GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Congratulations to the team at Invention Machine for hosting this week’s conference, Power to Innovate, at the Seaport Hotel in Boston. The theme of the conference centered around the Innovation Intelligence EcosystemTM and how companies can boost performance by coordinating information, communities, and innovation activities. Invention Machine’s premier product, Goldfire, is at the center of this ecosystem.“Goldfire is a unique innovation software platform that transforms ideas into commercial products – generating and validating concepts and making innovation a sustainable process. Designed with engineers, scientists and researchers in mind, Goldfire automates every day innovation tasks – from identifying a new market to developing a new product to improving existing product offerings – and empowering users with a repeatable process. Fusing proven innovation methods for generating ideas along with advanced technologies for accessing precise concepts from corporate and worldwide knowledge sources, Goldfire stimulates creative thinking and speeds inventive problem solving—helping product development engineers, scientists and researchers to quickly conceive and validate ideas thus fueling product pipelines.”The latest release, 5.5, should greatly enhance usability of the product especially by groups outside of R&D such as marketing and M&A. Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master & Senior Director at Invention Machine, demonstrated how he researched the disease, lymphoma. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of insights he created using Goldfire 5.5.The entire conference was followed on Twitter compliments of Andrea Meyer. Check it out at #P2I09. Here are some other highlights from the conference:

• Jim Todhunter, Chief Technology Officer at Invention Machine, shared their technology roadmap and how Goldfire will enhance research, not just search capability around a topic. He shared a sneak peak at release 6.0 and some of the new features to enhance collaboration, both internally and externally. Jim also presented an “Innovation Practice Maturity Model.” This four level model helps companies understand where they need to head to increase and sustain innovation.
• Randy Schiestl, VP Research and Development of Boston Scientific, shared their collective experience adopting Goldfire and using it across the enterprise.
• Jim Belfiore presented “Collaborative Innovation” and how to leverage Goldfire’s capabilities in team settings. Later, Jim Todhunter addressed it head on with a presentation on Open Innovation.

I am impressed with Goldfire, and I am particularly interested in how it could intersect with other technologies such as:

• Virtual reality like Second Life and the simulations from Visual Purple. As Edward Tufte notes, we need to escape “Flatland” and get ourselves out of two dimensional computer screens and into richer learning and sensing environments. Embedding the output of Goldfire into a three dimensional world could add context and usability.
• Preferencing systems such as those used by Amazon, Pandora, and others that allow users to continuously refine and enhance choices by “thumbs up/thumbs down” voting.
• Pattern recognition approaches. Marketers particularly need to see patterns emerging about their brands within the social web and within formal literature. Combining the output of Goldfire with data visualization might help marketers do this quicker and more effectively.
• Mass scaling. Goldfire aggregates information from multiple sources, both internally and externally. Could it be used in a more domestic, non-corporate setting to enhance people’s standard of living? A simple tool like Google Reader aggregates pre-selected website information using RSS feeds. Goldfire far outstrips this. Could individuals use a lighter version of Goldfire to collect their daily news given the shortcomings of traditional printed newspapers?

