After wasting more than an hour looking for good Saint Patrick’s jokes I decided I already used the best ones a few years ago.
What I did find was a 1949 Noveltoon called Leprechaun’s Gold that, to my mind, has both political and business parables applicable today. What about you?
Irish or not, I wish you sunshine, shamrocks, and rainbows.
What is innovation? Is it really embodied in a good deal playing Farmville on Facebook for hours? I found an excellent definition of innovation in a fascinating article about Bell Labs and Mervin Kelly, who, over the course of 34 years, worked his way up from researcher to chairman of the board (something few people today would consider doing—assuming they could even find a company in which to do it).
By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.”
“On a winter day the ball is cold, which makes the rubber harder, the air in the ball denser, so the ball doesn’t really expand and contract off the bounce,” said Ruben Acosta, 32, a hotel concierge who is known on the court as Superstar. “Boiling the balls gives them back their zing.”
While not all innovation makes money they do make waves. When large-scale corruption is uncovered it receives plenty media coverage, but how to address the endemic petty corruption that millions of people face around the world is a tougher question. In 2010 Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan and Sridar Iyengar started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.
On a totally different scale is Tony Hsieh, whose dream is to fix the world by fixing cities, starting with Las Vegas, not as dictator, but as facilitator. According to his friend Sarah Nisperos, “But he wanted all these things based on happiness and merit and how nice you are. I said you shouldn’t build a strip mall, you should be downtown.”
Hsieh’s working through Downtown Project, a company he created with $350 million to spend, to seed technology startups, invest in education and attempt to build a walkable, vibrant downtown.
“You can’t dictate what the neighborhood is going to look like. But you can definitely help support and accelerate people’s dreams and visions,” Hsieh says. “That is really our belief as to what drives our culture. It needs to be organic.”
But never before has it built a citywide system integrating data from some 30 agencies, all under a single roof. It is the handiwork of an I.B.M. unit called Smarter Cities…
Innovation often borrows from the existent to create something new; that process is especially thrilling when something relatively frivolous is used to make something with the potential to truly change the world. Such is what is happening as MMOG expands to MMOC. This is one link to share with everyone you know.
Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education.
Have you ever wondered what people will make of the first Twitter messages in 30 years? Will there be another wave of technological change that makes that world radically different from today?
Long before Twitter and social media there was Usenet; a communal meeting place for scientists, developers, hackers and other early adopters.
Along with the more mundane Usenet was the place of firsts, including some of the most amazing technological announcements of the last 30 years.
For $ 1,565 you get a keyboard and logic unit with 16K RAM and a Basic interpreter in 40K ROM. A cassette interface is built in, I think; but no diskette or monitor at this price — you use your TV set. … A “business configuration” with 64K, dual diskettes, printer, and “color graphics” goes for about $ 4,500.
Among the many ‘firsts’ are some that boggle the mind.
In 1991 there were two that forever changed our world.
WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary: The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
“I’m working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution.”
So much of Twitter use in the US is banal, but the rest of the world is finding serious use for those 134 characters, like fighting crime. An administrative chief in a Kenyan village does just that using it to find stolen cows or sheep and even thwart a home invasion.
When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher’s home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.
It’s fortunate that I’m extremely healthy, because I’m not a lover of the medical world. Individuals do great things, but I don’t trust the profession as a whole and those feelings have been reinforced by the secrecy surrounding the connections between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but that’s about to change.
Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.
Household vinegar has long been the go-to ingredient for a host of household cleaners and solutions to everyday problems (just ask Heloise). Now humble, cheapvinegar is saving lives (not in the US, of course).
…a remarkably simple, brief and inexpensive procedure, one with the potential to do for poor countries what the Pap smear did for rich ones: end cervical cancer’s reign as the No. 1 cancer killer of women.The magic ingredient? Household vinegar.
Crowdsourcing is making waves in many areas, from funding startups to improving government processes to jump-starting medical innovation. Who knew?
“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost,” said Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes.
If you read nothing else today I hope you read this final link and consider registering. After all, can’t hurt and could save a life.
Q: What do you get when you combine a driving entrepreneur with a mission and an algorithm?
A: The National Kidney Register and the longest domino set of transplant surgeries to date; 64 to be exact!
Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”
I’m an article sender. I constantly send articles to family, friends and clients. Some because they are of direct interest to the recipient and others because they are interesting, fun, weird and, occasionally, bizarre. Today I thought I’d share a few of them with you.
The first two I just saw and although I know I’m a digital dinosaur I wonder if I’m the only one who finds both these articles tending to the bizarre.
Characterized by an overwhelming fear of being phoneless—so much so that it results in physical symptoms, such as panic attacks, dizziness, sweating, nausea…
The second doesn’t really qualify as bizarre, probably more a glimpse of the future. One in which parents substitute a tablet or smart phone in place of investing themselves in their young kids—exactly the way a previous generation of parents used television only portable.
…it’s not really because you want to stimulate his little brain or nurture his grasp of gadgetry. You do it to shut him up for a few minutes.
How do you take your caffeine? Do you sip, slurp, gulp or just inhale it? Don’t laugh, the last option is now available.
Caffeine inhalers are a byproduct of the energy drink craze and began emerging on scene at the peak of the drink’s popularity.
Of course, inhaling doesn’t quench your thirst when it’s hot, so an enterprising entrepreneur created caffeinated water.
