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
SOMETIMES, there is an actual eureka moment. For Meredith Perry, it was in late 2010, during her senior year studying astrobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She was searching for an idea to enter into the college’s innovation competition.
” Why are we using these 20-foot wires to plug in our quote-unquote wireless devices?”
As Ms. Perry soon learned, there are very good reasons that we don’t beam electricity through the air.
“I realized that anything on the right half of the spectrum was too dangerous to beam,” she said, “and anything on the left half of the spectrum that was closer to radio was either too inefficient or tightly regulated by the government.”
So she started looking elsewhere and came upon piezoelectricity
If you have seen Internet assertions about T-shirts “that charge your mobile phone while you wear them,” or about boots on the ground literally creating the charge for a soldier’s radio, you are familiar with the idea of piezoelectricity. Those applications rely on something that’s already in motion.
And here’s where the second eureka happened — enabling her to see how she might build a device to wirelessly charge a battery in a cellphone or a computer from across a room.
“How do I create vibration in the air without actually moving something?” The answer came instantly — it was almost like a stoner’s aha: “Sound is vibration in the air.”
So she did what most everybody else does. She clicked on Wikipedia. She started with the “ultrasound” page, then “acoustic.” Soon enough, she was reading academic papers at the forefront of various disciplines.
Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. “It was such a multidisciplinary idea,” she said, “and everyone in each different department basically told me that there was basically no way that you could get past all the hurdles.”
She kept running into the same genre of problem. “I was working with a couple of different people at the beginning who would say there was no way to get this high-power sound over this distance without creating shock waves,” she said. “Of course, I would have my 10-minute panic attack and think the whole thing was over. Then I would do some research on my own, and figure out how to achieve high-power sound without creating shock waves.”
Even after winning attention at a D: All Things Digital conference, where she transmitted power an impressive three feet using piezoelectrical technology, she still couldn’t attract start-up money.
“Obviously her ability to do power transmission wirelessly through sound was something that was fundamentally new,” Mr. Nolan said, but “people have this perception — ‘oh, if I build it, they will come.’ ”
It’s one thing to pull an idea out of your head and shape it into a prototype. But it’s a whole other thing to figure out how that device will get out of your test kitchen and into the marketplace. Mr. Nolan said Ms. Perry had shown that chain stores and some “quick-service restaurants” were eager to integrate a wireless charger into their plans. She “had addressed all these key risks and got them nailed down early,” he said.
After the Founders Fund signed on, more than a half-dozen venture capitalists also kicked in to create $1.4 million in start-up financing — including Mark Cuban, the Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer, the Andreessen Horowitz firm and even Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager.
In the end, it’s the problem-solving and the fiddling that keeps her interested. “It’s like being on crack — don’t quote me on that — but it’s just so much fun you can literally get sucked into solving the problem and all you want to do is tell everyone about it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dalton Caldwell: App.net may not have won yet, but we are still fighting the good fight
http://gigaom.com/2013/08/17/dalton-caldwell-app-net-may-not-have-won-yet-but-we-are-still-fighting-the-good-fight/
Dalton Caldwell says App.net may not be the size of Facebook or Twitter, but it has proven that there is a market need for an open platform for developing social apps, a goal he believes is worth fighting for.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sidekiq
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sidekiq
From my perspective, one of the best parts of being a Web developer is the instant gratification. You write some code, and within minutes, it can be used by people around the world, all accessing your server via a Web browser. The rapidity with which you can go from an idea to development to deployment to actual users benefiting from (and reacting to) your work is, in my experience, highly motivating.
Users also enjoy the speed with which new developments are deployed. In the world of Web applications, users no longer need to consider, download or install the “latest version” of a program; when they load a page into their browser, they automatically get the latest version. Indeed, users have come to expect that new features will be rolled out on a regular basis. A Web application that fails to change and improve over time quickly will lose ground in users’ eyes.
