Five common characteristics of the best innovation leaders

From an article in one of last month’s IET journals (which I have only just got round to reading)…

According to BCG:

1. The ability to tolerate ambiguity
2. The ability to assess and be comfortable with risk
3. The ability to balance passion and objectivity
4. The ability to change
5. The ability to command respect, even from sceptics

I feel a team meeting discussion on these coming on!

Technorati Tags: innovation

Mapping new landscapes

I've been looking at how we can make better use of graphical representations of data. The power of "seeing" patterns is well known, but it is only recently we've had the computer power to make practical tools a reality. I have an idea to adapt LivePlasma to a real problem our engineers have relating documents to each other in what is fast becoming an unmanageable pile of content. More on that later.


In the meantime - visit LivePlasma and enter the name of a band you like. (I chose Zero-7, who are occupying lots of slots in my CD changer in the car!!). It pulls up information from Amazon about what other artists are related, using colour to convey style of music etc. Clicking on the relationships it displays makes exploring these very engaging and compelling. (I hadn't thought of the connection with Groove Armada or Nuspirit Helsinki - both of which I have in my CD collection, but this tool makes that more obvious!)

3D Phototourism

At the TTI vanguard conference in Barcelona - Steven Stetz from the University of Washington gave us a glimpse of the photo-viewers of the future.  In short he takes multiple 2D images (say from flickr) of a particular locatiuon and "stiches" them together to create a 3D model.

Very impressive stuff. The power of the navigation between the images is stunning.

Well worth seeing the video demos on his web site.  The part of the video on the Great Wall got my particular attention, gievn that my own charity trek there is onky a few weeks away now.

Quite apart from creating rich "phototourism" experiences I can see many business industrial applications for this, especially around large manufacuring plants, civil engineering etc.

Microsofts's Photosynth work is based on Steven's research. Also well worth a visit.

A new way of looking at Alice

We've been doing a lot of work on visualisation of data - mostly geographic - recently. Martin Brown, one of my project managers, drew this to my attention. It's part "intellectual toy" and part tool that graphically represents the raltionship between words in a text. (How it is done is explianed on TextArc's web site here.) Quite apart from looking cool it has got me thinking again about how we can make better use of the enormous graphical power available in today's PCs to make sense of the vast quantities of data we increasingly surround ourselves with. Our eyes are very good at detecting patterns that even the most sophisticted algorithms miss! I'm thinking about email and a smartner way to wade through that than Google Desktop!

Try it yourself here (java app)

If 2 minds are better than one then how about 2 thousand?

if 2 minds are better than one...
Originally uploaded by lynetter

I've been a great admirer of Lynette Webb's insights into new media and the impact of the Internet.

I also *really* like the way she uses CC images from Flickr to illustrate her points (and not just because she's used my own images!!)

This particular example really got me thinking - especially about why it is so hard to get teams at work to buy into this!

What a difference a month makes

A crashed laptop, corrupt backup and huge workload have all contributed to a lack of postings recently. I now have Livewriter reinstalled and have a backlog to catch up with!

Looking at my last post - I am struck by how fast the whole geoWeb space is moving. The big annual geoWeb bash (Where2.0) of course - so it was a good time to release new products.

Since this relates to a project I'm working on I'll be posting quite a bit on this topic.

In the meantime two things:

1) If you add "view:map" after a search term in Google...it will map the results. Try "Fi view:map" for a map of where Formula One races are held.

2) A great description of why the geoWeb subject is important and Google's strategic commitment to it, by Google's MichaelJones:

Google "my maps"

Google raised the bar again on easy "location intelligence" apps on the web when it introduced "my maps". So much of the information we interact with has a geographic or location component and navigating and exploring this graphically is much more compelling than traditional approaches. I liked these examples:

Where programing languages were invented (with colour coded flags for each "major epoch" of evolution!)

Famous Movies shot in the UK (the locations of everything from Tomb Raider to the Hunt for red October)

Magellan's voyage round the world (interesting use of line thickness to highlight additional information)

Our Earth as art (Cool sat pics!)

We'll be exploring the use of this to support our TrekChina initiative later in the year.