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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...
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....
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...
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....
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....
I am Ben Huh. The LOLcats guy. The story of our new app is one of success, reward, failure and redemption.
I want to tell you the entire story of how this app came to be, with all the guts and gore. Though the app itself was designed to entertain you, much of its development was anything but. Yet I believe that the story of this product is the universal story of entrepreneurship. To me, this release is my redemption.
Entrepreneurs usually share only the happy, proud announcement of a new product. We sweep aside the failures that hounded us along the way, as if we believe that a celebration is no time for honesty. Yet every new product has a painful history....
While we appreciate it in the abstract, few of us pause to grasp the miracles of modern life, from artificial light to air conditioning, as Steven Johnson puts it in the excellent How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (public library), “how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera.” Understanding how these everyday marvels first came to be, then came to be taken for granted, not only allows us to see our familiar world with new eyes — something we are wired not to do — but also lets us appreciate the remarkable creative lineage behind even the most mundane of technologies underpinning modern life....
San Francisco artists Ransom & Mitchell blend photography, digital painting and 3D CG to produce portraits of sideshow acts seen in traveling Carnivals from long ago.
These pieces were created by Jason Mitchell & Stacey Ransom for The Rough and Ready Sideshow, a group show at the Bash Contemporary. The show also includes artwork by Stephanie Vega, whose work I shared with you last Halloween, Alexandra Manukyan and Aunia Kahn.
Director/photographer Jason Mitchell and set designer/photo illustrator Stacey Ransom create highly detailed and visually lush portraits and scenarios by combining their talents with elaborate costumes, hair and make-up, props, hand-painted backdrops and set design. Then they add their own unique style of digital illustration and 3D computer generation.
Even the most lazily prepared home offices have more character and warmth than the sun starved, lowest-common-denominator melamine clad shame cubicles so many of us inhabit for half of our conscious hours these days.
While some people have successfully 3D printed buildings, others have taken the same approach to the car manufacturing business, as a company has just come out with a car called the Strati that's t...
Via Tiaan Jonker
On a Tuesday last summer, Erin Mandeville was at a CVS buying medicine for her five-month-old baby, Gabriel. Close to 4PM, she noticed her infant’s eyes roll back in quick succession. It was the first of Gabriel’s many episodes of infantile spasms that would follow.
Spasms or epileptic seizures can be catastrophic for young children. Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital tried every route and medicine to help Gabriel as his seizures progressed aggressively....
A hemispherectomy is "one of the most challenging operations in pediatric epilepsy surgery," says Dr. Joseph Madsen, director of the epilepsy program at Boston Children’s. A dress rehearsal is beneficial even for the most highly experienced surgeons. "This is a printed version that the surgeon can hold, cut, manipulate, and look for things," he says, holding Gabriel’s printed brain in his hand. For surgeons-in-training, the simulation is a blessing. "No one wants to be the first person to get a hemispherectomy from a surgeon, ever," he adds.
The 3D print of Gabriel’s brain was developed by the Simulator Program at the hospital. The model is printed in soft plastic with a precision of 16 microns per layer; blood vessels are set in contrast color for easier navigation. Gabriel’s parents were privy to the process and anticipated complications. Gabriel’s subsequent surgery earlier this year took close to 10 hours, and went according to plan....
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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....
Presenting the recipients of Best In Class, a special award to commend the most impressive sites in each of the WOTY 2015 award categories.
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...
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...
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:
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."...
...Lens choices, camera angles, color palettes, editing rhythm, and more are all elements in a specific vocabulary created to best express the story.
Here’s the insight for color: instead of trying to map colors back to cultural associations (which are not fixed across all cultures, but change with every micro-culture), it’s better to assign meaning to each color and stick with it.
This trick works perfectly as long as you never break your own rules, unless, of course, the shock itself creates a greater truth....
Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Steve Wozniak at Apple
John Sculley, formerly CEO of Apple, recently visited our office to do a Q&A.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. We talk about what really happened at Apple with Steve Jobs in the 80s, what it's like to be fired, and why entrepreneurs should buy his new book.
Business Insider: So let’s just start at the most famous moment. You’re known probably best for firing Steve Jobs, right? What was the thinking there? Is that something that’s been mis-remembered pretty horribly through history?
JS: Yeah, well, first of all there’s no accuracy to it at all. It’s one of those things that became a myth.
BI: Okay.
JS: The reality is that I was brought into Apple to bring consumer marketing to Apple, because Steve was getting ready to launch the Macintosh in a few years, and to turn around the Apple 2 because it was the only source of cash flow the company would have for three more years....
The 10 best designs of the year include a soccer cleat, a campaign to end gun violence, and much more.Fast Company hosted its annual Innovation By Design Awards and Conference in downtown New York today.
It culminated this evening at our awards celebration, where we revealed the 10 best designs of the year.It was long road getting here. We received 1,587 submissions from around the world. From that, we pared entries down to 53 finalists. And from there, our esteemed panel of judges fiercely debated, voted, stalemated, and debated again to reach a consensus on the top 10 designs of the year....
...But it wasn’t until 1999 that Tim Berners-Lee, who had invented the World Wide Web and launched the first webpage on August 6, 1991, coined the concept of the Semantic Web — a seminal stride toward cultivating wisdom in the age of information, bringing full-circle Otlet’s vision for an intelligent global network of organizing human knowledge. Much like Johannes Gutenberg, who combined a number of existing technologies to invent his revolutionary press, Berners-Lee was simply bringing together disjointed technologies — electronic documents, hypertext, markup, the internet — to create a new paradigm that changed our world at least as much as Gutenberg’s invention. But how, exactly, did we get there?
The 98 landmark technologies and ideas that bridged Otlet’s vision with Berners-Lee’s world-changing web are what digital archeologist Jim Boultonchronicles in 100 Ideas that Changed the Web (public library) — the latest installment in a fantastic series of cultural histories by British indie powerhouseLaurence King, including 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design, 100 Ideas that Changed Film, 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture, 100 Ideas that Changed Photography, and 100 Ideas that Changed Art....
1) No one knows you exist.You make a great product. But the world isn’t holding its breath waiting for you....
But when you look at this way, things look different: Goliaths have more meetings, more committees, and more red tape. More ideas being killed by research, more to lose by taking risks, and more outdated business models that they are stuck in. More rules, more regulations, and more good people leaving. So who cares if they never run out of photocopier paper?
Use your strengths: your speed, your instinct, your passion. Back your ideas with hard work. And yes, love can and does scale. Good luck.There has never been a better time to be a maker.
Thank you, Internet. You have levelled the playing field.
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Tom Fishburne shares a brilliant post about design innovation. Recommended reading! 10/10