Innovate Like Edison - 5 Step Process to Innovation

Excerpt from Fortune Small Business:

Throughout his career Edison used a five-step process to launch his inventions. To give you a taste of his approach, we use the example of Edison's first product, the stock ticker. His system is culled from historical documents and written as Edison might have noted them.

1. Identify trends in the marketplace, observing where and how needs are shifting. In 1868, I read in the newspapers that the rebuilding of the American South after the Civil War has sent commodities prices rising, since demand for lumber, brick, stone, and other building materials has increased and supplies are strained. The reporting of these prices - as well as the price of gold and precious metals - is eagerly sought by American businesses at an increasing rate.

2. Determine if there are any gaps created by these changing needs. I've noted that few efficient machines and few services exist to rapidly - and reliably - report commodities prices, precious-metals prices, and stock prices to businesses around the country.

3. Identify the core insight (the "aha!") or need at the heart of each gap. I think I can apply the principles of -telegraphy to make a machine that reports prices.

4. Link your insights to your capabilities as a company and your strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors. I can combine my talents for telegraph equipment assembly and design to develop price--reporting machines that operate rapidly and efficiently.

5. The hypothesis is an "if-then" proposal for a practical experiment about the goal you'd like to fulfill based on the linkage you've created. If I can build an efficient, reliable telegraph-like machine that can help businesses report commodities and metals prices all over the country, then I will make a significant profit.

The result? Edison's stock-reporting machine launched his career as a successful inventor and innovator.

Comments from Schoolcraft Community College Advisory Committee

“Preparing Employers and Workers for a 21st Century Economy”

What are the major trends will industry cluster/employer groupexperience over the next five to 10 years?

• Intranets – Instant message are common place
• Department communities on line as we well as physical
• Use of “BLOGS” in Business
• Mind Maps vs. Strategic Plans
• Network Centric Solutions™

What will your industry cluster/employer group (Advisory Group) need to do to respond?

• Train to use tools and apply in business environment
• Publish via internet
• More applied knowledge
• Find time to retrain and need to motivate learning

What kind of workforce will your industry cluster/employer group need to respond?

• Motivated to learn
• Applied experience
• Flexibility
• Problem Solver
• Passion / Commitment

How would you characterize the condition of the current labor pool?

• Short sighted
• Lack of creativity
• Lack survival skills
• Inflexible
• No “Specialization with passion”
• Someone else has answer
• Fear of change
• Fear of being wrong
• Value of being wrong

What can your industry cluster/employer do to help the college and faculty realign academic programs and services to appropriately prepare the workforce that will be needed by your industry cluster/employer group?

• Internships/Labs
• Program Level application
• Service Learning
• Fieldtrip/job shadow
• Mentor/Mentee
• “Just in time” learning

The Rational-iterative Decision-making Process

The rational-iterative approach is one such decision-making process that is particularly suitable for management. Repeated iterations of feedback between analysts and decision-makers lead to the development of an understanding of the tradeoffs among objectives for the decision-makers and an understanding of the explicit and implicit objectives of the decision-makers for the analysts. The rational-iterative decision-making process requires a number of explicit steps, although some steps may be combined or further subdivided depending on the specific situation.

• Step # 1. Identify the roles of different people
• Step # 2. Scope the target area
• Step # 3. Determine the objectives
• Step # 4. Develop measurable criteria to determine how well the objectives are being met
• Step # 5. Develop as wide a range of alternatives as possible
• Step # 6. Determine how well each alternative meets each objective
• Step # 7. Explain the relation of each alternative to each objective to the decision-makers (and possibly stakeholders)
• Step # 8. The decision-makers choose an alternative
• Step # 9 The chosen alternative is turned over to the manager for implementation, monitoring, and feedback

Are Mentorships being Disintermediated?

Are Mentorships being Disintermediated?

The basis for learning is changing. In the pre-microchip generation, lessons learned were generated from directly experienced real-world consequences. The tutelage of mentors was prized because they had learned the tricks and traps of the trade through personal or vicarious experience and handed them down through education. The most valuable mentors were guardians of institutional memory, who could act like harbor pilots to guide novices to a solution because they knew where the shallow straits were located, perhaps because they had once run aground themselves. (One of the interesting sidelights here is the pressure for increased self-reliance caused by the disappearance of institutional memory, a result of force realignments and the inevitable attrition of seasoned veterans who stood in the past as mentors.)

Power of Prototyping

By contrast, the information age has facilitated virtual reality--self-discovery through simulation of actual situations, events, and problems. Given data on the real-world parameters, computers can model sensory cues and contingencies, support gaming of choice alternatives, and simulate appropriate consequences. Moreover, these simulations can harmlessly mimic reality so that actual disaster is never experienced as a consequence. This is their key advantage, of course. Incremental learning or proficiency can be developed by stopping or restarting the process at will, completely erasing the damage of a previous mistake.

Infinite Memory

As data storage and processing power increases, the boundary between simulation and reality becomes even less distinguishable. Witness the power of computer animation in such popular films as Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and Twister, or the realism of mechanical simulation in the new Boeing 777 training module. In military affairs, this capability to simulate reality has been employed to construct a "virtual theater of war" which seamlessly combines real units and simulated ones to test doctrinal concepts and materiel effectiveness through simulated operational and tactical maneuvers.

