Tag: ideas

Fresh thinking for the ideas economy

The Economist believes that the world is governed by ideas. Because human progress relies on the advancement of good ideas, we are launching a new series of events that brings together top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time. By focusing on Innovation, Intelligent Infrastructure, and Human Potential, we imagine an ecosystem where good ideas move from concept to implementation, fueled by the power of human ingenuity, and only the best survive. Welcome to the Ideas Economy.”

See http://ideas.economist.com/ for more.


Teepin documents authorship of any idea

Teepin is a most useful knowledge tool for any company, namely those that, either by self determination or by mere pressure of the market and activities they dwell in, take the stance of pushing the envelope when investing a part of their resources in gathering, examining, assessing and eventually implementing the ideas they find most original and creative from their employees.

Company management wise, this software is quite handy and useful as it is recognized by its users, however, many of them don’t realize some of the legal issues that may arise on some cases.

To start with, one should bear in mind that Teepin materializes a manner of documenting authorship of any idea that’s set for debate within a company, or whoever was the first to assume “in public” that idea as their own, thus “taking the burden” of championing it in face of the scrutiny of all their peers and those high and low within the company’s hierarchy.

The same goes for documenting the opinions that, along the process of debating, employees and managers will submit to the issue at hand.

Far from being a setback, such act of documenting that this application provides, might reveal itself as a factor of enlightenment as what really went on, when any given idea or challenge was being debated.

This instance can prove to be vital when the company is to award merit (or demerit) for a determined idea or solution, or any outside circumstances, like Courts of law or any other public authority, if there’s the need for it.

On top of all this, it should be stressed that, Teepin has all the potential to speed up innovation within a company or an activity, which will lead to, at times, the need for legal authorship protection against illegitimate use or appropriation by a third party, namely copyright and industrial ownership rights, which must be declared at the rightful legal entities, for which purpose all Teepin documentation is neither sufficient nor appropriate.

About the Author
Nuno B. M. Lumbrales is a lawyer and a client for another web-based tool by the same team behind Teepin: LawRD – Reports on Demand, a tool for law firms practice management.


How to Evaluate a New Product Idea, by Evan Williams

A very good post by Twitter‘s CEO, Evan Williams, with more than 2 years already, on alternative ways he came up to assess ideas. Excerpt:

Tractability

Question:
How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
Blogger was highly tractable. Twitter was tractable, but sightly less-so because of the SMS component. Google web search had quite low tractability when they launched it. Vista?: About as low as you can get.


Read the full article – it’s worth it:
http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp


Crowd Control – CFO.com

by David McCann – CFO.com | US
February 10, 2010

Motorola uses a prediction-market variant to determine which among thousands of employee-submitted ideas merit a further look.

In 2003 Motorola rolled out a system through which employees could propose ideas for products or anything else that might boost the company's value. By one measure it was an unqualified success: it produced 10,000 ideas over the next four years.

But the volume of submissions to the system, called Think Tank, overwhelmed the review boards that were set up to vet the ideas. A backlog swelled, and missed opportunities abounded. In one case, a competitor brought out a product with features that had been suggested by a Motorola employee years earlier [...]”

via Crowd Control – Business Intelligence – CFO.com.


Inventions: Solutions in Search of Problems – Amex OPEN Forum

Another insightful article by John L. Mariotti about the usefulness of ideas. This excerpt is taken from the introductory paragraph:

There are millions of clever ideas out there.  The challenge is whether there is a need for these ideas that is strong enough to cause someone to “buy them.”  Just because an idea is neat, unique, clever or even useful, doesn’t mean that discriminating buyers will pay for it.

The full article:
Inventions: Solutions in Search of Problems : Innovation :: American Express OPEN Forum
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“Are You Killing Enough Ideas?”

Illustration by Lars Leetaru

Illustration by Lars Leetaru

A very good article by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach at Strategy+Business on the fact that some (bad) ideas should have been killed but actually weren’t. Take a look at this introduction:

““Why don’t we have enough good ideas? How can we tell which idea is going to be the next big thing? Why is it so hard to get an idea from the drawing board into the market?” Most telling of all is the question: “Why do we still waste resources on ideas that people don’t believe in?” In other words, even though an idea has been effectively “killed,” it still remains on the agenda, with nobody fully willing to learn from the mistake, put it to rest, and move on to other endeavors.”

Read the full article:
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09303?pg=all


“New Ideas in Old Systems”, by Tim Kastelle

This is an interesting article by Tim Kastelle on the problem ideas face in old, big, fat organizations: they just don’t spread!

The introduction:

The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think that all of our organisations should work like that. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. My examples yesterday came from education, and I know that a lot of people in the public sector think that innovation is unusually hard in their organisations. But nearly everyone resists change.

Read the full article at timkastelle.org:
http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/02/new-ideas-in-old-systems/