Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire: A Great Read by Innovation Guru Braden Kelley

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Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire by Braden Kelley (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) is a highly readable, positive book about the practical side of innovation. Braden Kelley writes with the benefit of not only having many years of experience in supporting innovation, but with the insights that come from one of the best innovation networks on …

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Making Innovation Smarter Through Decentralized Systems: Lessons from the Quorum Sensing Skills of Ants

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“Quorum sensing” refers to the abilities of some organisms, especially bacteria, to sense the presence of others and begin collective action such as forming a biofilm. It’s a critical area of research in immunology. There are also lessons from quorum sensing that need to be applied to business and innovation. Quorum sensing, in a sense, …

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CNN’s List of Top 10 Failed Tech Products

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Doug Gross at CNN has a list of the top 10 tech product failures in recent years (hat tip to Greg Aharonian’s Patnews newsletter). The list includes: LaserDisc Apple Newton Google Wave Segway Microsoft KIN Pets.com TwitterPeak Atari Jaguar HD-DVD Virtual Reality Some great ideas and even some cool technology went into most of these …

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The Invention of the Computer: Pulitzer-Prize Novelist Will Tell the Untold Story

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I am delighted to see Wired Magazine feature a story about the new book on the largely untold story of one of the original inventors of the computer. Nearly everyone has heard the standard story of the invention of the ENIAC computer at Penn State by a team led by John Mauchly and J. Presper …

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Chemical Engineers and Innovation: A View from the AIChE Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah

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I’m back from the week-long Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in Salt Lake City, Utah, where over 4,200 engineers from around the country and many other nations were gathered. Hundreds of technical papers were presented from researchers and leaders pursuing advanced in energy, biotech, materials, nanotechnology, chemicals, and related fields. …

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More Examples of External Factors Contributing to Innovation Fatigue

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Further stories in the news illustrate the important issue of external innovation fatigue factors as raised in our book. Recent examples: The Feds vs. Fruit Juice: The FTC goes to war against those who promote the health benefits of the pomegranate. Small-Scale Regulation May Bring Big-Time Troubles for Wisconsin Nanotech Licensing to Kill from today’s …

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The Tsunami of External Fatigue

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Innovators and business leaders doing their best to achieve commercial success need to understand the set of innovation fatigue factors that they face. These include personal factors due to the bad behavior of individuals; corporate or organizational fatigue factors reflecting inadequate systems, culture, or flawed judgment; and external fatigue factors due to the burdens of …

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About That Missing Graphene Patent: How to Trick a Nobel Laureate into Giving Up His IP Rights

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Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly on Twitter) had a recent tweet about the Nobel Laureate Andre Geim who discovered graphene and many potential uses for the super strong two-dimensional material. His tweet was “Puts the lie to the claim that patents help small inventors: Why Geim Never Patented Graphene http://bit.ly/9QrEC3“. The link is to a discussion on …

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Engineers Interested in Innovation, Startups, and IP: Join Us at the 2010 AIChE Annual Meeting

collaboration, corporate, economics, innovation, inventors, IP rights, management, open innovation, partnerships, patents, start-ups, strategy, tech transfer, universities / By

Chemical engineers interested in innovation and entrepreneurship should consider attending the AIChE 2010 Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. On Wednesday, Nov. 10, I will chair a session featuring four outstanding speakers on topics that should be of interest to many engineers, including university researchers, corporate researchers, and managers. If you are conducting research that …

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Ethics Fatigue

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Here’s a story I’ve heard too many times. I spoke recently with a businessman who developed an advanced formulation for a product that beat the market leader. He invested thousands in the product and found a manufacturer that expressed interest in his work and offered to be a partner in commercializing it. The businessman invested …

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