News Blog

(Credit: Innovations for Learning)

Brazilian schoolchildren aren't the only ones not waiting around for the much-delayed One Laptop Per Child computer--many kids are turning to alternatives right in the USA.

Non-profit Innovations for Learning today launched the "Teachermate" in Chicago public schools, a $50 handheld device that it calls "the world's most affordable solution for providing one computer to every student in a classroom." It's obviously not the most powerful handheld, but it should be plenty for the kids in kindergarten through second grade for whom it is intended, with a 2.5-inch color LCD, built-in microphone and speaker, 200MHz ARM processor, 512MB of memory, and a 4-hour battery. "Software for the handhelds includes a complete K-2 reading and math program that aligns with the Chicago Public Schools' reading and math initiatives," according to its press release.

Today's launch focuses on all 500 of Chicago's public elementary schools, which will receive the devices over the next two years under a program funded by JP Morgan Chase and the Chicago Community Trust. Other cities to get the computers include New York, Detroit, New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Denver.

And remember, if you want to get an even earlier head start, there's always the "Baby Laptop."

(Credit: Walt Disney Co.)

We asked Chris Heatherly, vice president of technology and innovation, Disney Consumer Products, The Walt Disney Co., to answer a set of questions--and he took the time to dive a little deeper.

How do you define "innovation"?
My favorite quote about innovation is one where Steve Jobs was asked how they systematize innovation at Apple and he said "We don't. We hire good people." I think a lot of talk about innovation amounts to a lot of dancing about architecture. People get caught up in trying to have an innovative "process" instead of having their values where they should be--making great product. To borrow from James Carville, "It's the product, stupid!" Who cares what your process is? It's what you put out there that matters.

If you want to make great products, you have to have high standards and absolutely insist on those standards. There's a great story about Pixar and the making of Toy Story 2. They completed most of the movie and then decided they didn't like how it was coming out. So they scraped it and started from scratch. How many companies have the guts to do that? Not many.

But I haven't answered your question. I think innovation is understanding people and what they need and giving them the most perfect solution you can to their problem even if they might not know they have it yet. It's giving people something new that they haven't seen before or making them re-experience something familiar in a totally new and better way. Everyone talks about Apple. The reason we all worship Apple is that there is no detail too small for them to sweat out. They don't stop at trying to make a great product. Look at the packaging. They work to reduce materials, to improve communications, to reduce shipping costs, to have better environmentally friendly materials, to create a great out-of-box experience, and on and on. Once you live and breathe these principles, you can't compartmentalize. You have to make everything as great as it can be. It becomes a way of life.

I think too many people confuse innovation and technology. I have seen a lot of designers try to make a mediocre concept innovative by putting Bluetooth or some other whiz-bang technology du jour in it. That's not innovation. It's cheating. Innovation is about solving problems for people. As I write this, I am at the New York Toy Fair. I am always so impressed and humbled by the incredible cleverness and simple innovation in small things that toy designers and inventors do every day. I think the technology business could learn a lot from these guys. The toy business has to work with very cheap stuff so they can't fall back on expensive technology. They really have to make the magic trick out of Popsicle sticks and rubber bands, if you take my meaning.

Yesterday, I saw a company that makes bubbles that you can't spill. Brilliant! I bet a lot of people have looked at bubbles and said "How can you innovate bubbles? There's nothing you can do. They're just bubbles." But this guy did and now he has a huge business because it turns out that parents don't buy as many bubbles for their kids as they might because they are afraid they will spill them and make a mess. To me, that's real innovation. A simple, clever idea well executed that makes things better for people.

What are the most important areas of innovation in your organization (product, process, IP, marketing, etc.)?

To be a creative company, you have to have a creative core, whatever that means for your company. For Disney, that's people like storytellers, animators, and Imagineers. For a company like Apple, it's designers and engineers. The people at the core of what you do have to be the heart that pumps innovation through the vessels of the organization. You can't live without your heart. But the other parts of the organization have just as important a role in innovation. Take technology, for example. Pixar is very clear that it is about telling stories and that everyone who is there is there for that purpose. Technology plays a really important role for them. They like to say that "art challenges technology and technology inspires art." They don't look at technology as being a second-class citizen to their artists. It's a respected peer. There are lots of other parts of the organization that have to be part of an innovative mission.

