r+d

I continue to think that ads are the best part of television these days. As with all great creative and innovative endeavors, perhaps it is the constraint of time and resources that mandates editing and re-editing and re-re-editing, all of which refines the product down to a punchy, effective message.

Fascinating concept from Tesco (now Home Plus). They installed photo-realistic grocery store displays in subways in Korea. Customer use their smart phones to QR scan the food they want to purchase while they are waiting for the subway. The order is processed by Home Plus and delivered to their house. 

Being an entrepreneur is unreasonable.  It is arrogant.  It is unusual. You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, and a US economy that produces $14 trillion in goods and services each year, and over 100 mm white collar workers in our country, that you, little old you, have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet.

I mean, c’mon, there’s no denying that it’s arrogant to say that you are right and everybody else was wrong to not see the wonderful opportunity that your company is pursuing.  That they were fools to just leave the dollar bills waiting there for you to pick them up.

And part of that unreasonableness is realizing that you are in a fight for your company’s life every day.  Every day that you are not “live” is a day you’ve lost the opportunity to make an impression.  Every day that you’re not bringing in cash is a day that you’ve lost the chance to expand your payroll.  Every day that you’re not pleasing customers is a day that somebody, somewhere else, will.  Perhaps they’re not doing it as well as you know you eventually will, but the plain truth is that they are pleasing them today and you’re not.

This is clearly just a concept and I'm struggling to figure out the practical aspects of this other than self and group-portraits, but it's a neat video featuring technology that's here today. WVIL stands for Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens. If you ask me though the only product here is the lens with a Bluetooth connection. The rest of the "camera" is just an iPhone + app.

Short film about the TMB Panyee Futbol Club, who out of necessity built their own floating soccer field and went on to become champions. Amazing and uplifting story that demonstrates how wonderful things can happen when passion meets innovation and constraints.

This reminds me of some of the work I've seen at emerging-tech think tanks like the MIT Media Lab (Tangible Media comes to mind), only this uses LEGO. As someone who played incessantly with LEGO toys and blocks growing up, this is right up my alley. Seems to be a great example of digital and physical elements coalescing to create a more magical playtime experience. I know for a fact my 3 year old twins would go bananas for this type of thing.

Matt at 37Signals dug this quote up out of a post on Cult of Mac. It recounts John Sculley's meeting with Steve Jobs in which Steve described his meeting with Edwin Land, the inventor/ founder of the Polaroid camera:

Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?”

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed — it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. 

I think the exchange is outstanding on so many levels, not the least of which in the way it quietly denigrates customer research, particularly customer research, for the purposes of breakthrough products or services. For incremental change, it's great. You're polling the audience for feature enhancements. That's right in the market research wheelhouse. But when it comes to breakthrough change . . . as Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

For revolutionary change, you need someone, or a team of people, who not only understand the specific value denials that need to be addressed but who also have the creative prowess and technical expertise to engineer the right solution. But for people who can do this, people who have been tinkerers and inventors their whole lives, it's not as hard as it might sound. They've been working on turning ideas into real things for years. It's just a part of who they are.

They just know how to make the right thing because they've done it before. Even if it's new to the world, they can see it plain as day right in front of them. Those products have always been there, waiting on their moment to be discovered. And once discovered, all that's left is the small matter of breathing life into them and polishing them for inspection by the world.

image via

As a creative person, you've been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your work should also be deeply personal and rewarding. If it's not, then something is amiss.

Creation is entirely dependent on ownership.Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there's no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision. States of approval and decisions-by-committee and constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions.