Experiencing The City Museum

While visiting St. Louis, MO last weekend I was slightly disappointed when I found out that I would be spending my afternoon in a museum, The City Museum. Don't get me wrong, I do have an appreciation for the arts and can appreciate the vast collection of knowledge found at the typical museum. I, however, am not a huge fan of reading plaque after plaque attempting to soak in and appreciate every exhibit. Quite frankly, I am typically mentally exhausted after a few hours in a massive museum.

I was more than pleasantly surprised to find out that this is not "the typical museum," according to my kind hostess. It's about experiencing the museum by using your every sense. The museum is housed in a 600,000 square-foot warehouse and every part of the museum has been recycled from the city of St. Louis. Like any innovative experience, no words can do this museum justice.

Bob Cassilly, the man who came up with the idea of this unique museum says, "CITY MUSEUM makes you want to know. The point is not to learn every fact, but to say, 'Wow, that's wonderful.' And if it's wonderful, it's worth preserving."

In short, however, the museum is like a giant playground that even adults can crawl through. As soon as you enter you start exploring and crawling through whatever small passageway you can find that can range from crawling through a giant whale (mouth to butt - yep!), tubes of metal, hollowed logs, and a fake cave (these are only a few examples). One of the museum's highlights is the seven story spiral slide, a personal favorite. After crawling around inside of the museum it's time to try exploring the old airplanes suspended in the air outside the building. Like I said, it's tough to explain so check out this photo tour on their website ... http://www.citymuseum.org/phototour.html

Experiencing the innovative The City Museum was truly unique and incredible. Even though I may not have left with facts and figure about St. Louis, my heart was captivated through this a-typical learning experience.

Innovation in wooden toys

While I am on the car theme, I wanted to mention Autoblox, an innovation in toys. I found it even more interesting because it is an innovation in WOODEN toys! The company grew out of an innovation project the founder had while he was a student at Carneige Mellon University. I find these toys both beautiful and inviting. The designs make me want to play with them. The colors evoke positive moods. The components create opportunities for people to design their own cars, but the car will always look good because of the "constraints" built into the cars -- the body, wheels, etc cannot be changed, but can be used interchangably. The people also seem to draw children into playing with the cars because they can personalize their car: "Mommy and Daddy and Billy are all in the car with me!" They also have a variety of designs, and new ones coming out all the time. They launch a new car just the way real car companies launch new models. The web site has this nice mix of toy-like pictures and also pictures from real cars, like a picture of real gears. This gives it a more realistic, less cartoonish flavor. OK, you'll probably see some in class this semester!

A cool eco car?

When I saw this car I was stuck first by its design and only after reading a bit did I discover that it is a green car too! The designer used biomimicry -an innovation technique we'll learn about -- and used examples from the world of nature to generate ideas. This is the same approach Nokia used for the Morph. He paid attention to all the necessary things: performance, comfort, efficiency, etc., but also included all kinds of amazing ideas for making this car green from cradle-to-cradle. The look of the exterior mimics an ecosystem, so "green" is more than just functional, but also surfaces (pun intended) in the form of the car. The colors signal eco-friendly, the smooth lines suggest both performance and efficiency, and the thing just looks great, at least to me. Read more about the Globetrotter here, and read more about the cradle-to-cradle movement here.

Digital Readers

On the same line of thought of free textbooks, I think devices like the Amazon Kindle are going to be the next thing in textbooks. You can store all of your books on the device and it reads like paper (no glare-y computer screen). You can highlight, type notes in the margins, and send sections to your computer to print (with all of the highlights/comments). It's a small device that would make it so easy to carry around, and you'd never be in class without a book or reading that you need (you can also email yourself most file types that will be converted then put on your Kindle).

As the world is becoming more and more portable, devices like these are going to become more and more in demand--especially with our generation. --Not to plug the product, but you can also get subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and blogs. All of your reading material (novels/bestsellers too) can be in one place.

From a design standpoint, i think a little is left to be desired in its form/appearance. Right now it's a little stark--but I can see where they are coming from: wanting to make it so that the text is the focus, not the bells and whistles of the device. But I know I'd probably want it more if it had a sleek elegant and posh look that Apple is so great in creating.

Using Patient Capital to Build Transformative Businesses

I stumbled upon this non-profit organization and immediately became very, very intrigued. The title for this post is their mission statement and I found it inspiring. The fund is dedicated to using the power of free markets and business to help liberate people from poverty. That idea resonates deeply with me. They have a Fellows program for young people that, as they state it, "provides extraordinary young professionals with a unique opportunity to use their skills to effect real social change with our portfolio organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, India and Pakistan, and to build lasting relationships with other like-minded individuals." If you are interested, you can find more information at www.acumenfund.org.