Here's one people don't put in a sentence with innovation very often--legal. Look at Google. They are constantly doing things with search and indexing and now with YouTube that challenge the legal status quo. If they had a legal team whose only role was to keep the company from getting sued, they would never do those things. If you want to be innovative, everyone has to be on board for the mission. Everyone has a role to play.

But one of the keys to innovation is having management that expects and drives innovation. You can have the best designers in the world and the worst management and nothing good will come of it. You have to have leaders who believe and have guts and support innovative work. You have to have leaders who hire the best talent and weed out the people who have the wrong values and intentions, but who at the same time are extremely tolerant of good people making mistakes or failing sometimes. If you manage quarter by quarter or have no tolerance for failure, you won't ever have innovation, no matter how creative your people are. You have to be willing to lose.

What would you consider your most successful innovation? How did you "find" it?
I'm very critical and I always think we can do better than we have done in the past. My favorite stuff--no matter when you ask me--is in the future and stuff I normally can't talk about it publicly.

My recent favorite innovation is a new technology called Clickables that we are launching in connection to our new Disney Fairies virtual world. It's a way for kids to take their online world experience into the real world. The core of it is a magical bracelet. By simply clicking their bracelets together, girls become friends in the online environment. And it's safer too because if you had to physically click with your friend that means they were in physical proximity to you, you saw them, and you know who they are. They aren't some random person online. Also, it allows kids to download virtual objects from their inventory and trade with their friends, which is another complicated thing we made simple. Most online worlds don't let you trade because it's hard to authenticate. We made that simple and seamless.

(Credit: Gearlog)

How did we find the idea? We knew that online worlds were going to be a big deal and so we got about 50 of our smartest people together from different divisions and of different job types--marketing people, technology people, designers, even finance people and lawyers--and we had a big brainstorm. We have a great process for brainstorms that's led by our head of creative Len Mazzocco. He's like the Michael Jordan of brainstorming. We came up with probably a few hundred ideas but narrowed it down to 75 really good ones from the two days. Then we narrowed it down to our top 10 and top 5 and in there was the nugget of the Clickables concept. Then we decided that this was such an important area that we would create a dedicated team around it, called our Toymorrow team that would be a little SWAT team focused on technology in the toy space. We moved really aggressively to find partners who shared our vision and had applicable technology. Speed is of the essence in these things. Len always says that "God gives everyone the same ideas at the same time." If you don't move fast, someone else will have your idea and do it before you can get it to market.

My other favorite recent product is a digital camera we made for preschoolers called Disney Pix Jr. I love it because it is so simple and so rugged and just does what it says it will do. I threw one myself down a flight of concrete stairs 20 times and couldn't break it. And the interface is so simple. We even got rid of the on button! And we have a fun feature on it called PhotoFriends that lets you pose with a Disney character in your picture. Kids are having a lot of fun with that. But for me, that is a great product because it meets the need and does what it says it's going to do. It doesn't read your mind or have Wi-Fi or cure cancer or any of that. It's just a great camera for kids. It is what it's supposed to be. Not a lot of products, especially technology products, can say that.

Which innovation "failure" did you learn the most from, and why?
That's easy. The Disney Dream Desk PC. We had all the right ideas in the beginning. We wanted to make an inexpensive computer without all the doodads in a small form factor about twice the size of the Mac Mini (you couldn't make it smaller back then because the processor was so hot) with a creative software suite a la iLife but for kids and with robust parental controls. I am proud of the way the software and Internet filtering came out. But the PC grew from this small inexpensive thing to this almost full-sized PC that was not as kid-like as we wanted and was much more expensive than we originally planned.

If we had kept with our original idea, we would have had the OLPC four years before Negroponte. That was the hardest project of my life, and I can't say I didn't fight hard. But our partner didn't share our vision. They thought it was imperative that it have all the slots and expansion and all the stuff parents probably don't really care about when they buy a kid a PC but that geeks care about a great deal. I thought we could change them, that we would convince them. But I felt compelled to launch, and I wound up compromising in some areas I didn't want to. I learned from that. Your partners need to share your vision or you will never get the result you want. I believe it's Louis Armstrong that said "There's some people, if they don't listen, you can't tell them." You have to stick to principles. If the people you work with don't want to do the project right, it's not worth doing.