Invention Machine’s CMO, Jeff Boehm, shared an interesting statistic about the companies participating at this conference. Those companies have outperformed the market 11.5% over the last 13 months.Message: innovate to grow.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Newspapers are dying. Their business model is burning to the ground. They cannot fend off the Internet and other threats despite their virtual monopoly and economies of scale in printing and distribution. Advertisers are moving on. Yet while traditional newsrooms are shrinking, journalism is thriving and the consumption of news is skyrocketing. Why are newspapers shutting down? As Clay Shirky describes it:“If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced. Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism. Let’s examine how.PRINTINGGutenberg’s innovation of printing multiple copies of one newspaper was a huge step forward in 1500. Today’s large scale printing machines are still built on that idea. Companies like Siemens that produce these machines need to engineer new versions of large volume printers that can take custom digital content and print one unique copy of a paper, then print a different one, the next one, etc, at very high speeds. This would allow news companies to create a custom newspaper for every single subscriber. The capability is already in existence to some degree with the printing of custom mail order catalogs. That technology needs to be extended to allow mass scale customization – a unique paper for every household.DISTRIBUTIONNewspaper companies have well-established skills and resources to take the printed paper right from the presses to your doorstep. But they need to “backward integrate” distribution into how they collect content. Today, news organizations rely on their own staff as well as syndicated content from AP and other organizations. The proliferation of blogs and other content providers gives news organization a tremendous opportunity to reinvent their business model by excelling at: news aggregation and brokering. Today’s consumer wants more relevant content than what is sent to them in a traditional newspaper. They use RSS feeds to aggregate their own content. Newspapers could do this for the consumer based on the use of meta-tagging and preferences much like what Pandora has done with music. Instead of a Music Genome, the news industry needs to create the “News Genome”, a structured architecture of news preferencing that allows customers to pre-identify what they prefer so that news organizations can source and broker it back to them – in printed form, delivered to their doorstep. JOURNALISMJournalism has been dominated by a relatively small group of reporters who go out and collect news and content. Today, there are millions of “journalists” under The Long Tail creating content. The key is how their content is fed into the meta-tagging “News Genome” idea discussed above. To give them an incentive to feed quality, relevant content into that system, news organizations could make micropayments to a journalist for each time and only when their content is pulled in and brokered back out to a subscriber. Clay Shirky is correct when he says consumers won’t pay for news because they have never paid for news. So the idea of micropayments from consumers won’t work. But micropayments to the journalist when they get a “hit” on their content would create the right incentives to the system. News organizations need to establish a preferencing system of tagging for each of their subscribers, then source and broker relevant, tagged, content to them in RSS-like fashion.What would it look like? Imagine the ultimate newspaper. It would have articles, editorials, advertising and other content that is custom tailored to your beliefs, lifestyle, affiliations and preferences. If you like to keep abreast of world news, so be it. But if you are also liberal-minded, these same articles would have a liberal bent to them. If you live in Cincinnati, but root for the Chicago Bears, your sports section would have Bears news, not Bengals. Even the obituaries would be connected to you and your world. If a great-uncle of your college roommate passes away, you would get to read about it. Your entire newspaper would be not only filled with the news and information that is relevant to you, but it is also written in a tone and orientation that matches your view of the world. For newspapers, this means instead of printing millions of copies of one version of the daily paper, they now have to print a million versions, one for each of a million different readers. Wow!A custom newspaper has advantages for the advertisers as well. It is the advertisers, not the subscribers, after all, who subsidize journalism. With custom newspapers, advertisers could target their ads in line with the keyword tags so that the ad appeals to that subscriber’s interests and values. My bet is advertisers would pay more for this with the promise of more effective ad placement. More money on the table leaves more room for micropayments to journalists. The loop is closed.As Shirky notes:“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

A colleague asked me, “Who is that innovation guru at the Harvard Business School?”That’s easy: Dr. Teresa AmabileDr. Amabile heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity. She is one of the world’s leading voices in business innovation. From Wikipedia:

• “Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Dr. Amabile received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1977. Originally focusing on individual creativity, Dr. Amabile’s research has expanded to encompass team creativity and organizational innovation. This 30-year program of research on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation has yielded a theory of creativity and innovation; methods for assessing creativity, motivation, and the work environment; and a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation. Her current research program focuses on the psychology of everyday work life: how events in the work environment influence subjective experience and performance. Before joining HBS, Dr. Amabile held several research grants as a professor at Brandeis University, including Creativity and Motivation, from the National Institute of Mental Health, and Downsizing Industrial R&D, from the Center for Innovation Management Studies. She was awarded the E. Paul Torrance Award by the Creativity Division of the National Association for Gifted Children in 1998.Dr. Amabile has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Lucent Technologies, Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, and Motorola. In addition to participating in various executive programs, her main teaching assignment at Harvard Business School is an MBA course, Managing for Creativity. Dr. Amabile was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She currently serves as a Director of Seaman Corporation.Dr. Amabile is the author of Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative, as well as over 100 scholarly papers, chapters, and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior.”

For innovation practitioners, I recommend reading her articles:

• Amabile, Teresa M., and Mukti Khaire. “Creativity and the Role of the Leader.” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008)
• Amabile, T. M. “Entrepreneurial Creativity Through Motivational Synergy.” Journal of Creative Behavior 31 (1997): 18-26.
• Amabile, T. M. “Attributions of Creativity: What Are the Consequences?” Creativity Research Journal 8, no. 4 (1995): 423-426.

Teresa Amabile has been shaking up the world of creativity and innovation for over 30 years. Now THAT’s disruptive!