When reality and simulation become indistinguishable, is there an indelible effect on the player that desensitizes him to the damage of real-world catastrophes? When harm and pain exist chiefly in cyberspace as immaterial states, can a player fail to develop sympathy for real-world consequences? The allure of virtual reality could have a dark side--the blunting of the human sentiments to real war that is fought abstractly, in a manner not too different from counterpart recreational games. Could advanced technology, the increasing digitization of the battlefield, and the automation of combat systems transform the experience of war into another video arcade game, an abstraction defined by the movement and deletion of computer icons? In my opinion, the answers are not clear-cut, but today's most popular computer games have martial themes, and more are on the way. The story is told of an officer who, in the pitch of virtual battle, swore at his terminal, "Damn, I lost an icon!" as an overrun battalion was flagged by the computer. Even if the story is apocryphal, the potential for the response clearly exists in cyberwar.

Systematic decisionmaking is eclipsing intuition. Computers that beat chess masters prove that artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems are capable of extremely sophisticated decisionmaking. Programs that apply experts' collective rules of thumb have even been shown to make more consistent, reliable decisions than humans in similar problem-solving situations. Yet most expert systems operate from data-hungry mathematical models. They illustrate the inseparable relationship between knowledge and intelligence--the more you know, the smarter you become; so to become smarter, you must know even more.

If the quantity of evidence determines the certainty of a hypothesis, then how much evidence is enough? The answer is determined by the amount of ambiguity in the problem, because computers reason in all-or-nothing terms and have limited tolerance for partial evidence. Uncertainty is resolved by redundant observations, so that more data is collected to resolve the uncertainty. Ironically, systems that can scan a situation in great depth and analyze in great precision can provide a decisionmaker with so much capability that he becomes addicted to the information and consequently paralyzed by it. Recently, the Army Times described a computer-assisted exercise during which a battle staff hadn't noticed it was being overrun by the enemy because the commander was preoccupied with obtaining more data from his battlefield computer.

Through technology, it is not only possible to suffer paralysis by analysis, but also to neglect the intuitive skills that give commanders an important advantage in ambiguous situations. The author of a recent Military Review essay observes that intuition allows a commander to focus rapidly on feasible solutions when time for systematic analysis is unavailable. This capacity is particularly important in peacekeeping, where the traditional combat decisionmaking model does not fit. But, as that writer notes, intuition comes largely from experience with a broad base of situations. Overreliance on structured systems might, indeed, stunt the growth of this intellectual capacity and severely limit a commander's options in unfamiliar scenarios. One of the worst possible outcomes would be the erosion of a leader's ability to use his own eyes and ears. While decision systems might present an unparalleled opportunity to eliminate risks, they could obscure a strategic leader's awareness of key inputs to the decisionmaking process which exist outside the range of data available through computers. Assessment of political and environmental conditions, for example, will rarely be carried out through the systems of sensors that will generate most of the input to Force XXI computers.

Transformed Minds, Transformed Culture

Information management and manipulation are replacing knowledge acquisition and inference . . .

Experts are now defined by their ability to recognize underlying patterns so that new facts can be acquired and integrated. Experts learn how to match these underlying patterns or heuristics to new data sources in order to advance composite knowledge . . .

Hence, it is becoming ever more important to know what to ask for, and increasing status is being accorded to those who can efficiently frame a search strategy to a question while avoiding becoming overwhelmed by the possible answers.

Searching is a recursive project which involves trial and error.

"If you didn't find it, you didn't ask for it the right way,"

"If my search strategy returned an answer, it must be a correct one."

The perils of uncritical thinking are compounded by some innate characteristics of the Internet: it is voluminous, it is uncensored, and it can be counterfeit. With so much information available, efficiency has priority over reliability, hence the popularity of the search engines.

"Let the buyer beware!" will take on more significance in a data-intensive Information Age.

Cuisine Analysis

I have done a bit of internet research, I always like to have the facts. Don't be overwhelmed by the volume, I am not ready for 6 days a week of exercise yet so I won't expect you to read this all in one sitting. There are other ideas to nuture, I know.

There is a ton of business intelligence here. I have not read through all of it, but I am sure that you and your dad could find it interesting fodder for debate.

The most important item, but most academic is the Harvard Business School Case highlighted in red. It is probably a bit dense, but it will give you a real sense of the pros and cons of the business.

If it were me, I would probably team up with one of the Internet providers online and "test the market." Minimizing your downside and giving you a chance to prototype a bit. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes.

"The discovery that Edison made is that you innovate by iterating quickly, by having lots of prototypes. Prototyping allows you to learn from risks almost immediately. You get a sense of the performance range of a product or service that teaches you more about the idea than a thousands hours spent intellectualizing."

Harvard Case Studies

• Fresh Connection

Words and Thoughts from a Wise Man

"If you don't make mistakes, you can't make decisions . . . You can't dwell on them."

Warren Buffett, Unplugged

Don't be Paralyzed - Prototype

The discovery that Edison made is that you innovate by iterating quickly, by having lots of prototypes.

Prototyping allows you to learn from risks almost immediately.

You get a sense of the performance range of a product or service that teaches you more about the idea than a thousands hours spent intellectualizing.

Source: http://www.ideo.com/