What lessons can you pass on to others from how your organization has changed to make itself more innovation driven?
Anyone who reads a newspaper knows that Disney has had some major changes in the past few years with a new CEO--Bob Iger--and the acquisition of Pixar. We are getting back to our roots. Focusing on quality, incredible storytelling, and the magic people expect of us. Bob's really focused on bringing the company together as a team and put quality and innovation at the forefront of the company's agenda. What he's done is create a great collaborative environment for innovation and the rest has taken care of itself. You can see the whole company flourishing right now.

In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?
The organizations are their own biggest barriers. A lot of things that big companies do that they think are conservative and prudent are actually very foolhardy and dangerous. It's said that cynicism is ignorance masquerading as wisdom. Business is very simple. You have to offer a product that is better than your competition and you have to keep your customers happy. A lot of big companies get caught up in other things. Managing a P&L is important, and money keeps the lights on. But if people don't like the product or service you are putting out there, it doesn't really matter how clever you were about saving costs here and there. When you're dead, it doesn't really matter why. You can't cut your way to glory. Look at Apple. In the last recession, everyone else laid people off and cut back on R&D. Apple said "We are going to innovate our way out of this." And look what happened for them. You can't stop innovating.

Beyond your organization, who do you admire for risk-taking innovation, and what do you think makes them successful?
Apple is too obvious, so I'll say Target. At a time when everyone was trying to follow Wal-Mart into the bargain bin, Target had a vision that everyone deserved nicely designed products. A lot of people thought they were talking over their audiences' heads or they were full of themselves. In fact, everyone else was underestimating the intelligence and taste of their guests, and Target saw something no one else did. But Target innovated in a lot less obvious ways too. Take queue lines. At a lot of big-box stores, you could spend 20 minutes waiting to check out. At Target, you will wait less than 5 minutes most of the time. If the register is stacked up more than 3 people deep, they will open another one. That's customer service. Today, Target is beating all of their competitors' comps and doing more business per door than anyone else. Not everything has worked for Target. Remember the short-lived Philippe Starck line? But they keep trying and more often than not, they succeed.

What innovation are you still waiting for?
I think the single most important innovation we all need is low-cost green energy. Energy is the United States' #1 trade issue, #1 security, #1 economic issue, and #1 environmental issue. Green energy will have a more transformative effect on the world than the Internet, it's that big. Outside of this, I am working a lot with robotics these days and I'm very excited about all this smart technology that will make its way into lots of products. I live in LA and we are (in)famous for our traffic. I would love us all to have robotic cars that could figure out traffic flow, so I never have to sit through a traffic jam again.

The proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007 will be coming up for a vote in the Senate in a few months. A similar version of the bill has already passed in the House.

The bill has certain relatively benign provisions, but let's ignore them since they just cloud the argument and are of little interest to either side in the debate.

United States Senate

Let's instead just cut to the chase. In lay terms, the bill makes it easier to challenge issued patents and harder for patent holders to obtain compensation through the U.S. legal system.

Regardless of how that sounds to you, make no mistake - this debate is between two opposing sides with their own interests at heart. ... Read more

BOSTON--The United States needs to take a cue from Finland and Singapore to revive a flagging innovation economy, says author John Kao.

Kao spoke here at the MIT Enterprise Forum conference titled "Power, Drugs, and Money" on Thursday. Kao used his speech to make the case that the U.S. has a problem when it comes to generating technical innovation. This is the same theme he asserts in his book Innovation Nation, which was published in October. Though it's an admittedly over-used term, innovation is what leads to new technologies that drive economic growth and power, the former Harvard Business School professor said.

John Kao

The U.S. public education system, however, does not adequately prepare students, and many scientists-in-training are discouraged by what they see as a federal grant system that has inconsistent priorities and lacks funding, he said.

Meanwhile, there are more opportunities for students and scientists in places outside the United States. Singapore, for example, hired the head of the National Cancer Institute as part of its Biopolis program to expand its biotechnology industry.

