lunes, 29 de noviembre de 2010

The innovation came from (the author say): "liquid networks"

Aquí la entrada que comenta el libro: Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Extracto del comentario de Krisztina “Z” Holly:

"To put the social aspect of innovation in context, let’s rewind a few millennia. According to Steven Johnson, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, sometime between 10,000 bc and 5000 bc, humankind hit a watershed moment: People began inventing in earnest. Before that, they built on one another’s ideas so slowly that it took 30,000 years to advance from mining to metallurgy. But then a big shift happened. They cast aside their hunter-gatherer ways and settled in cities, and shortly thereafter, a giant explosion of innovation occurred. The alphabet, currency, measuring sticks, aqueducts, cement, writing, bread, and wheels — these are just a handful of the vast number of world-changing inventions that our forebears developed during this period.

Something happened when humans put down roots, Johnson argues. Ideas started bouncing between individuals, growing and improving, in a web of connections he calls liquid networks. Unlike a gas, in which molecules rarely bump into one another, or a solid, in which molecules do not move from place to place, a liquid represents a free-flowing, high-contact medium. Cities provided such an environment for human thought; ideas collided within them, people learned faster, and ideas spread more widely."

jueves, 25 de noviembre de 2010

An innovator: IdeaPaint - John Goscha, Morgen Newman and Jeff Avallon

¡Genial! :-) :-) :-)

Aquí su sitio Web

"The family needs a better place to gather than in front of the TV. IdeaPaint can turn virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving your family a place to interact, communicate and fully explore your creativity. No matter where you use it, it can keep your family connected. Who knows, it may even help end the battle over the remote control."




"When you’re confined to the space of a typical whiteboard, your ideas are destined to be small. IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity. No matter where you use it, big ideas follow."


miércoles, 24 de noviembre de 2010

Prosaica innovación: la "afeitada perfecta" (que sin embargo ya era "perfecta" cuando yo era chico :-)

Aquí detalles desde el sitio Web del fabricante



***

Sólo USD 251 con 50/100 en amazon.com :-)

martes, 23 de noviembre de 2010

Betting in gaming innovation: apostando sobre cada jugada, no sólo sobre el marcador final


El artículo es de Wired: Wall Street Firm Uses Algorithms to Make Sports Betting Like Stock Trading

Extracto clave 1:

"This style of on-the-fly wagering while the game unfolds, known as in-running, didn’t exist in Vegas casinos when Cantor Gaming arrived. Other big casinos in town give sports gamblers a narrow range of betting opportunities and a limited amount of time in which to bet. That appalls Lee Amaitis, formerly co-CEO of Cantor offshoot BGC Partners and now president and CEO of Cantor Gaming. “When Wall Street first opens, everybody starts trading; in this town, when a game gets going, everybody stops betting,” he says. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. The game is the market. Why not let people bet the market?”"

Extracto clave 2:

"Casino executives neglect sports books because taking bets on athletic events seems like a risky proposition. They like guests to play craps, slots, and baccarat, games in which a favorable outcome for the house is all but guaranteed. From the point of view of casino owners, the result of a sporting event is incredibly uncertain, and they have no control over it. Experienced sports bettors, known as smart-money gamblers, can win far more steadily than someone playing roulette or pai gow poker. And a major upset can require a huge payout. For all these reasons, many casinos have decided that it’s best to minimize their risks by posting odds that stay in line with those of the other casinos in town, keeping betting limits low, and discouraging wagers by expert gamblers. “The other bookmakers in this town are afraid to take bets, and they hate us,” Amaitis says. “For me, not taking smart-money bets is like Cantor Fitzgerald not selling stock to Goldman Sachs. We do trades all day with Goldman, Deutsche, Citibank. You think those guys are stupid?”

Amaitis’ scrappiness and his willingness to use technology to open untapped markets fit right in with the ethos of Cantor Fitzgerald. It is, after all, the firm that in 1999 became the first to do fully electronic US bond market trades with customers. The swagger even survived September 11, 2001, when its New York headquarters on floors 101 through 105 of One World Trade Center was destroyed. More than two-thirds of its New York staff perished, and the company’s primary data center was decimated. But a skeleton crew of Cantor staffers was able to get back online and resume trading just 48 hours after the attack. Cantor pledged 25 percent of its profits over the next five years to the families of its 658 employees killed on 9/11. It gave the grieving families a total of $180 million, thanks in part to yet more lucrative technological advances like being the first firm to offer wireless trading on BlackBerries.