We measure the speed of our Web applications in milliseconds, not in seconds, and in just the past few years, we have reached the point when taking even one second to respond to a user is increasingly unacceptable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/08/29/bring-me-your-accents-immigration-fuels-innovation/
Innovation comes from those who are often less well educated (study the history of Hollywood, founded by “uneducated” Jews) or foreign born founding members (Google, Sun, Intel, PayPal) let alone reversed scientists like Einstein. We have loved them precisely because they were foreign-born, hungry to live here, hard-working and willing to challenge norms.
I welcome your accents. Your origins. Your nuances and experiences. If I could work with 10x more IIT or Polytechnique grads I would in a nanosecond.
I love foreign-born entrepreneurs precisely because many of them don’t grow up with the sense of entitlement that comes from winning the birth lottery.
And from an entrepreneurial point of view – it starts by acknowledging that foreign-born founders that don’t match our normal recognition pattern can be some of our best innovators.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Uses Internal Kickstarters To Pick Projects
http://slashdot.org/story/13/09/04/0145242/ibm-uses-internal-kickstarters-to-pick-projects
“IBM is readying its fourth internal Kickstarter-like crowdfunding effort over the past year or so to inspire employees to innovate and collaborate, often across departments and the glob”
“500 Watson Research Center employees were each given $100 to invest exclusively in colleagues’ proposals, which ranged from procuring a 3D printer to setting up a disc golf course to recording and sharing seminars.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP’s published study, 93 percent of business travelers preparing meeting material as a way to counter the meeting.
HP’s investigation also revealed that workers no longer feel the most effective way to work in the office. As many as 73 percent of business travelers is of the opinion that the travel time offers them the opportunity to do nights in arrears and increase productivity . 56 per cent said he gets his best ideas outside of the office .
Despite the high use of technology in eight out of ten feel that way to work with restrictions. They are related to , for example the slow internet connections or unreliable , the duration of the battery equipment , equipment performance, and use of mobile broadband high cost and complexity.
Source: http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/hp+palavereja+hiotaan+viela+taksin+takapenkilla/201309499463?utm_source=iltalehti.fi&utm_medium=boksi&utm_content=Versio1&utm_campaign=Boksi
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open plan office pester worse than e-mail
While office work identifies a distraction from the most frequent e-mails or instant messages, open-plan office distraction are the most co-workers.
To focus on their own can not, however, protect, for example by putting headphones on his head, or slip your do not disturb signs
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/tividuunit/avokonttori+hairikoi+pahemmin+kuin+sahkoposti/a929296
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Biggest Office Interruptions Are…
…not what most people think. And even a 2-second disruption can lead to a doubling of errors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324123004579057212505053076.html?mod=WSJEurope_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_Top
The big push in office design is forcing co-workers to interact more. Cubicle walls are lower, office doors are no more and communal cafes and snack bars abound.
Like most grand social experiments, though, open-plan offices bring an unintended downside: pesky, productivity-sapping interruptions.
The most common disruptions come from co-workers, as tempting as it is to blame email or instant messaging. Face-to-face interruptions account for one-third more intrusions than email or phone calls, which employees feel freer to defer or ignore, according to a 2011 study in the journal Organization Studies.
It’s easy to turn to a neighbor for, say, tips on how to tweak a spread sheet or where to go for lunch. But such interruptions—which many feel it would be rude to rebuff—nibble away at the ability to stay on task.
There’s a range of compensating behaviors. Some wear headphones. Some invent “do-not-disturb” signals like wearing hats or armbands, or stretching yellow barricade tape around their cubicles. More employers are training co-workers to communicate differently, and to limit unscheduled meetings.
Employees in cubicles are interrupted 29% more often than those in private offices
Such patterns can be costly. Employees who experienced frequent interruptions reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion—almost as big as the 12% increase in fatigue caused by oversize workloads
Error rates skyrocket after interruptions.
“Two seconds is long enough to make people lose the thread,” says Erik Altmann, a psychology professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and the study’s lead author.