Finland, which has twice as many Ph.D.s per capita as the U.S., has merged three of its universities to more effectively train students in its priority areas of education, science, innovation, and design.

Different countries have different models, ranging from heavy government direction like Finland, to the U.S. style "let 'er rip" system that relies on bottoms-up innovation. For the U.S. to better compete, Kao said, it needs a strategy that makes innovation more of a priority.

"A lot of other people are innovating when it comes to innovation because they have the stewardship, the strategy, and the will...because innovation serves a national ideal," he said. "Innovation may be about making new stuff, but it's very much about the complex and subtle interactions that have to be nurtured."

Rather than emulate France's technocrat-led "Grands Projets" approach, he said a better model is a hybrid that involves many parties, including government, academia, businesses, and entrepreneurs.

"I want to government to oversee the best platform possible, like the national highway system, but I want total freedom for entrepreneurs," he said.

In 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik spacecraft, the U.S. made math and science a priority, but right now, there is no overt threat. Prioritizing innovation for societal goals now is more like preventive medicine, he said.

The problem with current U.S. government efforts to drive technology innovation is that people are stuck in "incrementalism," rather than taking on a national innovation agenda. And many government leaders are indifferent to the innovation problem, he said.

Kao has spoken to some presidential candidates about his call for a national innovation strategy, but would not endorse a specific candidate.

He did note that Barack Obama, perceived as a youthful candidate able to inspire people, should be talking more about innovation and that Hillary Clinton has made three major speeches so far on science and innovation.

On a radio program this morning about the possible Microsoft/Yahoo merger, CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos argued that one of Yahoo's problems has been its inability to kill off unsuccessful properties.

Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social-networking tool and Google Video. (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well.)

To be fair to Yahoo, it recently yanked Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just announced it is dropping its music service and transferring subscribers to Rhapsody.

But it's also fair to say that Yahoo has gone beyond being a "one-stop shop" (1990s portal thinking) to a company that neither employees nor customers really know what it's about. I would tend to agree with Kanellos that an unwillingness to draw boundaries around what's in and what's out has a good deal to do with Yahoo's problems. (Full disclosure: both Yahoo and Microsoft are clients of frog design, where I work, though I have no inside knowledge of the merger at all.)

In the book Code Name Ginger, which chronicled the development of the Segway Transporter, there was a great phrase--"drowning puppies"--that describes the mindset necessary when tackling innovative products and services.

The challenge is this: you'll have lots of great ideas, but you will only be able to expend finite resources to bring a small number of them to market. If you try to spread resources across them all, they will all be starved and unhealthy. So you have to prioritize and not fund some of them. This is very difficult because, just like puppies, these ideas bounce around joyfully and are so shiny and perfect and full of future growth and promise. But the sad fact is you have to drown some of your puppies. It's a harsh phrase, but accurate.

Yahoo has continued adding property on property, service on service, but has not done enough puppy drowning to allow for shifting away from less successful areas. Regardless of whether the merger happens, let's hope Yahoo can regain some of its focus both for employees and customers.

I was working on this when I read this CNET News.com post. Apparently, Bill Gates believes that a strong technology sector will help keep America's economy healthy. I couldn't agree more. But I have a somewhat different take on the role tech has played in the U.S. economy.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. technology industry has had a number of "the sky is falling" moments, and every time we've managed to work through it and come out stronger than before.

For example, when I entered the job market in 1980, my employer--Texas Instruments--was the world's leading semiconductor maker. But in 1986, NEC and Fujitsu took the top two spots. By 1998, Japanese companies held the top 3 and 6 of the top 9 positions and TI had slipped to No. 5. Intel was the only bright spot, climbing the charts from 10th to 7th place.

Fast forward to 2006, when U.S. companies occupied 4 of the top 10 positions, including No. 1 (Intel) and No. 3 (TI). Rounding out the top 10 were two companies each from Japan, Korea, and Europe. That's certainly more balanced. What changed?

(Credit: Microsoft)

Well, U.S. technology companies and their employees seem to have a knack for innovating. But we don't just invent technology; we also create and dominate markets. We don't just rise to the occasion when our economy is threatened; technology innovation and marketing seem to be innate strengths of our culture.

