Recent News
Top Ten Reasons Why Your Company is not Innovative
New Product Shopping Simulations
Some thoughts on Meaningful Ethnography
Tom Tjaarda on Creativity
Take a Look - An American Look
Open Innovation
Archives
- November 2007
- October 2007
- April 2007
- November 2006
- October 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
January 27, 2005
So you have a technology, now what do you do with it?
posted by hdittmer at 8:16 AM
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...
When I searched for Linux I found that the January 18th NCIS crime drama, the KRON 4 Morning News and on CSPAN2's Book Event Shows all made some reference to Linux. On other searches I found 5 references to Frank Lloyd Wright and 6 references to a Rubic Cube. I do not know about you, but I was impressed. This is clearly a useful new application of Google's technology in an unexplored application. The lesson is that we can never say that we are finished, that we have explored all uses of our technology and capabilities. So look around you there are an infinite number of ways we can look at things that are to us common place and find new uses for them. Take what you have and make something new and great out of it. All it takes is the willingness to look at it differently.