To make matters worse, it takes more than 25 minutes, on average, to resume a task after being interrupted. After resuming a complex task such as design or programming, says Tom DeMarco, co-author of “Peopleware,” a book on productivity now in its third edition, it takes an additional 15 minutes to regain the same intense focus or “flow” as before the interruption, based on an 800-employee study for the book.
While another study by Dr. Altmann found people working in controlled laboratory conditions were capable of getting back up to speed on complex computer tasks within 15 seconds of being interrupted, few people actually dive right back into a demanding task after an intrusion. Most employees attend to two or more other tasks first, research shows. “It takes effort to get back into it. That work is aversive, so you start checking your email,” Dr. Altmann says.
More than 6,500 workers each year download a free “Interrupters’ Log Worksheet” from MindTools.com, a career-skills website, to help them analyze the sources of interruptions and either eliminate or reorganize them to save time, says James Manktelow, chief executive of Mind Tools.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Innovation with Smaller Teams
https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=561440&sessionid=1&key=640AC04A8F59A9508417E1E7F0902B0C&partnerref=DNDailyOD&sourcepage=register
When searching for new sources of innovation, businesses must go beyond the walls of traditional R&D departments and decade-old engineering practices.
Smaller, more agile competitors are emerging around the world and are proving that innovation can happen just as fast, if not faster, in smaller design teams. They are delivering disruptive innovations to market in shorter time periods and with equivalent, and in some cases better, quality than their traditional competitors.
This is happening in established economies and equally, if not more impressively, in emerging economies as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Medical Device Manufacturers, Be Prepared to Innovate
http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=267640&cid=nl.dn14
The trend toward “bio-connectivity” is gaining momentum, and medical device manufacturers need to be ready to bring that connectivity to next-generation products, a futurist at the Medical Design & Manufacturing Show said this week.
“The number of in-person visits to hospitals is decreasing and the number of bio-connective, virtual visits is increasing,” Jim Carroll, futurist and author, told a gathering of engineers at the show.
Today’s doctors are more likely to do patient consultations over Skype, Carroll said, adding that 40 percent of physicians are now willing to track patients via text messaging, email, and Facebook. He cited examples of such companies as Withings Inc., which makes a blood pressure monitor for use with iPhones and iPads, and MedCottage, which sells one bedroom “granny pods” that can be placed in the backyards of families caring for elderly patients. The cottage incorporates cameras and sensors, enabling patients to be monitored and managed from afar.
Carroll also pointed to a growing number of diabetes management technologies that enable patients to monitor themselves at home and share their data with physicians.
Some high-level healthcare executives have gone as far as to say that the need for dedicated central facilities is changing, Carroll said. “One CEO said that the concept of a hospital as a physical place is disappearing,” he told the audience of engineers. “Eventually, it’s going to go virtual.”
Tomi says:
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/
Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s occupations will be automated within the next 20 years.
Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
he authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.
“Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks that required creative and social intelligence,” the authors write. “For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”
Tomi says:
Open Source, Open World
Where Free Software Came From — And Where It’s Going
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139922/yuri-takhteyev/open-source-open-world
In many ways, software is like a machine. It usually consists of a large number of intricately linked parts that must work together to perform a task. So one could argue that software needs the same kind of legal protection that has been used for hardware: patents and trade secrets. Yet software is also immaterial — built of words, not metal and plastic. This makes the economics of software quite different from the economics of hardware. Although it takes additional resources to assemble each new copy of a computer, making another copy of a program costs nothing. This distinction made most governments reluctant to automatically extend to software the same legal protections afforded to computer hardware. Instead, they took a wait-and-see approach.
At first, the lack of intellectual property protection for software did not seem to bother technology companies.
By the late 1960s, however, more and more companies were starting to realize that, with a bit of extra work, a program could be made to serve the needs of many customers without extensive modifications. In effect, software could finally be treated as a product and sold, just like a piece of hardware. For this to work, however, there would need to be a way to keep users from making copies for free.