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator? For most people: push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America. These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside. The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.The Division Template is the culprit here. In this innovation sighting, the elevator floor button panel was divided out and placed back into the system…outside the elevator cab. Very novel, useful, and surprising. To use Division, make a list of the components, then divide out a component. Divide functionally or physically and place it back somewhere in the system. Use Function Follows Form to identify potential benefits, feasibility, challenges, and adaptations.The benefit is better elevator customer service. Elevator cars operate more efficiently which means you get to the right floor faster. How? By selecting your floor sooner (while waiting for the elevator to arrive) the elevator’s computer has more timely input about peoples’ destinations. It can calculate the optimal pattern of pickups and dropoffs, then execute it faster than traditional elevators. Here is how this new elevator, called the Miconic 10, operates:“Miconic 10 advanced software drives a powerful logic program that systematically rationalizes elevator traffic flow in a building. It employs a sophisticated algorithm to manage the complexities of traffic patterns as they change throughout the day and to group passengers together with the same departure and/or destination floors. With any conventional control, passengers can only tell the elevator system that they want to travel either ‘Up’ or ‘Down’. Likewise, everyone tries to get into the first car that arrives, often causing overcrowding, then scrambling to push the buttons once inside the car. As a result, the car will probably stop at every floor on the way up. With Miconic 10, you can register you destination even before you reach the elevator lobby. The system tells you immediately which car to go to. It groups passengers together by destination to minimize the number of stops. It makes sure that cars can’t become overcrowded. Once inside the elevator, your destination floor is confirmed to you. You don’t need to press any more buttons (special service buttons are, of course, provided). You receive confirmation of your destination floor upon arrival.”The first elevator was built by Archimedes probably in 236 B.C. It has come a long way since then.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Once you have a systematic and routine way to innovate, you are confronted with a new problem – how to decide how much innovation is enough. For many, this is an odd question. If innovation is essential for survival and growth, most people would want all the innovation they can get. But that is oversimplifying. Too much innovation can overload the system, confuse the organization, and lead to ideation fatigue. So how much is enough?Here is a useful analysis that can tell you how many ideas are needed to reach your specific growth targets called “Mapping the Innovation Gap.”The steps are:

1. Determine your revenue goals in each year over a specific time horizon. Base this on your firm’s strategic planning time horizon (usually 3 to 10 years depending on the industry). Use the actual revenue targets from your company’s business plan.
2. Break these annual revenue targets down over a mix of products, new and existing, in each year. Some firms call this a revenue cascade or revenue waterfall. It shows for each year how much of the revenue comes from existing products and how much comes from new products.
3. Estimate your Innovation Yield (number of new ideas needed to produce one new product). This varies by industry and by company depending on factors such as level of investment, core competencies, and access to technology. Various think tanks and consultancies have estimates such as the curve pictured above.
4. Estimate your typical idea-to-launch Lead Time (how much time it takes to develop and launch a product once it is conceived). As with the Innovation Yield, this will vary. Take a look at past product development experience and determine an average time (in years).
5. Plot the number of new ideas needed in each year to produce the necessary new products in subsequent years. Take the number of new products needed in a specific year and divide it by the Innovation Yield. Then plot this number back in time by the amount of Lead Time to develop ideas.

What you end up with is the number of new ideas that need to be generated each year to have a realistic chance of achieving future revenue growth targets. It can be a sobering number depending on how aggressive your targets are. With this number, a general manager can then task the team to “schedule” innovation, and then hold them accountable for generating the necessary number of ideas. Bottom Line: To grow, companies need a systematic innovation method, and it needs to be applied systematically.Download “Mapping the Innovation Gap” here.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Building a prototype of your innovation is a crucial link between conceiving the idea and commercializing it. A physical prototype helps you get immediate feedback from customers, designers, and financial backers as to the commercial viability of the project. It is a necessary step in the patent process. It is a pivotal point in the “GO vs. NO GO” decision, and it can save an inventor money and time as even Abraham Lincoln found out when he prototyped his patented invention.Prototyping can be difficult especially for a small company or independent inventor. Here is help. Imagine a 15,000 square-foot workshop with tools, equipment, and instruction to build and prototype your inventions. It is called TechShop, now with three locations in the United States. From their website:“You can think of TechShop as a health club but with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment. It is sort of like a Kinko’s for makers, or a Xerox PARC for the rest of us. TechShop is designed for everyone, regardless of their skill level. TechShop is perfect for inventors, “makers”, hackers, tinkerers, artists, roboteers, families, entrepreneurs, youth groups, FIRST robotic teams, arts and crafts enthusiasts, and anyone else who wants to be able to make things that they dream up but don’t have the tools, space or skills.TechShop has milling machines and lathes, welding stations and a CNC plasma cutter, sheet metal working equipment, drill presses and band saws, industrial sewing machines, hand tools, plastic and wood working equipment including a 4′ x 8′ ShopBot CNC router, electronics design and fabrication facilities, Epilog laser cutters, tubing and metal bending machines, a Dimension SST 3-D printer, electrical supplies and tools and pretty much everything you’d ever need to make just about anything.”There are many resources for getting a prototype, but most of these are the “Do-It-For-You” type. TechShop is one of the few that lets you, the innovator, come in and use the machines to “Do-It-Yourself.” They offer a wide range of training courses as well as individual consultations when needed. It is truly a “healthclub” for innovators.Perhaps the only thing I would add is a training course on How to Innovate!

