Monthly Archives: December 2010
A few weeks ago, Popular Science (PopSci) announced its “Best of What’s New 2010” list of the top 100 innovations of the year. Named No. 1 was the Groasis waterboxx, a “dead-simple game-changer.” Indeed, the waterboxx, developed by AquaPro Holland, allows trees to grow anywhere. According to PopSci, “drylands actually have enough water to sustain trees for decades, but it’s several feet beneath the surface. Because rain and irrigation evaporate quickly, many young plants die before their roots can tap that reservoir.” But the waterboxx prevents that. And, according to GreenLivingTips.com, it prevents “against evaporation, frosts, pests and the elements and also helps to maintain a steady temperature at the tree’s roots.” The waterboxx is designed to sit around a newly planted sapling. It has to be filled with four gallons of water just once. “The waterboxx does the rest,” PopSci said. “At night, its top cools faster than the … Continue reading
University technology transfer methods are ready to meet the Long Tail. What’s the Long Tail? It’s a concept borrowed from statistics; if you imagine a bar chart with a few tall bars followed by a slow curve downwards, that’s a long tail curve. A bar chart that ranks sales of book titles at amazon.com, for instance, displays a classic long tail pattern: a few books sell a lot (the long bars) and a lot of books sell fewer copies (the gradual curve downwards). However, if you add up sales revenue from the more esoteric (i.e. not the New York Times bestsellers) books, their combined total revenue equal a pretty good chunk of income, almost as much as the revenue from the big best sellers. Back when I worked in a tech transfer office at a large research university, I wanted to see which of our technologies …
It’s pretty common knowledge that implementing an effective social media strategy takes time. That makes tips on how to maximize your social media productivity, such as those shared by Todd Schnick, co-founder of #Innochat, on his strategy for allocating your time very valuable. Todd’s recommendation was to divide your social media participation time into thirds, with 1/3 of your time within each category: Observing / listening in others’ social media outlets Participating in others’ outlets through commenting, guest blogging, etc. Creating content and being active within your own outlets Ever since Todd shared that concept in early 2009, his social media productivity strategy has been front and center in my mind (and ensconced in my social media strategy presentations). The truth is I rarely come close to this balanced approach since creating Brainzooming content definitely represents the majority of my time. One way of improving your time allocation though is … Continue reading
A fun peek into how the news would have gotten out differently 2,010 years ago if social media tools had been around. (Click full screen). Thanks to David Passes for the heads up. Editor’s Note: And for those of you who have already celebrated Hanukkah, here is a fun video – and if you celebrate Kwanza or any other winter holiday during this season, may the season be merry for you and yours! 
Don’t miss an article (2,100+) – Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group! Mitch Ditkoff is the Co-Founder and President of Idea Champions and the author of “Awake at the Wheel”, as well as the very popular Heart of Innovation blog.
This is the time of year when analysts and consultants make predictions about the upcoming year. The folks at Trendwatching.com have just released their Top 11 Consumer Trends for 2011. Almost seems like a Spinal Tap moment. Anyway, we at OVO are no exception. Each year we publish predictions based on what we believe will happen in the upcoming year. You can register for the email newsletter here. In this blog post I’m going to explore one trend we think will be important, and why you should be acting now. As you may have guessed from the title of the blog post, we believe customer experience innovation is one of the most compelling opportunities in 2011. This is based on a number of market conditions, trends and innovation needs. First, as anyone paying attention to the economy can tell you, consumer spending is down …
Back home over Thanksgiving, my mother and I talked about coming up with creative ideas for dealing with the collection of books I bought during high school that are still left at their house. The books include both great literature and big coffee table art books. Quite honestly, we have no room for them at our house or any interest in lugging them back to Kansas City. Beyond my books, there are also hundreds of old books my dad bought to fill the newly installed shelves of the remodeled home when we first moved in years ago. My best creative thinking was to sell all of them together and hope to get $15 for the whole lot. It’s sad, especially given how much money I spent on them originally, but they are, after all, simply old, used books. Obviously though, I wasn’t being very creative with my idea. A few … Continue reading
