Iowa State, Michael Schrage and innovation

As Nick said – Jason (another dude who is diving into the whole wedia thing) and I were at Iowa State University yesterday and today at a conference called ETC2008.

It was a cool little conference over at ISU in Ames, Iowa put on by the HCI/CompSci people.  (HCI = Human Computer Interface)  It was very refreshing to see these college students so fired up about some of the topics.  I spoke to a cool guy named Matt Heying who is working on a neat project about mashing SaaS, Web 2.0 and research – cool stuff.

The Innovation keynote was giving by a guy named Michael Schrage.  It was a great talk on innovation and here are my notes.

• innovation is the transformation of novilty to value
• good ideas are cheap – good implementatiosn aren’t
  Tom’s Comment: How true, and something Nick keeps telling me! 
• a model is a relevant approximation of reality (models are social constructions)  that we cost effectivly use.
• what is simple?  simple is a social construct.
• “home made simple” is a site by procter and gamble – almost 100% concept testing online @ literally 1/100 of the cost and 1/100 of the time
  Tom’s Comment: Michael had a good bit for information here – it just makes sense…too much almost.  But with the power of the internet and computers – we are silly not to do this.  Add in the power of Facebook and we have a test medium which can really reach people under 30 years old!
• 80/20/20 vision
  80% of the necessary information
  20% of the time
  20% of the resources
• google is not a seach engine – they are an instant search engine, it’s about how fast they can do it.
  Tom’s Comment: The point here is if google could double your search’s effectiveness – but it took 1 minute for the results…people would not accept it.  They are INSTANT SEARCH – not search.
• resistance is by far the clearest window into understanding an organization’s internal economics of innovation – the reason they give for not innovating is the innovation culture.
• how to provide:
  more accessable models for cost-effrective ROU (reduction of uncertainty) that boost value from use
• we are over weighted in ideas and under weighted in implementations
• not anti idea, but pro-idea and testing
• refuse to talk about good ideas unless there is a testing routine
  Tom’s Comment: This was very clear after Michael’s talk.
• do not try to implement and idea without testing.  refuse
• layers of digital infrastructure allow us to itereate cheaply