Cantor’s latest innovation is the Midas algorithm, which is constantly being refined and fed reams of new statistical data. Even with Midas, however, sporting events are too volatile for Cantor to always end up on the right side of all the wagers it takes. But that’s OK: The point isn’t to nail the outcome of every contest; that’s a sucker’s game. There’s only one sure thing in sports gambling: the standard commission, known as the vigorish, that casinos charge when they take bets. When your wins are effectively balancing out your losses, the vigorish starts to add up. In this light, Cantor’s business model begins to look more like E-Trade than a conventional sports book. “The gaming business is nothing but a transaction business where you buy and sell sports instead of making a trade on the stock exchange,” Amaitis says. “It’s all about commission; and the more volume you do, the less risk you take.”

By 2012, Amaitis predicts, his company’s revenue will be $20 million. Cantor will make that money by taking far more bets than are made at present, enough that the vigorish will dwarf the income other casinos now make with their smaller (and safer) sports books. “My competitors want to hold 6 percent on a couple million dollars,” he says. “I’m looking to hold 2 percent on a couple billion dollars. Which would you rather have?”

Vegas has never seen this level of technological firepower, but Amaitis insists that it’s just the beginning. He likens the Midas program’s abilities to Wall Street’s first foray into computerization nearly 40 years ago, before people realized how the increased speed of trading opened up many exciting—or frightening, depending on your point of view—new investment opportunities. This year, Cantor was accepting bets on the outcome of NFL games months before the season started. But Amaitis wishes he could take more granular bets before kickoff. After all, more opportunities to bet means more commissions for Cantor. He dreams of being able to offer programmed sports betting that will allow gamblers to put in bid orders, just as you would with an electronic stock purchase. Before the game begins, you’ll be able to set your account so that a bet will automatically be placed if, for example, a team is ever a six-point underdog. You’d also be able to set it up to place a bet on the other side, say, if that number drops from six to four. Once your bids are in, you won’t even have to watch the game. “I am salivating for that,” Amaitis says."

lunes, 22 de noviembre de 2010

Brasil innovation: retos, logros e imposible

La columna es de The Economist

Logro:

"STAND on the observation deck in Embraer’s final-assembly hangar in São José dos Campos and you can see the case for globalisation laid out below you. Five freshly finished aircraft bear the insignia of airlines from across the world. Brazilian technicians wear T-shirts emblazoned with the word “lean” to emphasise their commitment to the principles of Japanese manufacturing. A supervisor boasts about the company’s ranking in an American guide to best places to work."

"Optimists have more than just Embraer on their side. Natura Cosméticos is emerging as a cosmetics giant by dint of clever marketing and borrowing from others. Everything about the company, from its use of recyclable materials in its packaging to its use of ordinary women rather than supermodels in its advertisements, is designed to emphasise the twin themes of naturalness and sustainability. Natura is also a master of what might be dubbed “lean innovation”. About 40% of its revenues come from products introduced in the past two years. But the company has only about 150 research and development staff compared with L’Oréal’s 2,800. Its trick is to form partnerships with foreign universities and to scour the world for products that it can license."

Reto:

"But throw in the word “innovation” and businessmen become more philosophical. Brazil spends a paltry 1.1% of its GDP on research and development compared with 1.4% in China and 3.4% in Japan. Last year Brazil fell 18 places in Insead’s annual innovation index, from 50th to 68th. Worse still, its ratio of basic-product to manufactured-product exports was the highest since 1978. These figures confront Brazilians with a troubling question. Can their country become an innovator in its own right, or is its recent growth little more than a by-product of China’s appetite for commodities?"

Imposible:

"Yet Brazil suffers from two huge blocks to growth: red tape and gaping inequality. For all its recent commitment to liberalisation the Brazilian government is still a rule-spewing, incumbent-protecting monster. Brazil comes 152nd in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” rankings for the ease of paying taxes (it took the Bank’s hypothetical medium-sized company 2,600 hours a year to comply with the tax code) and 128th on the ease of starting a business. Mexico is business-friendly by comparison."

***

El Estado, lo mismo en Brasil que en USA o en Mozambique, es sinónimo de contra-innovación, es decir, un Estado hace todo lo que le cabe hacer para que el espíritu innovador salga huyendo allende fronteras. Si USA ha sido la nación más innovadora de todas las épocas durante los últimos 100 años lo ha sido a pesar del Estado, nunca gracias al Estado (claro, si acordamos que las armas y todo el resto de la gigantesca y aterradora parafernalia militar no son propiamente innovación, sino retardación: nos mantienen en lo mismo que venimos desde hace 25 siglos cuando Platón, siguiendo a los espartanos, propuso su "república de guardianes")

jueves, 18 de noviembre de 2010

Innovación propuesta en educación (enseñanza de las matemáticas)

La fuente es TED. El conferencista:

"Conrad Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, where his job, in a nutshell, is understanding and finding new uses for the Mathematica technology. Wolfram is especially passionate about finding uses for Mathematica outside of pure computation, using it as a development platform for products that help communicate big ideas. The Demonstrations tool, for instance, makes a compelling case for never writing out another equation -- instead displaying data in interactive, graphical form.
Wolfram's work points up the changing nature of math in the past 30 years, as we've moved from adding machines to calculators to sophisticated math software, allowing us to achieve ever more complex computational feats. But, Wolfram says, many schools are still focused on hand-calculating; using automation, such as a piece of software, to do math is sometimes seen as cheating. This keeps schools from spending the time they need on the new tools of science and mathematics. As they gain significance for everyday living, he suggests, we need to learn to take advantage of these tools and learn to use them young.

"What he's saying is that enough time is wasted in math classes on JUST calculation, that often the underlying concept is lost anyway."
TremorX, YouTube"

miércoles, 17 de noviembre de 2010

Las 4 emociones básicas y la innovación



Hay Jobs-To-Be-Done funcionales, emocionales y sociales. Estos dos últimos (lo bien o mal resueltos que estén) tienen todo que ver con el estado de las relaciones consigo mismo y con los demás

Ejemplos:

1. Una MARCA que al usar los productos que cobija te hace sentir "parte del grupo" (antes estabas "fuera del grupo") (de MIEDO a CONTENTO)

2. Un elemento de diseño o confort en el artículo comprado que te hace exclamar "¡guau!" (de TRISTE a CONTENTO)

3. Un plan prefecto (hallarlo al fin) para salir a almorzar fuera el domingo... con el que todos en casa están de acuerdo y satisfechos (de IRA a CONTENTO - ¡y eventualmente todos!)

***

Los ejemplos en contrario abundan (de CONTENTO a TRISTE, o a IRANCUNDO, o a ASUSTADO), precisamente cuando la innovación está aún pendiente (el producto/servicio se encuentra resuelto - en correspondencia con los Jobs-To-Be-Done a resolver prometidos - solo a medias :-)

viernes, 12 de noviembre de 2010

Más innovación prosaica (que en todo caso agradeceremos): OLED technology


Aquí el sitio Web de la compañía:

"From stunning lighting innovations to huge video displays, the promise of advanced OLED technology is limited only by the imagination of product designers—and some tough manufacturing challenges.

At Kateeva, we’re working on inventive hardware, process and materials solutions to streamline production of OLEDs. Bright ideas take shape faster, at dramatically lower costs and with critical scalability."

Su fundador: Conor Madigan

"Conor Madigan, Ph.D, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Conor co-founded Kateeva in 2008.

Before Kateeva he was a post-doctoral research scientist at MIT and has worked on organic electronic device technology for more than a decade. He is the author of numerous publications on the topic and holds patents in fields spanning physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and software engineering.

In 2010, he was honored as one of the TR35, the list of top young innovators in technology named annually by Technology Review magazine.

Conor earned a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a Ph.D. from MIT. Both degrees are in electrical engineering."


La MISIÓN:

"At Kateeva, we’re all about transforming the economics of manufacturing advanced flat panel display products like OLEDs. Today, the cost of producing this vastly superior display technology is prohibitive. Kateeva aims to change the equation.

From our headquarters in Silicon Valley, we’re pioneering a new class of dry, non-contact printing technology that promises to overcome the chief OLED manufacturing barrier: patterned OLED layer deposition over a large area at a low cost.

