Innovation Blog

Greek legend tells of Pelops, the grandson of Zeus, who was killed, cooked, and served to the gods to judge whether they could differentiate between flesh of man and beast. Demeter, goddess of agriculture, ate Pelop's shoulder, but recognizing her error, restored him to life and constructed a replacement prosthetic ivory shoulder.

Fast fast forward. Today, 10% of the U.S. population is estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and synthetic skin.

This trend inspires the question: How ready are we to accept further engineered extensions of the human body?

And does our response vary depending on whether these devices are Restorative, Normalizing, Reconfiguring, or Enhancing?

Any one who has worked in product development will tell you that one of the biggest challenges is translating the industrial designer's beautiful vision into a manufacturable engineering database. One important reason this so hard is the tools that we work with. To the unititated CAD may look like MacPaint but to the engineer they are attempting to define complex organic forms using commands based on boolean algebra. Doing this while maintaining the elegance of the designer intended required a skilled and experience engineer teamed with a savy and patient designer. What we really need is better tools. We need tools that help with the creative process not stand in the way. We need tools that have their user interface design by developers with a focus on usability not by engineers and mathematicians focused strictly on precision.

Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed a new procedure to greatly improve reconstructive surgery results. The procedure involves using ink jet printer technology to place human cells in a configuration matching the tissue being replaced. The provides much greater control over the shape and nature of tissue being grown for skin grafts. This is also believed to offer future potential for growing catilage or bone grafts. For more information check out the article on the Science Blog (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/6735).

Today we all take graphical user interfaces on our computers for granted. But 21 years ago most computer users were used to text based displays and simple beeps as the only sound output from their computers. Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of the introduction of the first Macintosh. The German Macintosh site "Mac Essentials" has uncovered a copy of the video of Steve Jobs introducing Macintosh to the world. So take a look at http://www.industrial-technology-and-witchcraft.de/1984.html and watch as Steve takes Macintosh out of the bag and see the first consumer computer with a GUI and hear the Mac read a welcome statement. That's right, text to speach on a consumer product in 1984. Talk about innovation. So when a product idea seems to far out to be possible it frequently just means that you need a talented development team that is not willing to accept "can't be done" for an answer.

Depending upon your age you may think of a robot as Robbie from Lost in Space or Data from Star Trek. But either way these are still charaters on the TV and artificial intellegence (AI) is still a foriegn concept to most people. AI has slowly been sneeking up on us while we weren't looking. If you are reading this note you are familiar with Google. Google and many of the other technologies we see on the web are based on AI. But these are still not the personal AI assistant that many people have imagined. But there is progress. Researchers at Britain's University of Leeds have developed a system that teaches itself to play games by observing human players. Most AI systems work on a set of rules that are presented to the computer by the human user. Human's on the other hand learn by observation. Now we have a computer that learns like a human. Check out the article in "New Scientist" at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6914.

On another front, researchers at Austrailia's Swinburne University are working on computer generted avatar's that could sit in for you on your next conference call...

I frequently run into companies who have a technology that is successful for them in one application and now they are asking themselves what other applications can benefit from the same technology. This is always a difficult question. How do you make the best use of the good parts of your capabilities to be successful in a new market. This week Google showed an interesting example of one of the answers they came up with when they asked themselves this question. Google has released a beta site for their new video search offering. Now web search engines have provided searches of web content. They have provided dictionaries, encyclopedias, telephone books, movie showtimes and even TV schedule listings. But Google's new "Google Video" site (http://video.google.com) provides not searches of TV schedules but searches of actual TV content. Say you wanted to know if any TV show had mentioned the Linux operating system recently...

If you haven't heard by now you soon will. This year is the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's Miracle Year. In 1905 Albert, then a 26 year patent clerk and PhD student, published four research papers that reshaped modern science. In one paper, through the measurement of Brownian motion of in a glass of water, he proved the existance of atoms. In a second paper he deduced the size of molecules. In a third paper he presented the idea that light is made up of particles (photons) not waves as previously thought. That change in thinking about light has lead to quantum theory which scientists are still trying to understand. In the fourth paper he presented "a modification of the theory of space and time". That paper gave brith to his theory of special relativity which overthrough Newton's laws of motion which were long held to be the ultimate description of our universe...

Innovation is about "...seeing things that everyone has seen and thinking differently than everyone has thought." Well have to say that the house created by David Hanawalt and Bill Close fits that description. The "Wege House" has various stringed instruments incorporated in various structures within the house. The combination allowed David and Bill to enlarge their instruments so that you can walk inside them and "...to feel the sound in your body, within your bones and within your mind." So check out the house and the music at http://www.symphonichouse.com. In the mean time what in your world would benefit for combining multiple devices or concepts in ways not thought of before?

Young carpenters in Ghana have a reputation for constructing the world's most imaginative coffins.

Start shopping at ghanaweb.com and BBC.

Innovation is lacking from most of today's product designs. With the outsourcing of labor to developing nations over the past few years, much of what was “original” in design has disappeared, replaced by rehashing old ideas or even worse, copying other firm's designs. This is a trend that will undoubtedly continue as there is profit to be made at undercutting a successful product's market. Case and point is Apple's iPod, and the numerous “knock-offs” that have emerged to take a slice of the pie. Obviously, imitation is the best kind of flattery, and it shows that Apple designed a good product.