American businessmen, policymakers, and technologists started to discuss how best to support software businesses. Some favored granting software patent protections similar to the ones for hardware.
In the United States in the late 1980s, the intellectual property regime was a boon for many technology companies. The new rules made it much easier to sell software at home. And the (reluctant) acceptance of the U.S. legal regime by foreign countries also made it easier to sell software abroad.
But the era did have its discontents. For many software practitioners in the United States, the system was a betrayal of their field’s established values: collaboration and sharing. Programmers soon started looking for ways to adapt their old practices to new legal realities. This meant, among other things, finding ways to establish explicit legal principles for sharing and formally defining what used to be unwritten. Under the old law, giving a program to another person was all it took to share it. Under the new law, sharing required an explicit license, carefully worded to protect both parties from legal harm. There was also the challenge of keeping free software free. This was eventually solved by a clever form of licensing called “copyleft” — a pun on “copyright.” A copyleft license allows people to use the software as they see fit, to modify it, and to give it to others. However, it explicitly prohibits them from attaching new restrictions in the process. Proponents of freely shared software also started establishing new methods for organizing, for example drawing on nonprofit foundations. Together, these activities became known as the free-software movement.
Free software is free in the sense that one can legally use it without paying. Its advocates usually stress, however, that free software is really all about freedom — freedom to use the software, to make changes, and to share it. And such freedom, it turns out, often makes a lot of business sense. Letting people modify software allows them to find and fix problems in it; that can accelerate innovation and development. Freedom to modify the software without having to ask anyone for permission is also tremendously useful for consumers, especially big companies that make expensive long-term investments in the computer programs they use.
By the 1990s, engineers in the United States and abroad had started to take advantage of those benefits.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple does not innovate anymore
Apple last week announced its new 5S and 5C smart phones are no longer caused by the same kind of turmoil as a previous release. It seems that after Steve Jobs era, the company is no longer innovate. Apple has become the typical American corporation.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=378:apple-ei-enaa-innovoi&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
The power of thinking big
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/analog-ic-startup/4417391/The-power-of-thinking-big
“This product will capture 50% of the market for this function because it is so much better than anything else out there.” Greg passionately says to the team. Greg is right. If he can design what he is proposing, we will be very successful in this product category.
Greg designs the IC in what seems like a day, and he begins running simulations. Lo and behold, his new idea and architecture work just as he proposed. We are likely to win big!
Believe me, Greg has had some epic failures.
One more thing about thinking big is you need an environment that allows you to think big and fail. Yes, that’s right. The environment must allow you fail and not get your head chopped off. There is no faster way to stop innovation, creativity, and thinking big than chopping someone’s head off if they fail.
Tomi says:
Apple’s Innovation Problem
http://www.digitaltonto.com/2013/apples-innovation-problem/
Apple CEO Tim Cook has a very tough job. Not only does he have to run the most valuable tech company on the planet, but he has to follow one of the greatest chief executives in history. Is he up to it? I’m beginning to think he’s not.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has a very tough job. Not only does he have to run the most valuable tech company on the planet, but he has to follow one of the greatest chief executives in history. Is he up to it? I’m beginning to think he’s not.
There have been some missteps, of course, like some earnings releases that disappointed investors, the maps debacle, the continued lack of NFC or an Apple TV, but that’s not why I’m having doubts.
I find it easy to believe that those things would have happened if Steve Jobs were still around (well, except for maps, maybe). Apple’s legendary founder had more than his share of flops, but he had a great sense of what technology could do. Without him, Apple will have to learn to innovate differently and Tim Cook doesn’t seem up to it.
Focus Or Tunnel Vision?
I first began to have doubts when I read Mr. Cook’s remarks in a Businessweek interview, which I will quote here (with my own emphasis added):
Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those. A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door. (Laughs.)
Everybody in our company is responsible to be innovative, whether they’re doing operational work or product work or customer service work.
