It's time to take a peek outside, wander around a bit and take a deep breath. Recharge my batteries. ... Creative Generalist is on hiatus for the remainder of June. New posts to come in a few weeks. In the meantime, scroll down and click on any of the archive or friendlies links for your daily dose of miscellany. Cheers!
Aussie Charles Cave has saved us all some time-consuming note-taking by sharing with us his list of idea recording tools. Ranging from basic flashcards to computers, Cave runs through the pros and cons of each and compares our modern ways with the methods used by historical greats like da Vinci and Edison.
Have you ever been doing one of the following activities when you suddenly had a flash of inspiration but had no means of recording your idea? You thought you could remember the idea until a convenient time to write it down, but you found the idea had vanished as quickly as it appeared?
Ideas and thoughts are fleeting and unless you catch them immediately, they will be lost. There's no way to predict when a great idea is likely to pop into your mind so you must be prepared at all times to record them. Once you have established the habit of idea recording you will be surprised at how many good ideas you actually think of each day.
(via IdeaFlow)
Booz Allen Hamilton consultants Alexander Kandybin and Martin Kihn offer up this great Strategy + Business article on how to Raise Your Return on Innovation Investment. Basically, they take a close look at innovation and try to figure out to exactly what degree it translates into accelerating sales, share, or profits. Not much, they find. More R&D spending does not actually yield more returns.
Profitable innovation, in other words, cannot be bought. Simply spending more usually leads to a waste of resources on increasingly marginal projects. The solution to innovation anemia is not to boost incremental spending, but to raise the effectiveness of base spending — to increase the return on innovation investment, lifting the firm’s “ROI squared".
Kandybin and Kihn suggest three principles that they believe can improve the return on innovation investment of any company engaged in the development of new products or services. These so-called pillars are: Understand Your Innovation Effectiveness Curve (invest in innovation smarter and focus on the good ideas); Master the Entire Innovation Value Chain (understand that innovation is not a discrete activity, that it is a multifunctional capability that requires several types of competencies: ideation, selection, development and commercialization); and Don’t Do It All Yourself (outsource and accentuate extended supply chains and external knowledge sources).
An interesting overlooked fact, presented here (In the Wrong Key) in enRoute by Technologist Don Tapscott: the common QWERTY keyboard, designed by American Christopher Sholes in 1867, was created with the purpose of slowing typing so as to avoid traditional typewriters from jamming. Slow typing increased the typewriter’s reliability. Not so practical, however, for modern computer use.
Sholes’ keyboard is known as the QWERTY design, so-called because those are the top six letter keys on the left-hand side. That alone shows how foolish the QWERTY system is; "E" is the most frequently used letter in the alphabet, yet it’s not on the row of keys reached most easily by the typist.
But there is a better keyboard. August Dvorak, a University of Washington professor, created one in the 1930s. He analyzed the frequency of letter usage and devised an arrangement of keys that minimized hand movement and maximized efficiency. Unfortunately, his efforts never caught on. Few companies wanted a typewriter that no one knew how to use, and few typists wanted to train for a keyboard that no employer owned. Chicken and egg.