Posts filed under ‘innovation’
Google Innovation – The 16 Principles
A while back I posted on Douglas Merrill’s talk about innovation at Google. I have to say I was a bit disappointed in that talk – I didn’t really take away any clear messages to apply to my own work. Recently however, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Google, delivered a fantastic talk at his alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, called Inside the Black Box: Technical Innovation at Google. Jonathan gave a very compelling talk outlining 16 key principles to innovation at Google. This outstanding talk is well worth the time. Watch the video to understand these principles more fully.
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- Hire the Best
- Ideas Come From Anywhere
- Practice Sharing & Openness Fully
- Morph, Don’t Kill, Ideas
- Users Come First, Not Money
- Data Drives Decisions
- Iterate a Product (don’t use a Project Plan)
- Make Your Vision Simple, Understandable and Share It With All
- 20% Time
- Think BIG
- Bet on a Trend, or Fall Victim to It
- Accept a Smaller Piece of a Larger Pie
- Feed the Winners, Starve the Losers
- Avoid Hippos (highest paid person’s opinion)
- Never Surrender to Lawyers, Auditors, or Bureaucrats
- Reward Innovation
- Learn How to Learn (a 17th extra principle)
How to Start a Social Movement
Dave Eggers was recently noted in Time magazine as one of the Time 100: “Many writers, having written a first best-seller, might see it as a nice way to start a career. Dave Eggers, 35, started a movement instead.”
He is successful writer, publisher, as well as philanthropist and teacher-at-large. Dave recently won a TED Prize and described his work in setting up a variety of tutoring labs across the country. His talk is now online. A very entertaining and uplifting talk.
Given the need to edit the talk to ~25 min, some other wonderful examples of how the tutoring labs have significantly changed students’ lives (e.g. improved grade levels, increased focus on school work, etc.) were omitted. Trust me, there were several more wonderful inspirational examples of how this work is effecting the lives of students and their families. Awesome work, and fantastic talk describing how “the movement” began.
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Microsoft’s Photosynth
Microsoft’s Photosynth was demoed at TED2007 (video below). One application of this software is to link a vast number of digital photos together. Linking together overlapping photos appropriately – the images are joined together to provide an accurate representation of space. With the Space Shuttle set to launch this week, I was reminded that there was a Photosynth demo with photos of the Shuttle. Very cool software app to play with. Enjoy.
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Innovation at Google
In Fast Company’s March edition, they’ve published their list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies. The top ten are… #1 Google; #2 Apple; #3 Facebook; #4 GE; #5 IDEO; #6 NIKE; #7 Nokia; #8 Alibaba; #9 Amazon; #10 Nintendo. Interestingly, Google is also at the #1 position in Forbes list of the top 100 Best Companies to Work For published February 4th. So what does innovation mean at Google? Douglas Merrill, CIO at Google and featured on the cover of Fast Company, offers his thoughts regarding Innovation at Google in the video below.
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TED, BIL, GEL, LIFT, POP, oh my!
While I’m very enthused about the TED conference, I’m also interested in other similar conferences that bring together passionate, innovative, and articulate people. Here’s a list of a few other conferences you may want to consider attending or watching the available online videos…
BIL – Minds Set Free. Benefficient. Intelligence. Logic. New this year, BIL is a free, un-conference also held in Monterey starting on the last day of the TED. “…an open, self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic science and technology conference.”
GEL – Good Experience Live in New York City in April. GEL “is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life.”
LIFT – “LIFT is a series of events intended to facilitate and promote discussion about new technologies and their impact on our society.” Recently held earlier this month in Geneva and covered well by Bruno Giussani’s blog. LIFT Asia is coming in September.
Pop Tech! – Held in Maine during October, Pop Tech! “is a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas.” Video content found here.
ETech – coming in March, “at the 2008 version of ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, we’ll take a wide-eyed look at the brand new tech that’s tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us.”
SXSW Interactive – also held in March. “Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology.”
Innotown – To be held in October in Norway. “The aim of InnoTown is to move people’s minds, both rationally and emotionally; to inspire and enhance creativity and innovation, to help motivate people to think new thoughts and dare to fail – to succeed.”
Web 2.0 Summit – Held last October in San Francisco, the Web 2.0 Summit “focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future.” Videos available here.
Le Web 3 – Recently held in December in Paris. Videos of conference content available here.
I’m sure there other related conferences, but this is the list I know of at the moment. Several of these conferences offer videos of the presentations for free on their websites. I’ll be viewing some of them and posting what I find most interesting to emansviews.
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The World Is Flat
I’m traveling today from the West to East coasts and find myself catching up on my reading and blog posts. I was struck by an article in Fast Company magazine discussing a large pharmaceutical company. Now I must admit, I don’t usually think of the terms “fast company” and “large pharmaceutical company” in the same sentence. The article highlights Jorden Cohen, part of an organizational effectiveness group in New York who has built what is termed the Office of the Future (OOF). OOF utilizes a couple off-shore companies to handle some of our more mundane work – creating documents, manipulating and analyzing spreadsheets, scheduling meetings, and researching. As an example… “When questions come in, like who are the key players in the stem-cell market, often I would hire external consultants,” says Kristin Peck, head of worldwide strategic planning. “OOF does the same work for me at one-tenth the cost. It’s sort of mini-internal consulting, for very specific questions.” Jordan was inspired by Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and has developed innovative uses of off shore resources are becoming beneficial to his company.
NOTE: eman’s views has now moved to emansviews.com. I hope you’ll stop by.
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