In just a few sentences, he encapsulates both why Apple has been so enormously successful and also why its future is so precarious. Steve Jobs’ legendary focus can easily manifest itself into blindness about what’s going on outside the company.
While Apple has gained a reputation as a disruptor, in truth, its products generally don’t meet the definition of disruptive innovation (except for iTunes, which does). The thing that has set the company apart is that its products have been so “insanely great” that, even in established categories, an Apple launch has felt like something completely new.
Innovation Across The Matrix
Apple, of course, is not the world’s only innovative company. Google, IBM, Procter and Gamble and many others have consistently been able to develop new products and services that keep them ahead of the competition. However, when you delve a little deeper, you find that they each approach innovation in a different way.
Apple, much like Toyota, has thrived in well defined areas. They make important improvements to existing products, which is why Tim Cook’s approach of getting everybody involved in the innovation process works well there.
However, when it came to deciding which new directions for the company to develop, Apple had a committee of one: Steve Jobs. Now that he’s gone, it’s imperative that they start exploring other innovation methods.
Tomi says:
Solving Apple’s Innovation Problem
http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/02/08/solving-apples-innovation-problem/
On the face of it Apple has one innovation problem that it needs to overcome – find a new category-busting product like the iPhone. Not so easy, of course. But the intervention of hedge fund manager David Einhorn, mad at the company’s inability to leverage value from its $137 billion cash pile, tells us that its innovation problems are significantly bigger.
It needs to re-instantiate the idea that it could be worth a $1 trillion.
Instead Apple is a company whose current, core customer-centric mission has acted like a dehydrator in the company’s idea closet. Its insistence on a very narrow definition of what it does has made it impotent to use that money. It’s creativity is all but dried up.
Contrast that with Google, which also has a cash pile, though more modest in scale. Driverless cars (where I have voiced skepticism) and Glass are great forward thinking projects. The company just needs more of them. And the reason is that the very long term form of innovation is back in fashion – or will be soon.
I said a couple of days back that companies need to function on three levels with their innovations – innovate every day, innovate in the long term (the new 10 – 30 year cycle) and innovate in the process of creating wealth by changing how an enterprise looks, feels and functions.
Like Google, Apple has its lean innovation programs fine tuning and improving its internal processes. But I think Apple misses the point of what an enterprise is for because of its narrow product and brand focus. Apple needs to think like a global leader – the global leader in tech.
We face two simultaneous problems in the global economy. The first is the accumulation of capital for non-productive uses – Bain reports that by 2020 the total of financial assets in the world will be $900 trillion, $300 trillion more than today, and its effect is constantly to threaten a surge in non-financial asset prices such as commodities. Apple is a symptom of that problem hoarding cash it is too scared or unimaginative to spend.
The second is the growth of a global middle class that will be extremely resource hungry and that is causing enormous structural problems – or opportunities – because of the pace of development. These are Apple’s future customers.
So what’s that to do with Apple? If you believe Apple’s only role is to create bright shiny objects then nothing, of course. But prior to its obliteration by Apple, mobile phone giant Nokia was a major player in the development of emerging market infrastructure, applications and capability raising.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The research journey outside comfort zones
I have un-comfort zones – all seems to much work, I have a feeling unsure of what this company.
Why on earth would not even left here? Why teasing myself?
Comfort zones to go through the route to permanent changes.
My motive was that the old way of working had come to an end, a dead end.
Staff was missing and the atmosphere deteriorated. The options were to either stay lament my fate, or to turn to new unexplored paths.
The worst thing about the journey was that if work wants to make a difference, not enough to comfort zones to leave alone. I have to organize a group trip.
In his book, “Switch: how to change things when change is hard,” the brothers Chip and Dan Heath tell us that change will mean certain failure.
Comfort zones you can not know in advance what adversity you encounter, and all of them you can not come out on top.
Surprisingly, the best group tours to succeed, however, if people have already pre-prepared openly to the fact that mistakes will happen.