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

This is the fourth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on “Where should innovation reside?” Here is the next perspective in the series:Who leads innovation in your company: marketing or R&D? It’s a trick question, of course. But it’s a useful question for Fortune 100 companies to consider. Has your company made a conscious choice of how it “allocates” this leadership role? Allocating innovation to one group over the other will yield a different business result. The approaches to innovation by marketing are dramatically different than approaches to innovation by R&D, so the outputs will be dramatically different. The question becomes: which group will outperform the other? Technical-driven innovation or marketing-driven innovation?But there is another layer of complexity. Allocating innovation resources to one group over the other will also yield a different kind of innovation. Market-driven innovation speaks to what is salable. Technology-driven innovation speaks to what is technically possible. Which group delivers the type of innovation that is best suited to the company’s growth strategy? Now the decision of who leads innovation becomes even stickier. This question is a bit like deciding how to allocate your money in an investment portfolio. Which allocation of funds will give you the total return and the type of return (tax advantaged, etc) that you need? The tempting answer here is to assert innovation leadership should be shared between the two. Diversify your innovation allocation just as you would diversify your personal investment allocation. I’m not so sure. Here’s why.For a company that knows exactly what its customers need, then it’s just a matter of developing it. A technically-led innovation approach makes the most sense. L’Oreal, for example, does virtually no market research with its customers. It gathers no “Voice of the Customer.” Yet it knows exactly what customers need because…L’Oreal tells them! In that case, innovation is led by the technical team to deliver the beauty compounds and formulas that will thrill their customers. The innovation approach here is described as “Problem-to-Solution. Engineers lead this because they excel at solution matching.A company in the refrigerator space such as GE or Whirlpool needs a different approach. Breakthrough innovation is more likely to be found in the “Solution-to-Problem” mode, best driven by the commercial marketers who excel at problem matching. The marketer needs to use an approach that relieves them of their preconceived notions about what customers want. They seek to avoid “fixedness” around their current product so they can solution spot more freely. Only then will they be able to envision new concepts of home refrigeration that never would have emerged with a technical approach. The best companies maximize their innovation investment return by consciously allocating leadership to either marketing or to R&D. In the end, innovation is best driven with a team approach but with clear role accountability and direction depending on market conditions and corporate strategy.You can check out all of the ‘Innovation Perspectives‘ articles published so far from the different contributing authors on “Where should innovation reside?” by clicking the link in this sentence.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

Parents teach their children many things: morals, etiquette, religion, sports, cleanliness, walking, cooking, riding a bicycle, reading, writing, math, discipline, safety, driving a car…the list goes on and on. What if you could give your child the life-long ability to innovate? What a gift indeed. This issue surfaced after a string of emails with one of our blog readers who wants her child to learn innovation (thanks, Trish!). Can children learn a corporate innovation method at such an early age? I’ve taught children how to innovate, and it is one of the most rewarding feelings you can have. I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th graders the method called Systematic Inventive Thinking. I was surprised and a bit unnerved how well they did. After teaching the five templates of innovation (over a five weekly sessions), each child completed a “final exam” by innovating a new-to-the-world product using one of the templates in just 30 minutes! I was amazed. The PowerPoint slides I used for this training are in the READING section of the blog if you wish to download them.Here are some pointers for teaching your children to innovate:1. Equate innovation to other skills-based activities

• Innovating takes skill just like sports or dancing. Don’t let your children think innovation is some special, innate talent that only certain people have. This creates an artificial barrier, one that I see too often in the corporate environment, and it prevents people from trying to be innovative. Innovating is a skill, and it can be learned by anyone, even those who are not creative in the traditional sense.

2. De-emphasize patents

• For some reason, kids are fascinated with patents. They tend to see patents as the ultimate reward of innovation. Patents do not equate to successful innovation; rather, they equate to getting legal status regarding an invention. If a child invents something that has already been invented, this is a success. In fact, it is a huge success because it shows an ability to create novel ideas that have a track record of success. Be sure to reward your child if they invent something that exists. Send the message: if you can invent something that is already shown to be successful, you can definitely be the first to invent something new and useful.