For example, Intel, Microsoft, and IBM together created the personal computer. Contributions from Apple, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others helped to make personal computing the most important product category in tech history.

Nokia may be the dominant cell phone company, but U.S. companies like TI dominate the chips inside, and Qualcomm invented CDMA--the competitor of Europe's GSM standard.

U.S. companies invented and dominate networking and the Internet. American companies invented the Palm Pilot, Tivo, and of course the iPod and iPhone. Except for Vizio, we don't make TVs, but TI invented DLP technology--the core of a new generation of HDTVs and video projectors.

It's surprising that we occasionally manage to out-innovate and out-market Asian and European consumer electronics giants like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, and Philips.

First manufacturing moved offshore, followed by outsourcing of data and call-centers and even software and hardware development. But our unemployment rate has averaged just below 5 percent for the past 10 years, and it's not expected to change anytime soon.

When we're confronted with a challenge, we retool, innovate, create, and market. As an industry and with the occasional help of the government we also protect our intellectual property rights--one of the biggest challenges we've faced, and continue to face, since the early '80s.

At the end of the day, it's imperative that we continue to develop, nurture, and protect our human capital, our intellectual capital, and our venture capital. And not just in traditional electronics, but in biotech, nanotech, green tech, and energy tech.

Just as they say in the stock market, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Technology is a treadmill that never stops or even slows; we can't either.

Note: a prior version listed Blackberry as an American invention. Research In Motion is a Canadian company. Thanks to Neal and sorry to all you Canadians out there.

(Credit: Seattle Post Intelligencer)

Is Apple's PR wearing thin?

Sure, there was the MacBook Air and the buzz around "thinnovation." But wasn't that--pun intended--too "thin" for a big media splash, especially compared with past years? Now that MacWorld is over, pundits are reviewing Apple's PR efforts, and when the expectations are so high (and a company is so good at it), it is not too surprising that some are disappointed with what they've seen this year. Frank Shaw, a PR professional at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's lead PR agency, is one of them, and you have to give him credit for being so vocal in public despite his affiliation with the Apple rival. (It would be easy to dismiss his criticism as just a Microsoft cabal.) Shaw is wondering whether Apple's shock and awe, event-focused product launch PR philosophy has lost its relevance in a time of always-on communications:

"The concept of holding news, building expectations, and then unveiling a massive surprise has been super effective, and no more so than last year with the iPhone. It was a tour de force from a communications standpoint. This recent Macworld? Not so much."

He refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which states that people's ability to retain and process information has accelerated, resulting in significantly faster news cycles:

"So in this world, is a twice a year news bang sufficient? The answer could be yes--but there is little room for events like today in that world. Apple stepped to the plate today, IMHO, and hit...a single. The company won't be up to bat again for a while...if you are only up a few times a year, you better hit some home runs."

He admits that he's a proponent of "small ball" rather than "home run ball," and it's hard to judge whether that makes him old-school or PR avant-garde:

"I've never been a big fan of 'giving up control of the message' or 'information wants to be free' or 'user generated content will rule the world' or 'it's all about the conversation.' But I'm a huge believer in the value of ongoing communication, to the right audiences, about the topics they care most about, in a regular, sustained way."

iPhone guilt

But Apple products raise more than just PR questions. On the O'Reilly blog, Dale Dougherty takes Apple's 1984 slogan "The computer for the rest of us" as a starting point to meditate on the "rest of the rest of us"--those excluded from our high-tech frenzy and without the means to participate in the Apple universe of godly gadgets. He does so because he feels "iPhone guilt":

"Taking the iPhone out of my pocket in a public place makes me uncomfortable. Some people ask nicely about it: 'How do you like it?' But I'm keenly aware that others don't have what I have and they notice it. The iPhone is a great phone but I'm conscious that it's helping to define 'the rest of us versus them.'"

Dougherty's moral treatise poses some uncomfortable questions:

"Is the high-tech world indifferent to the problems of the poor? Do we have any competence that matters in helping them find a better life? Or are we just making 'the happy few' that much happier? What is a social network if the people facing the toughest problems are not part of it? They don't need more signs that tell them that they are on their own. The have-nots don't do networking. It doesn't get them anywhere."

