In my ongoing work on analyzing the intellectual property landscape in biofuels, one of the most impressive companies I’ve run across is Amyris, a renewable products company whose clever use of synthetic biology goes far beyond biofuels. Amyris was founded by Kinkead Reiling, Neil Renninger, and Jack D. Newman who met at Berkeley and founded …
Amyris: Great Story of Open Innovation and Renewable Products Read More »
Gene Quinn’s article, “ Proposal: Unlocking Job Growth with Patent Acceleration” over at IP Watchdog, reminds us of the powerful link between IP rights and economic growth. It’s an issue we take up in Conquering Innovation Fatigue when we discuss Hernando de Soto’s findings (countries with respect for property rights have much better economic growth …
Job Growth Through Sound Intellectual Property Rights and a More Efficient Patent System Read More »
The ability of an inventor to profit from an invention for a limited time, while also sharing the advances with the world to further knowledge, is the genius of the patent system. The availability of patent protection has done much to advance the economy of the United States and other nations that have shown respect …
Weakened IP Rights as an Innovation Fatigue Factor Read More »
For connecting one human to another, it’s been said that any two people can be connected by acquaintances in six steps, hence the concept of “six degrees of separation.” The term “seven degrees of separation” occurred to me when reading Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of airliner accidents in his outstanding book, Outliers: The Story of Success. …
Nussbaum on Design (BusinessWeek) has a though-provoking column that mentions several innovation principles from designer Diego Rodriquez. One of these is “Killing good ideas is a good idea.” That’s the kind of counter-intuitive blasphemy that merits reflection. Of course, developing good ideas is essential, but without the killing phase, good ideas can lead to “idea …
Idea Cancer: The Danger of Good Ideas (Growing Out of Control) Read More »
The latest issue of Consumer Goods Technology has a story that indirectly reveals some important secrets of successful innovation. The article is the cover story by Alarice Padilla, “Game-Changing Innovation: The Maker of Louisville Slugger Revolutionizes the Sporting Good Market with Bionic Glove Technology,” which describes the rise of a remarkable new glove that gives …
Reaching Out to Get a Grip on Innovation: The Story of the Bionic Glove Read More »
As part of my “Magic and Innovation” series, here is a 3-minute video blog, “Transforming Nickel Ideas to Dollar Innovations: The Danger of Excessive Valuation of an Invention.” In it, I discuss one of the innovation fatigue factors that stem from the innovators or inventors themselves when they think their early-stage invention or embryonic innovation …
Some tremendous products don’t reach their potential in the marketplace due to inattention to packaging. Smart entrepreneurs in consumer goods, medical products, and other areas understanding that packaging not only governs much of the response of shoppers to your product on the shelf, but also can affect its value and function after purchase. Child resistant …
Innovative Packaging to Alleviate Competitive Threats: Lessons from Aleve® Read More »
As I began writing this post, my wife was in a car a thousand miles away with a brand new smart phone. I received a call on someone else’s phone informing me that my wife’s smart phone had quit working completely after following the instructions she received from tech support to fix the GPS system …
The Palm Pre: How a Focus on Short-Term Results Can Destroy the Fruits of Innovation Read More »
Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder Than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem by Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan D. Nielson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009) strikes a chord in most anybody who has been in Corporate America – or most anybody who works, for that matter. Dr. Brent Peterson from the Marriott School of Engineering (Brigham Young University) and Gaylan Nielson, CEO of The Work Itself Group, apply decades of experience in facing the dysfunctions of modern business and diagnosing the problems of wasted effort. They estimate that over half of all work is meaningless, or “fake workâ€â€“work that is not related to the objectives of the business and does not help a business to survive. Fake. Meaningless. Wasted. These are terrible adjectives to apply to the exhausting efforts we go through, but they are accurate much of the time.