Dr. CK Lin | Productivity. Innovation. Entrepreneur Profiles

A friend of mine asked me to come up with a lis to the most innovative companies.

How do you come up with a list like that?

Here is how I approach this issue.

Most innovative = game changer

And my definition of game changer is something that either already has or has the potential of changing the status quo.

Technologies are many but few are innovative. And even fewer are considered game changers.

Here are some examples of game changers: Flickr and Youtube has shifted how people share moments of significance in their lives. Hulu shifted how premium content is shared and monetized. And, Apples’ iPhone and iPad are devices that changed how we interface with the digital world.

So here are my selection criteria for the ‘most innovative companies’:
1. They must provide more opportunities for the users
2. They must provide cheaper threshold to entry that allows for more entrants/more accessibility
3. They must enable more efficient value creation and therefore more monetizable for long term success.

Other than the obvious candidates(e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook) where they have the financial resources and brainpower to start and develop new products, here are some companies that caught my attention.

Education
TED Conference(Ted.com) Though not a for-profit company, its open content model could fundamentally shift how knowledge is transferred around the world.

Energy
TerraPower (http://www.intellectualventures.com/OurInventions/TerraPower.aspx), backed by Bill Gates, is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear fission able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste and produce massive amount of energy.

Biotech
J.C Venter Institute (jcvi.org/) has the technology to engineer living cells from scratch, a new type of living entities. Thus enable the possibility of making therapeutics, artificial tissues, and chemical ingredient by design.

Genesis Biopharma (http://www.genesis-biopharma.com/) has a funding model to finance pioneering aging research for rapid product development. it’s a mainstream move by biotech industry into aging research.

Consumer products
Zappos (www.zappos.com/) pioneered and popularized the use of social media platforms to provide transparent and direct customer service.

Entertainment
LXD (http://thelxd.com/) is merging the art of dancing, film story telling, and social media to provide an awesome and interactive audience experience.

The99(www.the99.org/) is a comic book series with multicultural superheroes, designed to highlight global culture exchange and tailored for a global market.

Business
Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com/) enables scalable p2p financing platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers alike.

Chase’s check deposit via smart phone photo program will enable consumers to do more with their smart phones.

Technology/Workflow
Vokle(vokle.com/ ) is Skype+Ustream. It is a open and monetizable town hall platform to enable interaction of 1 to many in real time.

Codeita (http://www.codeita.com/) has redesigned web development by bringing all the necessary tools together in the most logical place, Your web browser for faster, more reliable workflow.

The following are organizations with the potential to be game changers if they continue to evolve.

Pachube(http://www.pachube.com/) data network of things for macroscopic environmental data for urban planning, large impact assessment, etc.

ushahidi(http://www.ushahidi.com/) open platform to report disasters world wide

Instructables (http://www.instructables.com/) is a open platform to teach people to do specific things from electronics to food recipes

Tenrehte.com enables consumers to control their energy consumption by controlling the device power supply wirelessly and via smart phone apps.

Witricity(http://www.witricity.com/) enables transfers power wirelessly. This will enable unlimited use of electronic devices without the constraint of power storage and wiring infrastructures.

SixthSense of Pranav Mistry(http://www.pranavmistry.com) enables people to merge the digital world with their environment and augment our senses with the richness of information and data available to us.

Favorite TED quotes:

1. “Food has a primal place in our home”–Jamie Oliver
2. “What makes people a little irrational is erection and addiction”–Elizabeth Pisani
3. “epic win–beyond imagination and what was thought impossible”–Jane McGonigal
4. “Being a teacher is the world’s finest calling”–Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin
5. “Create the condition for happiness. How do you fee about how you spend your time everyday”–Chip Conley
6. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”–Arthur Clarke
7. “Don’t put limitation on yourself, other people will do it for you”–James Cameron
8. “Conservations will fail if it doesn’t improve the life of the local community”–John Kasaona
9. “I won’t let a brain tumor stop me from my desire to aid others–Glenna Fraumeni
10. “Human community is dependent on a diversity of talent”–Sir Ken Robinson

Since I am an overachiever, here are 3 more. Ha!

11.

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

12. “Combination of Special skills and facilitation is the winning formula”–Tom Wujec
13. “Heroes are most effective when working In teams”–Phil Zimbardo

Calculating Risk: Nobel Laureate Alan Heeger on Innovation and Getting it Right

“One does not stop learning when you finish your PhD, you’re only beginning.”

2000 was a pretty good year for Professor Alan Heeger. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his efforts in the discovery and development of conductive polymers and his first business venture, UNIAX was acquired by DuPont.