3. Apply innovation across a wide variety of situations

• It is not just for inventing new products. Teach you children to apply innovation methods to things like writing a poem, doing school work, or getting dressed in the morning. Have them invent a new way to clean their room or play with a toy. Help them equate innovation with creating novelty in the everyday things. Make innovation a routine way to tackle new situations.

4. Distinguish between innovation skills and problem solving skills

• Both are useful, but are often confused as the same. They are related, but different. Help them see problem solving as what to use when the problem is very well defined and must be solved. Help them see innovating as the set of tools to use when new approaches are needed for an existing task. Example: Innovate a new way to clean their room, but problem-solve when they want to avoid having to do it.

5. Teach “ambidextrous” innovation

• Help them understand the two directions of innovation: Problem-to-Solution and Solution-to-Problem. Example: if the kitchen toaster burns the bread every morning, and they see a novel way to fix it, that is Problem-to-Solution. Other the other hand, if they imagine the toaster is like a TV that is “on demand,” then make the connection that this would help mom get toast ready precisely when everything else is ready, that is Solution-to-Problem innovation.

6. Set an example

• Parents struggle teaching children anything unless the parents demonstrate those skills themselves. Whether it is table manners, proper grammar, or how to treat other people, parents must “walk the talk.” Innovation is no different. Let children see how you and others, especially other children, use innovation methods to do cool things, fun things, important things.

(Pictured are two future innovators, Emerson and Margo, from Cincinnati, Ohio)

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

“As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word but it was the template.” – Paul McCartneyThe Beatles were innovators, and they did it the old-fashioned way: they used templates. They were two-way innovators, using a mix of PROBLEM-TO-SOLUTION and SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM innovation. The Beatles were corporate innovators who created immense fortunes for their shareholders. They used structured methods, experimentation, and technology the same way Fortune 500 companies create new products and services. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, The Beatles have sold more albums in the United States than any other artist. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked them number one in its list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and four of their albums appeared in the top ten of the magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. The Beatles’ innovative music and cultural impact helped define the 1960s, and their influence on pop culture is still evident today. The Beatles were collectively included in Time magazine’s list of The Most Important People of the 20th Century. How were they so effective?The Beatles practiced team innovation. John Lennon and Paul McCartney are the most successful musical collaboration in history. One would sketch an idea or a song fragment and take it to the other to finish or improve; in some cases, two incomplete songs or song ideas that each had worked on individually would be combined into a complete song. Often one of the pair would add a middle eight or bridge section to the other’s verse and chorus. Lennon called it “Writing eyeball-to-eyeball” and “Playing into each other’s noses”. They applied these templates in a disciplined, structured way to create a stream of hit songs.The Beatles were experimenters. David Thurmaier writes:“Above all, the Beatles remained curious about all types of music, and they continually reinvented their own music by injecting it with fresh influences from multiple cultures. This experimentation adds a dimension to their work that separates it from their contemporaries’ music. In the second volume of his book The Beatles as Musicians, Walter Everett explains that “rock musicians’ interest in Indian sounds multiplied rapidly” after George Harrison introduced the Indian sitar to the song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” Also, the string quartet on 1965’s “Yesterday” would make its way into the music of other groups around the same time. This exchange of musical innovations worked both ways; for example, the Beatles were able to take elements from Bob Dylan’s music and meld them into their own. Their relentless experimentation and questing for the “new” is one strong element that makes the Beatles’ music attractive and rewarding for study and enjoyment.”The Beatles loved technology. They innovated songs and the way they produced songs. They used a wide range of techniques in the studio to differentiate their sound including guitar feedback, classical musicians on popular albums, artificial double tracking, close miking of acoustic instruments, sampling, direct injection, synchronizing tape machines, and backwards tapes. The recording process was summed up by Paul McCartney: “We would say, ‘Try it. Just try it for us. If it sounds crappy, OK, we’ll lose it. But it might just sound good.’ We were always pushing ahead: louder, further, longer, more, different. That love of technology lives on today with the release of The Beatles RockbandTM.Oddly, McCartney seemed uncomfortable using templates to write songs. Perhaps using a template seemed like cheating, making him feel less creative. This is a fallacy about creativity and creative people. My sense is that creative people in any field use a template of some sort. How could creative people like Robert Frost, Shakespeare, da Vinci, and Disney continue to pour out masterful work over and over? Like the Beatles, they used templates. It gave them the direction, the signpost, and the inspiration to apply their creative mind in a structured, systematic way. Many have studied and commented on the contributions of The Beatles and the lessons learned. And in the end, it was their prolific use of structured innovation templates that made their contributions possible.

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GUEST POST from Drew Boyd

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.

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