Innovation in Practice

The Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen - Never Miss an Idea

Innovating is mental, visual, and vocal.  Here is a new product to help capture...and coordinate...all three.  It is called the Pulse^TM by Livescribe.  The Pulse^TM is a smart pen that records and links audio to what your write, so you never miss a word...or an idea.

The Pulse^TM will become a great tool for conducting innovation workshops.  One of the more challenging issues in workshops is capturing ideas.  No matter how diligent the team is in collecting ideas, many subtle insights and concepts are missed.  Even if an innovation workshop is recorded on audio or video tape, it is nearly impossible to connect the spoken word to the drawings and notes taken by the participants.  The Pulse^TM SmartPen solves that.

Here is how I will use the Pulse^TM in my workshops:

• Recording component lists
• Recording Virtual Products
• Recording "Function Follows Form" ideas
• Drawing new product embodiments
• Recording potential benefits of new ideas
• Recording potential challenges and drawbacks of ideas
• Scoring ideas
• Creating Attribute Dependency matrices
• Recording initial business cases to support new ideas
• Recording names of participants and facilitators

I envision using the pen with teams of two or three people as they use a structured innovation method.  One team member will use the pen to keep track of ideas and draw physical representations while recording the actual discussion as it happens.  Each team member will sign the page while verbalizing their name.  Idea sessions upload automatically to a computer when the pen is attached to its charging cradle.  This approach captures the moment of innovation in audio and written form...forever.  It creates a permanent record of who innovated, how they innovated, and what they innovated.  We'll never miss an idea again.

Potential benefits of this approach include:

• Better records and annotations for filing patents and protecting intellectual property
• Better archiving for future workshops to refine and improve ideas
• Better metrics of ideation programs
• Easier sharing of ideas with R&D teams, consultants, and agencies
• Better marketing strategy development

Congratulations to the team at Livescribe for the development and launch of this useful product.  For innovation practitioners, this is a must-have.

The LAB: Innovating Health Care with S.I.T. (August 2009)

Health Care Reform, as the U.S. government sees it, promises lower costs, better access, and improved quality for all.  Let's apply a structured innovation method to health care to see if we can achieve some of these goals.  For this month's LAB, we will apply Systematic Inventive Thinking to the hospital discharge process.

Discharging patients from the hospital is a critical aspect of health care delivery.  It is a time of transition where one group of care givers stops treating the patient and another group starts.  The most frequent type of transition occurs when patients go from hospital to home, happening nearly 40 million times each year in the U.S.. Studies show that about 20 percent of discharged patients have an adverse event – a preventable emergency department visit or re-admission – within 30 days following hospitalization.  The discharge process is so important that a cottage industry is emerging around it.  Some  consultants, software products, best practices, training, and research studies focus just on discharging patients.

To use S.I.T., we start by listing the components of the service (process):

Innovation Sighting: Web Site Morphing with Attribute Dependency

Imagine a Web site that detects a visitor's "thinking" style and "morphs" its look and feel to suit that visitor's style.  Professor Glen Urban and his colleagues at M.I.T. describe an approach in the Sloan Management Review article, "Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales."  They collaborated with BT Group, a UK telecom company, to create a Web site that learns whether a person is more analytical versus holistic, and whether the person is more visual versus verbal in how they process information.  Once the Web site learns this (based on a few preliminary clicks on the site), it adapts itself to present information in an optimal way:

This is an excellent example of the Attribute Dependency Template, one of five templates in the Systematic Inventive Thinking method of innovation.  Attribute Dependency takes internal and external attributes of a product or service and combines them to create new dependencies (or break existing dependencies).  With Web site morphing, for example, the two attributes that have been linked are:

• Web site appearance (an internal attribute)
• Visitor's Cognitive Style (an external attribute)

Dependencies can be passive, active, or adaptive.  Passive dependencies are static - they don't change once they have been established.  Active dependencies are dynamic - an attribute changes only when another one changes.  Adaptive dependencies change the way they change.  In other words, they learn as they go.  Attribute Dependency is a great tool for creating "smart" products - those that know and adapt to user preferences or environmental conditions.

Does Web site morphing work?  The MIT researchers report that Web-originated purchase intentions for BT's broadband service could increase 20% after morphing the site to match individual cognitive styles.

Academic Focus: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has created the first-of-its kind Bachelor of Innovation™ program.  Founded by Professor Terry Boult, the programis "an internationally unique interdisciplinary undergraduate program between the College of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) and College of Business (COB). The Bachelor of Innovation™ (BI) is a family structure, much like a Bachelor of Science (BS) or a Bachelor of Arts (BA), in which particular majors are defined. Included degrees (in alphabetical order): BI in Business Administration, BI in Computer Science, BI in Computer Science Security, BI in Electrical Engineering, and BI in Game Design and Development. Each degree in the program is composed of an emphasis major, an innovation core, and one of 4 cross-discipline cores."

Here is how the program is structured (from the UCCS website):

Automated Innovation

"To avoid the fate of alchemists, it is time we asked where we stand.  Now, before we invest more time and money on the information-processing level, we should ask whether the protocols of human subjects and the programs so far produced suggest that computer language is appropriate for analyzing human behavior:  Is an exhaustive analysis of human reason into rule-governed operations on discrete, determinate, context-free elements possible?  Is an approximation to this goal of artificial reason even probable?  The answer to both these questions appears to be, No."

Hubert L. Dreyfus
"What Computers Can't Do:  The Limits of Artificial Intelligence"

This chilling conclusion about the fate of artificial intelligence seems to put an end to the idea that we can automate innovation.  Since this book was first published in 1972, not much has changed, and the  field of artificial intelligence seems to be in decline. 

For a machine to innovate, it would need to: