A couple of months back, Fast Company published their list, “The World’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies”. There are many obvious ones, like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Then, there were some of the companies you wouldn’t expect to see or perhaps have even heard of. Here are three I think are cool and worth watching:

SolarCity

Just when you might have thought that solar power would always remain in the margins comes a company that has become the biggest solar service provider in the United States. With 25 operation centers in 14 states, the six-year-old company’s strategy rooted in providing on-going service and support to panels they lease (not sell) to customers. SolarCity monthly-fee based agreement is backed by an on-going service relationship. This includes a PowerGuide™ power consumption monitoring system that gives homeowners an instant snapshot of their energy use. Among its loftier goals is to bring “the cost of solar to parity with grid power through economies of scale by 2016.”

SolarCity illustrates how a company can look closely at what the relationship with a client should be when it comes to energy usage. It’s clear that they value partnering with their customers with a mission to save them money. As their model continues to gain followers you can be sure the competition will soon be hot on their heels.

James Corner Field Operations

With a company name fresh out of a dystopian novel, Corner and his team are delivering transformed landscapes that take blighted urban spaces and create new destinations for the public. The second section of the High Line, an elevated green space along Manhattan’s West Side, is one of the firm’s more high-profile contributions. It’s also an approach to landscape architecture I hope many other city leaders across the globe will be inspired by. The focus of embracing urban sites that are blighted and converting them into public spaces is a key part of creating sustainable cities in the next 50 years.

Chobani

Greek-style yogurt? Yes. This five-year-old company is  $650 million-plus success story that matches a good product with bold moves. Chobani isn’t the only Greek-style yogurt out there but it’s forged a path with standout packaging and flavors the competition haven’t found a way to counter. And enough customers demonstrated fondness for the product that the company created a “Chobani Love Stories” campaign that doubled sales.

A yogurt company may seem like an odd choice to single out for innovation but it’s actually one of the riskiest ventures. It’s one thing to appeal to the energy-saving, sustainable sensibilities of a public. It’s a very different set of concerns when it comes to people’s passion for food. Yet that is exactly what all great innovation touches on — something that people can be passionate about and wish to share with others regardless of any financial incentives. You can’t ask for people to be passionate, but you can try to appeal to something deeper and risk establishing a connection. Good innovators are always doing that.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

— Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

Posted by Joanna Schneier

I often think about the first company that I started; I was 12 and desperate for some spending money and a friend mine and I decided that we would improve on the babysitting model. We decided to create a company where parents could call one phone number and then we would farm out the work to teens in our neighborhood. We set a fixed price and had a special deal – two babysitters for the price of one.  We put up signs all over the neighborhood and told every parent we knew. We soon expanded to pet sitting and within a very short period of time we had more work than we could possible handle.

Obviously it is not my recommendation that we all start the next Babysitters’ Club but I do think that it is important to recognize the factor of looking at your market for needs that exist and addressing those needs. Those needs may be blatant, like a better childcare service, or they may be hidden, like a better way to share pictures through a service like Pinterest. The key is to look at what everybody is looking at but to think about it in a way that nobody else has.

Paul Dirac, the 1933 Nobel Laureate in Physics, once offered that a physicist’s “better dead that living still when once he’s past his thirtieth year”. Such a jaundiced view of the effect of aging on innovation, shared by several of his contemporaries, is not entirely the case. In his May 2005 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Age and Great Invention”, Benjamin Jones counters that the average age at which people deliver remarkable innovations has trended upward by 6 years over the course of the past century.

This rise in the number of older innovators is due in part to the longer period innovators spend in study during one’s 20s relative to a century ago. It’s also true that the lifespan of the general population has been increasing so that there is a greater pool of talent across a spectrum of disciplines. Jones’ paper illustrates that “the greatest achievements of the 20^th Century occur at later and later ages.” One possible contribution to this trend is the increased role for experience in a variety of fields, where the cumulative expression of people who have practiced innovating over 20 years is of great value.

There is a lot of flash associated with term “innovation”, suggesting the latest hot app that captures the attention of the tech press. Older innovators are seasoned pros that have a more infrastructural bent. They tend to build companies, and are often out of the spotlight but provide the services that higher profile innovations require to exist. A few years back, the Kaufmann Foundation published their findings that the rate of entrepreneurship in the United States was highest among the 55-64 age group, with people 55 and older twice as likely to found successful companies than counterparts between 20 and 34.

Even so, the bias toward favoring younger innovators persists across the country. Older entrepreneurs face a corporate culture that will favor fresh-out-of-college employees with more innovative tasks. This is a critical misstep that at the very least ignores the potential for cross mentoring within an organization. What is worse is that there is a general buy-in on the part of older workers that their value is limited and that any type of job-related training to keep skills current is useless given the younger talent pool on the horizon.

I’ll finish with another quote from Dirac, this offered at age 78:

“A good deal of my research in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problem, but simply examining mathematical equations of a kind that physicists use and trying to fit them together in an interesting way, regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply the search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later to have an application. Then one has good luck.”

Such “luck” is the product of experience and is something we can ill-afford to trust to young minds alone. As our country’s population ages, our perception of how inter-generational innovation can benefit society has to shift if we are to remain competitive and build stronger companies into the 21^st century. This is not about ‘ageism’ or any other awful moniker trotted out from time to time. This is just common sense.

One of traps of writing on innovation is that the associated language can hide a deeper problem. Wade into the controversial waters of how to transform public education in the United States to get a sense of this. You can have very specific strategies for addressing the lack of innovation in a business, but when it comes to innovating within the U.S. public school system, variables of race, class, culture, and political expediency collide. As much hand wringing ensues, our children continue falling behind other nations, leaving them vulnerable even as we spend more per capita than any other country. This is a tragedy played out daily in communities from coast to coast.

So what is missing? Is it a lack of will and vision on the part of elected leaders? Is it bad teachers, or parents not reinforcing fundamentals at home? Maybe those are all at play, but let me add this to mix: It borders on pathology for anyone to tout American can-do ingenuity while we’ve steadily exported jobs abroad over the past two generations — unless of course that is what one believes will strengthen the prospects for our children in the future. There is a profound disconnect with what is financially prudent for companies to remain competitive, and what it means to invest and reinvest in the children of this country. We have transitioned into an “every-man-and-woman-for-himself” mentality that has been steadily eroding the spirit of this nation. Within another 20 years, our principal export could be a cautionary tale of not taking the long view and hanging one’s children out to dry.

What is the long view? It is a fundamental part of innovative thinking that cuts across all sectors, based on not moving forward without specific infrastructure landmarks being met. For example, building and reinvigorating flexible, responsive manufacturing centers throughout the country has to be part of the metrics of innovation that inform the missions of businesses based in this country. President Obama recently held out this lure of financial incentives for companies to stay here in his State of the Union speech. Say what you will about his policies, this is not a partisan issue.

What he didn’t articulate are the high stakes: the loss of our country having a robust and growing manufacturing center robs the coming generations of one of the cornerstone metaphors of the American experience. No doubt, we are far behind other countries now, and it will take the better part of a generation and financial sacrifice to reverse a trend that is damaging us to the point we may never recover. But if we as a country are teaching by the current example, then it must be to always weigh cost-effectiveness and expediency over a lasting commitment to our children’s welfare.

Think that’s the way to go? Good luck with that.

One of the odd byproducts of writing about innovation is feeling somewhat removed from the process of…innovating. To remain an innovator means tackling ideas as they emerge and not take them in stride.

This isn’t as easy at it seems. Working online often means that we feel we are just clicks away from what may be the “next big thing”. We can be lured into observing and remain less curious. In fact, the act of waiting for the new has had an impact on how we view ourselves as a society. While we may imagine ourselves as people who are self-directed innovators, we consume more than we produce and measure our success according to the flexibility we have in acquiring what we desire. The latter point may seem like a reasonable metric but it is a narrow view that doesn’t test our limits or those of our colleagues.

This criticism is not original nor does it point the way to a solution. But, it’s our predicament that we wish to foster the next wave of innovators yet don’t know how to build the will and determination that is required. A good example is the decay of the space program in the United States. Once, we captured the imagination of the world, landed a man on the moon and created a new frontier for exploration. Our growing complacency toward the program in the following decades points to our inability to recognize where innovation in one arena can feed into our sense of our selves as a nation. Today, we lament that China may surpass us in space exploration.

The loss of this frontier to a competitor should signal the need for soul searching, particularly in the business sector. First, we have to redefine what it means to be entrepreneurial. We have to shift from thinking of it as a solitary effort of a visionary and see it as an organizational requirement. If innovation is to be a business goal, and one that could reenergize this country, we have to focus more on risk-taking that is strategically distributed within groups in an organization.

Second, there is an enormous amount of trust required to allow teams to innovate. The possibility of failure is always present. But that is the nature of experimentation, which is even more important in difficult economic times. That is why organizations need to be structured to protect innovation centers as much as possible from external pressures.

Third, companies have to understand that innovation is not a problem to be solved but rather a condition that emerges out of a specific culture in the workplace. Gathering highly competent creative people in a room and waiting to see what happens cannot will innovation into being. True leadership is revealed when the talented members of team can both have a sense of freedom in their work to match the pressures of delivering the goods.

These are launching points for discussion. Organizations that focus too much on finding the right people and not enough on building the infrastructure within an organization to support innovation need to take note: Stop waiting for the “next big thing”. Be it.

Another Top Ten List? But Of Course!

After much searching and scouring, I isolated some cool innovations for 2011, most in the field of biological science. So let’s get started.

Top of my list goes to the Antenatal Screening Kit. Challenged by the Nepalese non-profit Jhpiego to develop a low-cost testing tool, student Sean Monagle and seven engineering undergraduate classmates at Johns Hopkins worked over three years to deliver a $1 marker pen that can screen mothers for preeclampsia and related complications. At cost of $20,000, the young team developed simple testing tool where a line drawn with reagent-infused ink reacts with a drop of urine from a patient. Each test will cost pennies to perform. For the number of lives that will be saved with this test, it’s easily my first choice.

The Lytro light field camera is revolutionary development that allows users to focus after the photograph has been taken. In between the camera’s primary lens and a sensor that splits light into thousands of pathways is an array of adjustable microlenses. This allows the user to open up the image on their computer and choose the location and quality of focus. This has to be seen to be believed, so hop over to lytro.com/camera and check it out!

Scientists at JCVI (J. Craig Venter Institute) in Maryland and California have developed the first living cells completely under control by synthetic DNA. The group copied a bacterial genome, sequenced its genetic code, then applied a “synthesis machine” to construct a copy. The stated goal of the institute is to design bacterial cells that will create medicines and help to eliminate environmental pollution. This is likely the reason that JCVI has a $600 million contract with Exxon Mobil to design algae to capture carbon dioxide and make fuel. While no one knows how these new synthetic organisms will behave in the environment, it is nevertheless an amazing step in our understanding of cell function.

Another inexpensive medical development comes from Diagnostics For All, which offers a screening test that is a lab on a chip — a postage-stamp size paper with diagnostic assay agents coating it. Drop a small blood sample on it and 15 minutes later you have a measure of your liver’s health. Again, this is another option for the developing world, where instead of being shut out by expensive tests, five cents provides the screening needed for physicians to respond in the field.

The Basis Band is a health and heart rate monitor that you wear on your wrist. It contains a multisensor band that collects data like heart rate, calories burned, physical activity and sleep patterns and links to an online dashboard for monitoring. I’ve included it because it is the next step in personal health-tracking devices that will be a growth industry in the coming years.

From Sony comes the HMZ-T1 Personal 3-D Viewer, an $800 set of goggles that brings 3-D viewing to your living room. Although pricey, the goggles are a sign that the home environment may trump movie theaters as the best place for 3-D.

Built to imitate a dog’s nose, the Bed Bug Detective will certainly be hit in some infested households. This handheld device designed by Chris Goggin, who helped bring to the world George Forman’s Spin Fryer and sundry military missile electronics, is an inexpensive alternative to a pricey visit from an exterminator.

The Printbrush A4 from PrintDreams is a cool device that prints on any flat surface, and it capable of printing full-size formats (A4 or letter size). The demo here http://printdreams.com/video_rmpt_full.php has to been to be believed.

The Medical Mirror, developed by Ming-Zher Poh at MIT hasn’t come to market yet but it’s sure to be hotly anticipated. Two years ago, Poh was trying to transform his computer’s webcam into a heart-rate monitor. He wanted doctors to have a tool to work with burn victims or infants to track their cardiovascular health. The way it works is fascinating. As your heart beats, a pulse of blood is sent through vessels. The more blood travels, the less of the light hitting your skin is reflected back. This reflected light is monitored by sensors in a mirror then translated into heart-rate data. Poh anticipates being able to use the mirror measure other vitals like respiratory rate and blood-oxygen saturation.

This past year, researchers at Vanderbilt University developed a bionic prosthesis that approximates the natural human gait. This is a major advance, as we will likely begin to see wearable bionic devices that alter and enhance human physical performance in the next decade. Look for a Bionic Olympics in 2024.

The term “memex”, a joining of the words “memory” and “index”, was coin by the computer scientist Vannevar Bush in the article As We May Think written for the Atlantic Monthly toward the end of World War II. Bush imagined memex as a device capable of compressing all data into a quickly retrievable system, a “supplement to one’s memory”. The historical context of such innovative thought, born at the end of a devastating event, is worth noting. As a scientist witnessing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he believed having creating a large, accessible knowledge base — a shared memory bank — would help avert disasters. Not only did the article anticipate what we know today as hypertext, it predicted personal computers, speech recognition, online encyclopedias, and the Internet. Some of his ideas involving sophisticated indexing systems have yet to have been realized.

When we see the innovations in our world, we often have no idea of the deeper roots that lead to them. We appreciate their impact on our lives but are disconnected from the factors that led to their creation. Take, for example, another inventor, Douglas Engelbert. As a 20-year-old radar operator in the Philippines during WWII, he read Bush’s article and it profoundly influenced the course of his life. He would become a pioneer of human-computer interaction, developing the first computer mouse, and later developing the concept of ‘bootstrapping” in 1968. Bootstrapping is a strategy to accelerate innovation by boosting the “Collective IQ” of an organization and its customers. Today, Engelbert continues to champion this approach, providing “A How To Guide for Bootstrapping Innovation™” on his website.

But sixty years ago, Engelbert was a 26-year-old trying to imagine a path for his life. Over the course of a year, informed in part by Bush’s piece, he formulated some basic principles:

• It was important that his career made the world a better place
• Doing so would requiring optimal organization
• That collective intellect properly harnessed was crucial
• That if this was done, then solving intractable world problems would be serviced
• That computers would be the best means to tackle these problems

These ideas came to amazing fruition in the legendary presentation popularly referred to as the “mother of all demos”. Held in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, the live demonstration introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. The complete 100-minute presentation is archived here is you wish to see it:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Albert Einstein once offered that concern for humankind and its fate should be at the center of all technical endeavors. That in the midst of all diagrams and equations, this idea should never be forgotten. But it is also easy to forget that the roots of innovation can come from a deep purpose that resonates far into the future.

In the past ten days, the press has reflected on the adulation that Steve Jobs received upon his passing. In a relatively short time, their tone shifted from Jobs the pioneer on par with Bell and Edison to now include Jobs the private man who was ruthless even cruel to business associates and employees. Frankly, this shift is predictable but it leaves me sad for how the press will raise up then just as quickly tear down the people they anoint.

Now, the effort to bring Jobs back to earth could be seen as a way of eschewing hero worship, or better, as way to avoid obscuring the complexity of the man. Because if we do raise him up too high, we risk learning nothing about how this innovative force sustained his vision and acted decisively. And we may grant him and other inspiring people powers that we don’t have and may never attain.

Even so, the tendency in the press is one of reducing a message to bite-size portions so it can efficiently feed its audience. In Jobs’ case, the story is of an adopted college dropout who transformed the computer into a valuable addition to one’s home and work life. Jobs made making an aesthetic choice for early home computers just as central as the processing power of the computer itself. He brilliantly transformed the cold, sterile nature of computers and tailored it for a positive user experience. Granted, he and Wozniak were indebted to Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay for developing the early GUI that would come to define the Macintosh. But it was Job’s ability to immediately see the potential for capturing and shaping popular imagination that created the revolution that continues to this day.

The untold story is that Jobs was a quick study who made decisions aimed at working on a grand scale. But, more important, he was a person who knew what he didn’t know. This is the fundamental entrepreneurial trait he possessed from the beginning, when there was no money, no future — only a dream. Jobs evolved into a collaborative visionary, working past early technical limitations of the projects he would spearhead (such as the Apple III), and rising above the unceremonious booting from the company he founded.

While Jobs specialized in finding the best people to work with, he also demanded more than some of them could handle. Relationships were irreparably damaged along the way. His is not a road most people would care to tread if offered to them. It is a solitary and private venture complicated by working both harmoniously and in an adversarial manner. This is something the press largely ignored in the story of Jobs the innovator and pioneer — that to create “insanely great” products, you have to be willing to fail professionally and personally. One’s path to success can both inspire us and give us pause when the stakes are so high. Perhaps that’s why people like Jobs are so rare?