The Math Instinct

Another great article from the New York Times. The subject is another perspective on "cognitive fitness," this time how certain kinds of math skills may have been adaptively advantageous to early humans. This apparently innate skill, which the article dubs the "approximate number sense," allows us to very quickly assess, for example, whether there is more of one food source than another or whether one bush of berries has a lot or a little food. Translated into modern life, it means we can judge, very quickly, which checkout line at the grocery store is likely to move the fastest or how long we will have to exercise to burn off that fourth (fifth? sixth?) hot Krispy Kreame donut. It also discusses how this innate talent for math might helo us learn other kinds of math, such as calculus, which seem to be difficult for so many people to learn. I like the last sentence of the article, "Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind." You can find the entire article here.

Innovating Textbooks

I have been displeased with the textbook market for many, many years. The prices are, in my opinion, absurd. It's not a free market: you can't buy the lowest priced textbook; you have to buy the one required for the course. Textbook companies know this, so they exploit the prices. They copyright the textbooks even though most of the material inside the textbook is not the work of the authors, but the work of many other writers, researchers, scholars, and business people. In other words, it is not original knowledge, just old knowledge repackaged. I like that this economics professor is trying to turn that industry on its head: he's making his economics textbook available free, over the web. I have proposed to some of my colleagues that we jointly write a new OB or mgt textbook. Each person writes a chapter or two, within the domain of their expertise, and then we make the whole thing available free! We'll see if my idea of bucking the textbook pirates sellers works. Read more here.

Emotion-driven desire

There is something about these watches that I really like, and I can't explain it from a "behavior" or "function" perspective -- they just look great to me. It's clearly an emotion and meaning thing. I've tried to figure out why I think I simply must have one, but there is no clear reason other than pure, raw, want. So far, I'm trying to resist: I haven't even checked into prices because they might cost a bizillion dollars and then I would be so disappointed knowing they were out of reach. Then, they would become some sort of weird obsession and I find myself starring at the web site.

Oh, wait, that was getting a bit strange, especially from your professor. OK. Cool watches. 'nuf said.

Innovations in vending machine food

You may know that you can get hot pizzas from a vending machine, but did you know you can get bread from a can out of a vending machine? When I went to Japan, I found all kinds of new vending machines, including one that poured beer into a chilled glass, and tipped the glass to create just the right amount of foam on top. Bread from a can is an interesting twist to the vending machine empire. It looks more like muffins or scones, which might be perfect if the machine was right next to the hot coffee/hot tea machine! Maybe good for that late night, watching-innovation-videos, snack break? From a design perspective, I have a hard time thinking of the user needs it might meet or hidden problems this might solve. Perhaps because we are accustomed to bakeries in our grocery stores, eating bread from a bag, and the wide availability of other late-night snack options. You can read more here.

Nokia Morph

We've talked a lot about radical innovation and pushing ideas into brand new, never-been-done-before territory. We've also talked about how some great new ideas come from taking ideas from some unrelated area and applying them to the focus of your innovation efforts. We'll Nokia is doing just that with the Morph concept phone. It is an amazing idea: a phone the folds, that senses odors, that anticipates your environment and changes to respond appropriately, a phone that is nearly impervious to spills, and, finally, a phone you can actually wear. The presentation of the phone is itself a work of design. The music sets a beautiful, peaceful, but watchful mood. The drawings are not cheesy or cartoon-like, but capture the sense of possibility and the skeetch-like quality of the animation also suggest that the concept phone is still under development. The animation shows how Nokia has drawn from the natural world in its innovations. You can read and see more about the Morph here. Bill McDonough is one of the leading proponents of merging the natural and designed world. See a great video of him speaking about this here.

week 3

I heard a great story about an innovation in the cosmetics and personal care industry: fish pedicures. You stick your feet into a tank filled with very small fish (around 1 inch long) and they gently eat away the dead skin, callouses, etc. piscine exfoliation! In India it costs about $10. The salon owners noticed a drop in customers and were looking for a way to keep current clients and attract more. Like all good innovators, they started observing their clients and asking indirect questions. They found out that many people did not like the feel of the normal, metal pedicure instruments. Other people felt "elitist" with a person working at their feet. Still others were creeped out by the thought of someone fiddling with their toes. It turns out that people -- at least some people -- love the feel of fish gently nibbling away at their feet. A second bonus is that the feet-fed fish get big, fast, and can then be used in gardens. So, it's a win-win-win. Read more here.