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Bringing ideas to life in an organization can be a bumpy ride. We’re all familiar with the myth of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, waiting for inspiration to fall on his head. Newton’s apple is one of the more common symbols of innovation, right up there with Archimedes shouting Eureka from his bathtub. Metaphorically, that’s what we do when go to a brainstorming meeting to come up with new ideas. If the conditions are right, and the coffee strong enough, the next great idea just might fall on our heads. What is often overlooked is what happens next, after the apple falls, when we have to actually bring that idea to life. If we’re not careful, Newton’s apple can turn into Newton’s applesauce, a watered down imitation of the idea. One of my first cartoons (back in 2002) was about this phenomenon.j...
Perhaps you’re sitting here, reading this on your phone, absently checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to the friend you’re meeting tonight for dinner.
You stand at the end of a long line of inventions, which might have never existed, but for the disabled. The keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email: In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter, so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf.
And, in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent Internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters. His proof was his own experience: Electronic messaging was the only seamless way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work....
Global delivery company DHL started its business by offering free plane tickets to people on the street. For the trouble of giving up their baggage allowances, passengers were handed a free round-trip plane ticket to Hawaii.
Founded as a courier service in 1969, DHL used the spare capacity in travelers’ luggage to transport high-value documents. To understand why it made sense for DHL to provide free tickets to travelers, it helps to understand the massive changes entailed by the containerization of ocean cargo in the 1960s.
Online marketplace Amazon.com made its debut in the 2015 Thomson Reuters Top 100 global innovators list, leaving International Business Machines, the world's largest technology services company, out of the list.
Amazon joins the innovators list for the first time for innovations in data centers, devices, electronic methods and systems, according to its latest report.
The Thomson Reuters Top 100 global innovators program identifies innovators annually through an in-depth analysis based on a series of patent-related metrics that analyze what it means to be truly innovative. There are 27 companies that are dropped from the list this year, including AT&T (T.N), IBM (IBM.N), Siemens (SIEGn.DE) and Xerox (XRX.N)....
With over 1.4 million apps available on Google Play and over 1.2 million on the App Store, the idea that smartphone users are spoilt for choice is an understatement. And it’s not just free apps that are crowding the stores. January 2015 was the App Store’s most profitable month ever, with users spending about half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases in the first one week alone.
Think about that figure for a moment. Half a billion. That’s more than the entire budgets of the Titanic and Avengers: Age of Ultron combined. And that’s what people like you and I spent on our favorite yoga app or must-have game in just one week.
There’s a je ne sais quoi about apps that go viral that every app developer would like to lay their hands on. I don’t claim to be have all the answers, but an analysis of the flavors of the season – Dubsmash, Meerkat and Periscope – might help us distill the secrets behind building apps that drive fanatic downloads and sky-high engagement rates....
There are a million other things people would rather think about than banking. It is boring. It's tedious. It's complex. That's why financial institutions need to build an innovation strategy completely around making banking easy and saving people time.
In the opening remarks delivered at the Forum 2015, Jeffry Pilcher, the CEO/President and Founder of The Financial Brand, showed nearly 1,000 attendees why they need to simplify banking, and what they can do to pull it off. Here's the script from that speech....
Here's a fun way for brands to dole out product samples. As part of its sponsorship of this weekend's NCAA Men's Final Four competition, Coke Zero and Ogilvy & Mather installed a "drinkable billboard" that shoots soda through a massive straw into a public drinking fountain.
The 23,000-pound novelty is in White River State Park in Indianapolis, where the games are taking place. Coke Zero flows through 4,500 feet of straw to spell out "Taste It." Then the liquid travels from the bottom of the billboard to a sampling area with six fountain spouts where people can taste the soda....
“Home,” Maya Angelou wrote in her magnificent meditation on belonging and (not) growing up, “is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant.”
Indeed, it seems that only for children, with their purity of feeling and their ability to“mediate the ideal and the real,” does the Venn diagram of home and house integrate into one fully overlapping circle. In adulthood, the circles drift further and further apart as we begin to project our conflicted dream-home ideals onto our real houses.In the impossibly wonderful Home (public library), illustrator and children’s book author Carson Ellis presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home...
Your Facebook page cover photo is a small but powerful tool when it comes to promoting yourself, your services or your business. It’s the first thing seen by anybody who visits your Facebook page and you have the power to decide whether they just scroll past it or stop and have a proper look. Have a look at these creative examples to see how you can make the most out of your Facebook cover!...
Carmeli argues that with all the fretting of Amazon’s ability to chew up smaller, or less agile retailers, the companies themselves are missing a huge opportunity to gobble up Amazon’s share of their market. "They have one thing Amazon doesn’t," Carmeli contends, "their inventory is within five miles of 90% of the population."So while Amazon is scrambling to build distribution centers and pumping up algorithms to anticipate orders and deliver by drone, Carmeli says retailers have the power to enable same-day delivery already....
In this series of posters, graphic designer Nick Barclay illustrates 14 famous films as circles of color. Dracula's poster features two red fang marks; Harry Potter's depicts the outlines of his famous broken spectacles; The Lord of the Rings is a giant gold ring to rule them all; Trainspotting is a series of pink track marks on pale flesh; and The Matrix is one red and one blue pill.
The posters are eye-catching pieces of abstract decoration, letting you pay homage to your favorite movies without making you cover your wall with giant photos of Keanu Reeves in a trench coat or Daniel Radcliffe holding a wand. Each poster is complete with some film buff stats: the date the picture was released, its budget, and how much it earned at the box office....
Since 2009, Bill and Melinda Gates have written a letter every January discussing the work of their foundation (which is to receive the bulk of his wealth). Last year, they wrote about why they believed that people around the world are doing better today than ever, despite some people's perceptions otherwise.