Back when Apple’s famous “1984” resonated through the advertising world, Jobs established himself as an emancipator, putting better tools into the hands of millions of people to enrich their lives. At the time, he was responding the behemoth that was Big Brother, IBM, and using Orwell’s bleak narrative to offer Apple’s Macintosh as a smashing force against conformity. Now, Apple is faced with going forward without its singular leader. Will it allow itself to become just a behemoth as well, or can it find a way to risk everything as Job’s once did and inspire the next generation of innovators to come?

Charles Leadbeater’s theories on innovation have compelled some of the world’s largest organizations to rethink their strategies. A financial journalist turned innovation consultant (for clients ranging from the British government to Microsoft), Leadbeater noticed the rise of “pro-ams” — passionate amateurs who act like professionals, making breakthrough discoveries in many fields, from software to astronomy to kite-surfing. His 2004 essay “The Pro-Am Revolution” — which The New York Times called one of the year’s biggest global ideas — highlighted the rise of this new breed of amateur.

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn’t just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t.

Posted by Joanna Schneier

If in the eyes of many economists, innovation is central to prosperity, then what are the qualities innate to the people who lead the way? And are these traits principally related to intelligence or is there something more going on?

For a better part of the last decade, researchers in the fields of organizational psychology and higher education have come together to develop metrics for behaviors present in successful individuals. In 2004, the team of Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman contributed to that effort, publishing their findings in a tome titled, “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbookand Classification”. An exhaustive distillation of traits that contribute to a positive psychological outlook, the book strives to form a definition of ‘character’ applicable across cultures and social strata. Universally appreciated strengths such as integrity, modesty, persistence, bravery, and self-control are among 24 traits the authors select and examine in detail.

While the book received much praise, the more daunting challenge remained to surmount two hurdles: first, to develop successful strategies to build character in a variety of settings; and second, to convince people that developing character was just an important as intellect in attaining success in the world. Angela Duckworth, a graduate researcher in working at the University of Pennsylvania in Seligman’s department, took on the latter task. In that process, she ended up isolating and developing a test for a quality she viewed as essential for long-term success: grit. In 2007, Duckworth and Peterson, along with co-authors Michael D. Matthew and Dennis R. Kelly of The United States Military Academy, West Point, published the paper “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals”. It posits that grit is essential for high-achievement across a spectrum of professional endeavors, a required trait for anyone who risks, fails, and nevertheless perseveres. More telling, highly gifted individuals who performed well in school but did not demonstrate grit tended to not rise to prominence in their chosen fields.

This is not surprising, nor is it necessarily new information. From Aesop (The Tortoise and the Hare, anyone?) to an early study conducted in the 19th century that cited “zeal combined with the capacity for hard labour” as a predictor for success and not one’s innate talents, people have lauded perseverance as key. Yet in this case, Duckworth and company were seeking to quantify and predict the ability of specific individuals to commit to “extremely long-term objectives and…not swerve from them—even in the absence of positive feedback.” To that end, they developed the Grit Scale, a questionnaire designed to help measure the importance of grit and its relationship to IQ. More important, they wanted to “capture the attitudes and behaviors characteristic of…high-achieving individuals”. Across the six studies they document, the factor of grit was consistently suggested as equally important to talent when it came to high accomplishment.
In their summary, the authors suggest that children “who demonstrate exceptional commitment to a particular goal should be supported with as many resources as those identified at ‘gifted and talented.’” In addition, children should be encouraged to work both with intensity and with stamina, and to be helped to recognize that “excellence in any discipline requires years and years of time on task.”

The stamina required for achievement in the face of adversity, whether from within or without, is a quality that all innovators demonstrate. In the face of economic challenges, innovators today are willing to pursue an aim without falling prey to the distraction of shifting fortunes. This does not sanction imprudent behavior, but it does require fostering skill sets that respond productively to failure — especially when one has invested an incredible amount of effort in the pursuit.

To discover and help teach to our future innovators these particular skills remains the work of each of us. In this sense, building character is not a solitary but a collaborative activity between all members of society. This way, an environment is created within which a fundamental grittiness can take root and prosperity can develop.