Innovation & design
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. — Thomas A. Edison...
There was apparently a closing session at ad:tech this week in New York called “30 Great Ideas in 60 Minutes”. Most of the following comes straight from the ad:tech blog, so go there if you want more, but I thought...
From a posting on the Patently Obvious blog about an Appeal Court ruling over some Lemelson patents: In an infringement suit against Symbol, the district court found that the patents were unenforceable under the doctrine of prosecution laches — holding...
A new paper runs deliciously contrary to accepted wisdom in science, which says that most scientists peak in their 20s. It is welcome news to those of us who have not yet, ahem, done our Nobel-winning work:Great achievements in knowledge...
Ira Flatow has an interesting-looking segment in the first hour of tomorrow's Christmas Eve edition of NPR's Science Friday: How do great inventors invent? Is there something that separates the mental processes of a creative inventor from the rest of...
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, books on creativity and innovation are not to be tossed aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force. Most books on creativity and innovation are awful. With rare exceptions, such books repeat simple ideas endlessly,...
Gartner has posted Part II of its interview with Clay "Disruptive innovation" Christensen. It's worthwhile reading, and he does make a confession, of sorts: In a typical company, 80 to 90% of its money ought to be spent executing sustaining...
Good question at WhyNot.net: Why don't elevator floor buttons come with undo? For example, when in an elevator and you press the wrong floor button why can't you press it again and have the selection be un-selected? Similarly, if you're...
From a short and somewhat melancholic interview in the Washington Post with Nestor Ramirez, a patent examiner: What continues to amaze me about people who apply for patents is not that they're coming up with these completely novel inventions that...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
I'm deep in the throes of a paper looking at universities and the evolving view of patents therein, and I ran across the following dandy quote. It is from a letter written in 1917 by biologist Jacques Loeb of the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
So, Gillette made its announcement this morning. As I predicted a few postings back, it announced a new razor -- or, as it calls it, a "powered wet shaving system for men". The M3Power combines the three blades of the...
Wonderful photos and text here demonstrating the trouble with running sidewalks in different places than where people naturally want to walk: they'll walk elsewhere and create paths. While the piece is interesting in itself, it is also a nice way...