This year, on the Gates Foundation's 15-year anniversary, two of the world's biggest optimists are predicting a better future, often through interventions that seem basic, but will drastically improve the lives of billions of people around the world.
"The lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history," they write. "And their lives will improve more than anyone else’s."...
This land was not our land.
As late as 1750—some 150 years after Britain established Jamestown and fully 250 years after Europeans first set foot in the continent—[Native Americans] constituted a majority of the population in North America, a fact not adequately reflected in textbooks," Claudio Saunt writes in an accompanying article. "Even a century later, in 1850, they still retained formal possession of much of the western half of the continent."
With Saunt's map, you can watch the shift occur. Each part is clickable, with information on the treaties that were used to negotiate cessions available via links in pop-up boxes. You can also search for a location or any Native American nation, such as Cherokee or Sioux, to see the land they once possessed. Color coding distinguishes between native lands (blue) and reservations (orange). The latter have dwindled significantly since their creation....
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In the infancy of the drone era, we’re still only certain about a handful of specific use cases. Choreographed drone dancing probably wasn’t one of them, unless you’re with MicroAd, the company that created this artful waltz of LED-laden drones in front of Mt. Fuji.
The production featured over 16,500 LED lights on over 20 drones that then launched into a choreographed performance at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The spectacle offered the perfect juxtaposition of old and new and an innovative way for MicroAd to show of its new Sky Magic Drone.
As the drones move through the night sky in conjunction with a band playing the Samisen (traditional Japanese guitar), it imparts a feeling of futuristic wonder that, for just a second, reminds you of the awe-inspiring power conceived at the intersection of tech and creativity....
Yet, two decades after Christensen published his original article, the idea of disruptive innovation has achieved almost meme-like status in Silicon Valley — and lost much of its original meaning in the process. Today, “disruption” is used to justify any and every innovation coming out of the tech sector.
Dismayed by this misuse of his work, Christensen recently wrote a reply to his critics, titled “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” Given the overuse that “disruption” has endured over the last few years, his article (co-authored by Michael E. Raynor and Rory McDonald) was a needed reset around how the theory of disruptive innovation should be applied — and where it shouldn’t be....
Presenting the recipients of Best In Class, a special award to commend the most impressive sites in each of the WOTY 2015 award categories.
The 10 most innovative companies of the year are generating big revenues thanks to their ability to innovate themselves and tap into the right markets. They are doing it right – and you can do it too. This week we are bringing you 5 of the top 10 companies: read on to see if you can find a great entrepreneurial idea you can steal and apply in your own business...
This is not another “use red instead of blue” article. We have heard that one time too many. Applying colors is a delicate process that needs to take in context the audience and the entire environment of the website you want to modify. The choice is highly individual, as it needs to fit the website’s (and the brand’s) personality.
However, there is one utterly universal principle. Do you know what rules our perception? It is contrast. This article will not tell you “use colors in your designs,” but will tell you “use contrasts in your designs,” followed by a proof in a form of a case study...
3D Street Painting and 3D Pavement Art Illusion
Is it real?! The chalk drawing of London's most popular underground train station looks to have that couple a bit off-balance as the man holds onto the wall.. it must be as good in person as it is digitally! Wait ..is that sign on the far left not real?!
Before Kanyi Maqubela became an investment partner at the Collaborative Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on social enterprises, he was a typical Stanford student in need of career guidance. He was working with startups, studying philosophy, dating someone special—and feeling overwhelmed.
Enter "Designing Your Life," a new and wildly popular course for Stanford juniors and seniors that is grounded in design thinking concepts and techniques. The course’s lessons gave him the perspective he needed to navigate decisions about life and work post graduation....
Website layout designs naturally tend to make use of horizontal and vertical lines due to the blocky nature of the coding behind them, but designers are breaking free from these constraints by using dynamic angles in their designs. Sometimes these angled lines are simply background images created in Photoshop, but others are animated elements made directly in code. Check out today’s web design showcase to see some great examples of website interfaces with angled lines....
Think about all the different reasons you can provide value for your consumer base. If you can use those reasons to build a unique and inviting story, you’ll have built a strong brand and satisfied group of customers. Here are some examples of TED talks that exemplified this ability, and have something to teach all of us as marketers:
It’s the end of the day. You’ve just finished an exciting project, and it’s time to bill the client. You pull up your invoice template and instantly your good mood is gone. It’s so boring! Why can’t your invoice reflect your branding and express your thanks to the customer for their business?
Just because the invoice is a business document, doesn’t mean it has to be boring. An invoice is usually your last contact with a client, so why not leave them with a lasting impression? Done properly, your invoice can be an effective part of your marketing strategy....
But Medium isn’t just taking a revolutionary approach to digital publishing — it’s changing the way companies operate too. As one of the fiercest and most faithful adopters of Holacracy – a radical new theory of corporate structure — Medium is experimenting with a completely management-free environment that’s laser focused on getting things done. Stirman couldn’t be more thrilled with the results: the freedom, the momentum, the productivity are all unparalleled, he says.
But companies don’t have to go all-in on Holacracy to reap the benefits. If his transition from Twitter to Medium taught him anything, there are always more tactics to try to make things work better. Below, he shares his lessons from taking the leap....
Amsterdam-based graphic designer José Bernabé has created a fascinating new type called Chemical Cloud.
By playing around with brushes in Photoshop, Bernabé successfully fuses a cloud-like pattern with a gradient of color, together with a sans-serif font as the backbone. The result is unexpectedly stunning.
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Tom Fishburne shares a brilliant post about design innovation. Recommended reading! 10/10