"Whether it's the latest from Web 2.0 or Apple Computer, do we need to ask what it means for those who aren't able to take part? Does it help them catch up or put them further behind? That calculation is part of the social cost of any new technology. We might think of it like we're starting to think about our oversized carbon footprint and its impact on the physical world. Is there any way to offset the negative social impact of the technology that we're so busily developing?"

"It's a challenge for the 'best of us' to address."

(Credit: Hem.com)

Europe loves the VW Beetle, the Renault Twingo, and the Smart. The U.S. has the Mini and will finally get the Smart, too. And recently India proudly presented the spiritual successor to all of these--the $2,500 Tata Nano, a "people's car" that is widely gushed about, not only for its surprisingly slick design but also for its innovations.

In recent years, ecoconcerns, design savvy, and an (urban) willingness to quest for practicality have fostered the trend toward specialized cars that are as small as the niches they serve. While the idea of a small car is not new, in the case of the Nano, and that's an interesting addendum, the miniaturization of the product goes along with a miniaturization of price, development process, and distribution model. The Nano is the world's new "cheapest car," it was developed and designed by an off-site micro-organization, and it operates with a decentralized distribution model that allows the suppliers who assemble the car to also sell and service it directly to the consumers. What you can learn from Tata: shrink the product, shrink the feature list (no frills!), shrink the development team (no red tape!), shrink the price (ultra low cost!), and shrink (localize!) assembly and distribution. Think small, score big.

In fact, nano is the new big. Language is always a good indicator of cultural shifts. There is talk of the "Nano-effect," of "nano-sphere," and the magazine Nanowerk observes that, "Over the course of the last 12 months, the LexisNexis database of newspaper articles records 239 stories referring to nanotechnology in the British press. In the same period there have been 239 stories referring to 'iPod' and 'nano'."

India's Economic Times even proclaims the "coming Nano Age:"

"Small is getting a big play. Part of the push is coming from companies eager to stuff cell phones with value add-ons and another is about demonstrating technology that is smart, simple, small and beautiful. (...)Nanotech products or small, nifty gadgets may not be cheap, as the emphasis is not on price cutting but efficiency at a small scale. Though it remains to be seen whether, the Tata Nano, a nanotech medical device or a pocket printer, will set the cash counters ringing."

(Credit: P2i)

Imagine buying sneakers and cell phones waterproofed with the same stuff.

You may be able to do that soon with the development of something called Ion Mask, a cold plasma surface enhancement technology developed by the U.K.'s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the University of Durham now being marketed by spin-off Porton Plasma Innovations (P2i.)

When applied, the technology invisibly modifies the surface of products making them super oil and water repellant. How repellant? It's three times more effective than Teflon, according to P2i.

The treatment works by decreasing the surface energy of virtually any object with an ionized gas or "plasma" mere nanometers thick, according to P2i. In the case of cell phones, PDAs, and other electronics this invisible "enhancement" not only waterproofs the outside, but the insides as well; with no damage to precision components. Water bounces off treated surfaces "like beads of mercury" with no change to the look, feel, or performance, according to the company.

"Ion Mask is extremely effective against the problem of moisture ingress as it can be applied to the most intricate electronic objects without damaging the precious circuitry," said P2i's Ian Robins. "The process is particularly well suited to high value applications such as MP3 players, which are required to perform outdoors in all weather conditions, or other small, lightweight electronic items which may be inadvertently worn in the shower or while swimming."

The technology was originally developed by the British Ministry of Defence to protect soldiers from chemical and biological weapons. P2i and its investors at Circus Capital Technology expected it to revolutionize everything from water-repellent footwear to sportswear to medical disposables to the long awaited shower phone.

P2i has shown that it's not shy about licensing the technology. Check out Whizaway.com ; "The World's First Antibacterial and Hydrophobic Urine Director" designed for both disabled and active, outdoorsy women. Plasma enhancement insures that no "residual droplets of urine" are left on the device, so that it may be confidently stowed after use. Revolutionary indeed.