Researcher attitude is particularly strong medicine in the organization of the work or the people has been criticized. It is human to that in a long-running situation, courage to try something new is non-existent.
But if people are paralyzed, there is no hope for anything better. The mere change of terminology to help the top: “This is, therefore, to your hypotheses. How are you going to try, if this is true? “Nothing is certain in advance.
Comfort zones you need a tour guide, the role will be to teach graduate-care attitude, and on the other hand, that the group agreed forget the goal of the route a serpentine fashion.
Researcher attitude is not natural to man. It has to be consciously practiced.
Fire off easier. Maybe just because it was done more. Fire shut goal is to return to the comfort area. Researcher attitude goal is to make permanent changes.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/cio/blogit/CIO_100_blogi/tutkimusmatkani+epamukavuusalueelle/a933360
Tomi Engdahl says:
There are many challenging goals.
How do you get there?
http://www.lean.org/kata/
There’s a lot of interest in what the Coach/Learner dialog looks like when it’s extended across all levels of an organization.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t Like the Problem? Don’t Believe It
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1368&doc_id=268255&cid=nl.dn14
Most of the electronics were hand wired on to wire-wrap panels. I was asked to troubleshoot one of the panels that was operating intermittently. The wiring in this panel was neatly wired in a horizontal and vertical fashion. This made the wiring look neat, but it caused maximum crosstalk between the wires. All the other panels were wired in a rat’s-nest style for minimum coupling between the wires.
When I told him why the circuits on that panel weren’t working well, he ignored me. He would say something like, “Well, it was working yesterday.”
Of course, it would fail again later when the temperature, the phase of the moon, or whatever else changed. My boss accused me of being incompetent, and I got upset and quit.
Comment:
Remember, every problem has three approaches: the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Crises Stimulate Opportunities
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=268011&cid=nl.dn14
To solve a problem, one must first recognize that a problem exists. Universities and industry are in denial. Based on my 30 years of teaching and industry experience, I say that not much has changed in this contentious relationship. The world now changes on a time scale measured in days. As a result, this situation is now at a crisis point.
You would never know that listening to academic and industry leaders. What I hear is a mix of doing the same old, same old and making incremental changes, so we don’t upset the silos and comfort zones that dominate these two worlds. Radical innovation is needed, along with visionary, selfless leaders who can take risks without fear of failure.
Do the technological universities and industry have a common goal? I believe fundamentally they do — solve society’s most urgent problems
The industry urgently needs to attain and retain a competitive advantage by organizing multidisciplinary teams to apply human-centered, model-based design techniques to these problems. Universities need to develop, and the industry needs to hire
Engineers need to have depth in an engineering discipline and the multidisciplinary breadth to communicate with and lead engineers from other disciplines. The problems are multidisciplinary, and a siloed approach to solving them will fail. But technological depth is not enough. Once engineers apply human-centered design to identify the real problem and model-based design to identify a technologically feasible solution, they must determine if the proposed solution is viable and sustainable from a business point of view and usable from a complexity point of view.
Technological depth and nontechnical breadth are essential for innovation to happen, as engineers need to grow professionally daily.
So what is the problem? This seems like a win-win situation for all involved: students, universities, practicing engineers, industry, society, and the planet. My view is that many academics think the industry wants engineers who just use computer tools (training, not education), leave the mathematics and science back at the university, and do whatever it takes to make money. They also think that real problem solving takes place with substantial, long-term, high-overhead government funding that feeds the university reward system.
Industry members are now realizing that the design-build-test-break-fix approach leads to limited success and insight, and that the challenging problems they face can be solved only by embracing model-based design, which relies on mathematics, science, and engineers who are tool masters, not just tool users. Some industry problems demand short-term solutions with limited funding, but very often those solutions uncover long-term, fundamental issues that must also be addressed, usually with university collaboration.
Challenges are met and problems are solved by changing culture — attitude and behavior — and instilling ownership. Consensus — something in which no one believes and to which no one objects — is not a substitute for shared ownership.