The Origins of Good Ideas - An Extract from Steven Johnson's New Book "Where Good Ideas Come From"

In the year following the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight neonatal incubators from international relief organizations. Several years later, when an MIT fellow named Timothy Prestero visited the local hospital, all eight were out of order, the victim of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual. Mr. Prestero and the organization he cofounded, Design That Matters, had been working for several years on a more reliable, and less expensive, incubator for the developing world. In 2008, they introduced a prototype called the NeoNurture. It looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts

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Can truly great design be done the open source way? | opensource.com

This is a blog worth posting in full as it addresses the issue of open source, crowdsourcing and the concept of how ideas evolve in practice in organisations.

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Stop saying 'innovation' - Scott Berkun | The Economist

Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you. Every Fortune 500 crowd I've said this to laughs and agrees. The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We're tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it's often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

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Combining Ideas – a Key to Innovation - Tim Kastelle, School of Business the University of Queensland

One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and innovations within your organisation. These act together to create non-linear feedback loops which make the change process nearly impossible to predict or manage. How do we manage this? The act of innovation consists of combining ideas in new ways, and then executing the this new combination effectively (If you’re nerdy, I’ve got a fairly technical model of how this works in the paper I wrote with Jason Potts & Mark Dodgson for this year’s DRUID Conference). One of the ways that we deal with the complexity we face is by innovatively connecting ideas.

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As the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products.

Earlier this spring, manufacturers and designers from all over the world were shipping their wares to Milan to prepare for the Salone del Mobile. Anybody involved in design knows this is the most important rendezvous of the year—or at least it used to be, when design meant mostly furniture and objects. Designers anticipate meeting new talent and inspiration; they seek out curators, writers, teachers, students, and, of course, each other—this is a chance to meet with their peers and trade war stories. It’s hard to tell in advance whether Milan will be blooming with wisteria or gray, rainy, and dreary at this time of year, but the event is inevitably alive with the sound of design. The Salone is to design what Cannes is to film: the most useful and most productive yearly trade meeting. But is the future of design here? Milan still represents a big red dot in the geography of design, but design is changing rapidly, and so are its maps. There are myriad forms of design, many of which don’t require movement of materials and artifacts; only curiosity, an internet connection, and the ability to seek, learn, and synthesize from other fields and cultures.

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