Nearly a decade later, he has yet to lose his nerve to innovate. Despite his remarkable success in both the academic and entrepreneurial sphere, he is still on the frontline of discovery and research, here at UC Santa Barbara.

He talks about the inherent risks innovation and starting your own business, the importance of being bold and the difficulty in getting it right. Read the rest of this entry »

Read it if you want to see the breaking news of 2009.

Just read on the Huffington Post that President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Surprised? Yes.
Proud? Yes.
Too early? Never.
Political? Perhaps.

With his effort to reduce global nuclear arms development, negotiate solution between Palestanians/Israelies, and bring larger attention to climate change, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 2009 to President Obama.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” said Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee.

He certainly has captured my attention and gave me hope for a better future.

Yes, he is still early in his presidency to see what fruits his efforts will bear.

As the former Laureate stated, this may be a way to encourage him to do more for global peace.

With the failed bidding of the Olympics, many of his critics (including SNL) say he is biting more than he can handle and accomplish none what he has promised.

That may be true. But give the guy a break, it’s only months into his presidency.

But, still you made many of us believe that ‘Yes, we can’.

Global peace is possible. One small action at a time.

Read this if you’d like to increase team creativity, productivity with the 21st century motivation

How many of you work with people? How many of you depend on your people to produce results? How many of you would like to create an environment where people are self-motivated, creative, and results oriented?

When people think about motivation, they think of the most obvious model, the carrot and stick model. This is especially true in north America where capitalism rules. True, people are extrinsically motivated. True, people are tuned into wii.fm–’what’s in it for me’–all the time. And true, business have been using it as a motivation mechanism for hundreds of years.

Dan Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind”, gave an eyeopening presentation on the paradox of incentives and results. he asserts that carrot and stick model works in a narrow scope of problems. and it doesn’t work in most others. especially when the problems requires creativity. in fact not only that it doesn’t work, incentives actually make people perform worse. the higher the incentive and worse people perform.

What? That goes against the idea of capitalism. He had my attention.

He further explains that extrinsic motivators–the carrots and sticks–are good for mechanical problems. Problems that have a defined set of rules, narrow focus, and clear roadmap. An example is streamlining a car manufacturing process in an assembly line.

however if the problem is undefined and qualitative–‘big hairy audacious goal’ as Jim Collins would call it–and the solution is on the periphery, the extrinsically based model would crumble. sweeter carrot and sharper stick would just fail. he says, appealing to the intrinsic motivators–autonomy, mastery, and purpose–would accelerate creativity and thinking. an example is Kennedy’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’ challenge.

A la the world is flat and a whole new mind, if you look around, the traditional white collar jobs are being commoditized. the mechanical, tedious type work is being transferred abroad more and more. The high paying jobs today require you to be more creative, more right brain, and more conceptual.

What kind of candle problem does your company have? Are you motivating your people with extrinsically based strategy or intrinsically based strategy?

If you have the kind of problems that require your people to think outside of the box, Dan pink offers 3 winning characteristics:

1. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives,
2. Mastery: the desire to do something better and better that matters
3. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do and in service for something larger than ourselves

Examples he gave were:

• Google’s 20% time and how this method birthed the likes of Gmail, Google News, Orkut.
• Wikipedia and how it beat Microsoft’s Encarta.
• ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) where workers are held to account for results. Results only. How they deliver the results is irrelevant. Meetings are optional. The consequence is that productivity goes up and turnover goes down.

In my circle I also have 3 successful examples:

1. Opportunity Green(www.OpportunityGreen.com): Southern California’s premiere sustainability business conference and community. I was fortunate to be one of the people who started it. And in 3 years Mike Flynn and Karen Solomon has grown it from obscurity to the #1 brand in bringing TOP business people and corporations together for sustainable causes. Get this, almost all the people involved are volunteers.
2. Homeless but Not Toothless(http://www.homelessnottoothless.org/): Dr. Jay Grossman’s nonprofit organization that brings dignity back to homeless people through charitable dental work and he is now broadening the mission to foster care children. With the help of Hollywood celebrities and power brokers, HBNT will help thousands more.
3. Internet Advertising and Marketing: Most of the companies are virtual. These self-selected and self-motivated people and organizations the driving force to innovative business models that inspired traditional business to be more open and transparent. See Chris Anderson’s book “FREE” for more examples.

What will you do now? Will you be lazy and use the traditional carrot and stick extrinsic motivators or adapt to the scientifically proven intrinsic motivators? How are you going to motivate your people for your “candle problem”? How will you motivate your family, friends, coworkers, community organizations?

Watch the video and let me know what you will do