Garage Rules And Innovation

From here:

When Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company in 1999, one of her first moves was to study Bill Hewlett’s and Dave Packard’s writings. With the help of her executive committee, she compared the founders’ original management principles with the way HP operates today and quickly excised the parts that were no longer relevant. “Preserve the best, and reinvent the rest,” became the cry.

They produced the ‘Rules of the Garage’. These are given in the HP poster above as well as below:

• Believe you can change the world.
• Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
• Know when to work alone and when to work together.
• Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
• No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).
• The customer defines a job well done.
• Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
• Invent different ways of working.
• Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
• Believe that together we can do anything.
• Invent.

I like the phrase ‘preserve the best and reinvent the rest’. Unintentionally in change programs this can easily become ‘ignore the best and copy the rest (from others)’ which hardly ever works…

Picture credit here.

Cash, The Mother Of Invention

Interesting recent article by Brian Appleyard on the option of offering significant prizes to develop highly innovative solutions to immensely challenging problems. This way of coming up with clever solutions has a very long, successful and sometimes troubled history, such as Harrison and Longitude.

This approach to innovation is relatively cheap and gives a chance for highly creative mavericks, who may be uncomfortable working in big organisations, to come up with the goods and be suitably rewarded.

The modern examples that he mentions are:

• $10 million – building a private-sector spaceship, offered by the X Prize Foundation
• $1 million – make meat in a laboratory and sell it by 2012, offered by Peta
• $40 thousand – the network challenge (to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the internet), offered by DARPA

Proactive prizes are phenomenally powerful tools. They circumvent bureaucracy, investment anxiety and, where necessary, ideology. They exploit networks, causes and frustration with existing establishments such as Nasa.

They also exploit the human will to take part, to compete and to win. They restore a sense of sweaty, balls-out, seat-of-the-pants heroism to innovation. And, with networks involved, they invite us all to play. Prizes work better than work.

Picture credit from the 2009 independent film ‘The Mother Of Invention‘.

All Done With Words

Impressive – go here to appreciate the use of letters/words!

Merry Xmas Everyone

…Let’s Hope It’s A Good One, Without Any Fear…(John Lennon)

Picture credit here.

5 Fallacies Of Cloud Computing

Some more views on the likely impact of cloud computing here, centred around questioning the validity of the following five statements (see also here for background):

1. New technology always supersedes old technology
2. Cloud computing is new technology
3. The cloud will replace data centers
4. Cloud computing can work for any IT need
5. The cloud is secure

Now, it may seem that I’m somehow anti-cloud. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is a sensible method for provisioning computing resources on demand and fulfills a very real market niche. I just do not believe that it is the answer to every IT problem, nor is it the sole future of IT — only small portion of it. Cloud computing will expand the market. I can envision a very near future where companies use a hybrid of traditional dedicated data center resources with cloud deployments to extend, replicate or expand as demand warrants. The cloud is indeed a new paradigm, but it lacks the underlying “shift” that alters the entire industry around it. The pundits should sheath their hyperbole and focus on what cloud computing can do for people rather than what it will do to the marketplace.

Climate Change: For And Against

Impressive infographic at Information is Beautiful presenting the two sides of the climate change debate: The Global Warming Skeptics vs The Scientific Consensus. The picture above is s small part of the whole chart.

Interesting discussion of the chart and more general issues here, including:

Of course, there is no such thing as a purely objective and judgment-free presentation of data, no matter how scrupulously the data itself may be collected; if nothing else, we make choices about what data to present. And a side-by-side comparison chart like this can’t help but give a slightly misleading impression of the relative merits of the arguments, by putting the conclusions of an overwhelming majority of honest scientists up against the arguments of a fringe collection of politically-motivated activists. But it’s certainly good to see the actual issues arrayed in point-counterpoint format.

Still, there remains a somewhat intractable problem: when people are arguing about issues that necessarily require expert knowledge that not everyone can possibly take the time to acquire for themselves, how do we make judgments about who to believe?

Free eBook on Microsoft Office 2010

Free e-book on Office 2010 here, download is about 10.5 MB.

First Look: Microsoft Office 2010, by Katherine Murray, offers 14 chapters of early content, organized like so:

Part I, “Envision the Possibilities,” introduces you to the changes in Office 2010 and shows you how you can make the most of the new features to fit the way you work today…

Part II, “Hit the Ground Running,” focuses on each of the Office 2010 applications in turn, spotlighting the key new features and showing how they relate to the whole…

Part III, “Next Steps with Office 2010,” zooms up to the big picture and provides examples to help you think through interoperability…

Principles Of Good Management

Clear exposition of 6 key principles of good business management – 10-minute video summary here and web site on the associated book ‘Awesomely Simple’ here (including free downloads and other resources).

Deceptively simple is probably a better description than awesomely simple!

21 Different Ways To Innovate

Remarkably, the above picture is not a fake (see picture credit below):

This is a re-engined development of the Model 116, designed as well by Theodore P. Hall. A 25,5 hp Crosly engine is in the rear, powering the plastic-bodied 4-seat car and a 190 hp Lycoming O-435C built on the 34,5 ft wing for flying. Pilot Reuben Snodgrass flew it for the first time on November 1, 1947 but the prototype crashed within 3 weeks due to fuel starvation. Using the same wing and another car body it flew again on January 29, 1948 piloted by W.G. Griswold. Both machines used the same registration.

Here are some ways of coming up with similarly innovative ideas, although hopefully a bit more practical:

1.    Copy someone else’s idea.
2.    Ask customers
3.    Observe customers
4.    Use difficulties and complaints
5.    Combine
6.    Eliminate
7.    Ask your staff
8.    Plan
9.    Run brainstorms
10.    Examine patents
11.    Collaborate
12.    Minimize or maximize
13.    Run a contest
14.    Ask – what if?
15.    Watch the competition
16.    Outsource
17.    Use open innovation
18.    Adapt a product to a new use
19.    Try Triz
20.    Go back in time
21.    Use social networks

How many have you tried?

What works best for your organisation and culture?

Do you use the same method(s) over and over again?

More details here and picture credit here.

UK Science And Innovation 2009

The fifth annual Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014 report for 2009, published today by the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) outlines the latest achievements which have helped the UK to remain a research world leader and emerge as a powerhouse for innovation.

 

Key highlights include:

• The UK’s continued strong performance in delivering world class, sustainable research demonstrates that recent investments in research infrastructure have paid off;
• Knowledge transfer and commercialisation activities from the science base have been firmly established across the university sector and within Research Councils. In particular, the numbers of spin-outs remain well ahead of the early nineties;
• There has been encouraging increases in the proportion of young people reaching expected levels in science and mathematics. Applications for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects at university have also grown;
• The UK’s strengths in the services and creative industries – where innovation is less likely to be picked up in indicators such as R&D – mean that overall the UK’s innovation performance is under-stated.