This final link is definitely weird, possibly bizarre—unless you have a billion dollars and plan to live to 125.
Because he is 87, it makes him an unusually robust specimen [He has never been sick], which is what he must be if he is to defy the odds (and maybe even the gods) and live as long as he intends to. He wants to reach 125…
Today is not about the difference (if any) or which is more important (you can’t have one without the other).
Which is more important in a CEO, age or experience? With the advent of the Facebook IPO that decades old question is hot again.
The debate typically pits the benefits of creativity and familiarity with emerging technologies against the need for disciplined decision making and experience dealing with hard times.
But in actuality, the group rarely conducts its work in unison, as a deliberative body or a source of command. Instead, its power comes from its members’ informal and social networks, their determination to make the most of those connections, and their ability to work well in subgroups formed to address specific issues.
Finally, take a look at the winners of the M-Prize on Leadership along with other out of the box approaches at the Mix.
If organizations are going to evolve from the hierarchical, command-and-control structure that has dominated over the past century to a new model where trust, transparency and meritocracy are guiding principles, they’re going to need to change the way they develop leaders.
“All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.” –Jean-Louis Gassée
In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand.”
Then, of course, there is the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of managers; it started around the time the first hunting party organized to go after a wooly mammoth.
“It’s very tough to believe that there are such wide differences in management out there.” –Raffaella Sadun, assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
(Only someone who has never been in the workplace could make that statement with a straight face.)
The list of companies, not to mention executives, that have crashed and burned as a result of their lies is extensive and very public, while the number that are more or less opaque is uncountable. Is there truly a benefit for those that practice candor?
“In fact, the share prices of survey companies in the top quartile of CEO candor outperformed companies in the bottom quartile by 31%. For nine of the past 10 years, top-ranked companies have outperformed bottom-ranked companies on average by 18%.”
Finally, a disturbing look at the meritocracy called Silicon Valley.
“Silicon Valley is indeed a meritocracy for those to whom these criteria are not hurdles. But others—the blacks, women, and Hispanics whom it overlooks—find it an elite private club from which they are excluded.” –Vivek Wadhwa
(Hat tip to Emanio CEO KG Charles-Harris for sending this to me.)
“Unmentionables” has a whole new meaning and it can damage or even destroy your organization; once again, the problem and the solution are found in your culture.
Now for the fun stuff.
Millions of people base their buying decisions on peer reviews, AKA, the “wisdom of crowds,” but how wise is it when the “wisdom” is for sale?
Heads up! This is a rant. In today’s world of ‘citizen journalists’ I may wince at the misused words, but given our educational system I’m not surprised. However, when I see them in major online media sites such as Vator.tv I get really annoyed, as I did yesterday at this sentence, “Zynga is not loosing steam when it comes to entering 2012 with a whole new lineup of games for its users to get addicted to.’ I’m not referring to the fact that the sentence ends in a preposition, that’s way too common to cause a reaction. But if Zynga does start ‘loosing steam’ I at least hope the water isn’t too polluted.
This final entry should probably be called something like ‘when disparate things converge’. If you happen to have abundant disposable income and require a hospital stay shop around; you may be surprised at what’s available.
The media loves to focus on young entrepreneurs and Internet startups, most of which offer little real value and solve few problems—other than how to acquire more stuff or a greater online reputation. (Sarcasm intended.)
However, there are exciting things happening that look to solve real problems using real science in totally innovative ways.
One is an effort, driven by scientists, that is pushing to end the scientific elitism fostered by exclusive periodicals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a movement towards a kind of “open source” science that is gaining traction within the scientific community itself. There’s been an explosion of open access archives on which a scientist can not only share research results, but also find research connections and collaborators they would normally never meet.
Dr. Michael Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet.
The DIY movement has made itself felt in many areas of life, but I find none more fascinating than its application to biological research and is another push towards more open scientific endeavor.
“I want to generate the sort of tools that make it easy to do DIYbio at home.” –Cathal Garvey, Cork, Ireland, inventor of the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer, who offers the plans free of charge via the Net.
But the pièce de résistance comes from the National Science Foundation, which announced last summer the founding of the Innovation Corps, a program to turn the scientists of academia into entrepreneurs. This is not a fluff piece or election year propaganda, nor are they twenty-somethings locked in their dorm rooms coding all night. NSF recruited serial entrepreneur and now professor Steve Blank to teach the program—and a very tough program it is.
These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. Each of the teams selected by the NSF had a Principal Investigator – a research scientist who was a University professor; an Entrepreneurial Lead – a graduate student working in the Investigator’s lab; and a mentor from their local area who had business and/or domain expertise. And they were hard at work at some real science.
Today offers up four looks at executives and bosses, the folks we love to hate.
A lot of people claim that the whole idea of income inequality has been blown out of proportion, but, looking at your own paycheck, you have to wonder how/why CEO pay increased 30-40%.
“Bosses won in every area, with dramatic increases in pensions, payoffs and perks – as well as salary.”
“It turns out that many CEOs are feeling insecure about their jobs, too.”
Workers, even those with raises, are insecure, too, and new research out of Harvard says bosses are making it worse.
“…managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions.”
As function-rich mobile phones proliferate the need to understand them increases and the results of ignorance become more pronounced—not to mention embarrassing. File this one under “lessons learned.”
“He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.
“I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,” the man said. “
What is innovation? Is it really embodied in a good deal playing Farmville on Facebook for hours? I found an excellent 
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