With core technology licensed from MIT and a world-class team of display and semiconductor equipment technology experts, Kateeva’s production solution offers a faster and infinitely more affordable route to market for manufacturers of new-generation OLED displays."

jueves, 11 de noviembre de 2010

Prosaica innovación :-) "The all-new Cadillac CTS-V COUPE"







Aquí un review from The NYT (sept. 2010): Cadillac Meets Corvette, and Everyone Falls in Love

Aquí un review from WSJ (agosto 2010): Cadillac’s CTS-V Coupe Makes German Rivals Look Like Taxis.

Lo siguiente de un anuncio publicitario reciente:

THERE IS THE CURVE AND THEN THERE'S AHEAD OF THE CURVE

The Nürburgring in germany has 154 of the most demanding turns in the world. And each of them inspired one of the world's fastest-reacting suspension systems. We call it magnetic ride control. Through innovative magneto-rheological fluid technology it reads and adjust to the changing road conditions up to 1000 times a second. Blending car and road into one fluid motion. Curve after curve after curve.


***

Será "prosaica" pero quiero uno así :-/

miércoles, 10 de noviembre de 2010

An innovator: Christopher "moot" Poole

Aquí su sitio en la Web: 4chan

The case for anonymity online

¡Fascinante!
¡Alucinante!
(puedo apostar que este muchacho seguirá dando de qué hablar :-)


viernes, 5 de noviembre de 2010

Invención, innovación y genio

¿Quién tuvo el genio para llegar a concebir el "jugo"?



¿Quién se inventó esta tablita "mágica"?



¿Cómo es que tanto y tanto se ha logrado innovar, que el "jugo" está ahora disponible desde tantos y tantos campos del planeta, hasta tantos hogares (a precios tan cómodos, y también en "versiones" a precios para los más exigentes paladares)?

jueves, 4 de noviembre de 2010

¿Qué significado en común (si alguno) tendrían todas estas MARCAS?





1. Que sólo "viven" en Internet
2. Que hace menos de 20 años no existían y hoy son mundialmente valiosas
3. Que los servicios que respaldan son gratis y los usamos casi a diario (casi todos nosotros, muchos de sus servicios)
4. Que todas son "made in USA"
5. Que todas fueron fundadas por "chinos" de menos de 25 años
6. Que sin ellas Internet "no sería ni el 10%" de lo que es
7. Que son los cuatro lados de la base de la pirámide de la virtualidad desde la cual se alza un universo de bits que no tenemos ni idea todavía qué es

***

R/ Todas las anteriores

miércoles, 3 de noviembre de 2010

Jobs-To-Be-Done de un curso de idiomas



Enseñanza-aprendizaje de idiomas: uno de los productos más valiosos del mundo; uno de los con más diversas realizaciones, pero uno de los más mal estructurados en cuanto a "pricing"

¿Para que aprender otro idioma, diferente de aquél que se aprendió naturalmente a medida que se crecía junto a padres y amigos?

Algunos Jobs-To-Be-Done:

1. Avanzar en la profesión, en la carrera que se está haciendo en una organización
2. Entender el mundo, otros mundos en este mismo mundo, desde nuevas palabras y sonidos
3. En potencia, poder expresar las "gracias" o decir "te amo" por ejemplo, a millones más de coetáneos
4. Hacer turismo y disfrutarlo más...
5. ...O tener que emigrar pero no tener que sufrirlo tanto
6. Poder hacer traducciones (por placer o por negocio)
7. Jactarse (o insultar) sin poder ser atrapado in fraganti
8. Hacerse el sordo, al tiempo que se mejora en extremo "hacerse el bobo"
9. Comprobar que a fin de cuentas lo humano (en lo estúpido y en lo sublime) nace y crece igual en polonés que en turco, en español que en griego, en inglés de Maine que (en inglés) de Melbourne...
10....Entender (quizá) por fin, que donde nos sentimos habitando más a gusto es - en cualquier lugar - dónde suenen las cosas en la lengua entrañable que se las oímos por primera vez a nuestros padres :-)

***

¿Cuánto vale entonces (o sea cuánto está uno dispuesto a pagar por) aprender otro idioma? R/ Todo o nada, depende de que Jobs-To-Be-Done nos acosen (o nos seduzcan) :-)

martes, 2 de noviembre de 2010

Innovation on strategy

Aquí el doc original desde HBS Work