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The video above is the story of William Kamwamba, a young man born in Malawi, one of Africa's poorest nations, who pieced together a windmill from scrap parts at the age of 14 (from Wired Magazine's Teen's DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope).  Despite being described as a local kid gone crazy, William used a picture of a windmill on a textbook cover, to successfully complete a windmill and power his house with electricity so he could read after dark.  This soon led to using the device to pump water for irrigation, and started William down a path that would not only change his life, but help lift those around him up to better living conditions.  

Stories like this are inspirational to say the least, but also allude to what we may find taking place in the United States right now.  Mr. Kamwamba's story is evidence of what can take place when resources which could be deemed extremely minimal, at best, are innovatively pieced together in ways previously unseen, to create products and technologies that solve the most basic of problems and usher in waves of new possibilities.  The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article "Tinkering Makes a Comeback Amid Crisis", which notes the recent surge in hands-on building, prototyping, crafting, and general making of things taking place in the United States over the last few years:

Engineering schools across the country report students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work that hasn't been seen in years. Workshops for people to share tools and ideas -- called "hackerspaces" -- are popping up all over the country; there are 124 hackerspaces in the U.S., according to a member-run group that keeps track, up from a handful at the start of last year. SparkFun Electronics Inc., which sells electronic parts to tinkerers, expects sales of about $10 million this year, up from $6 million in 2008. "Make" magazine, with articles on building items such as solar hot tubs and autopilots for robots, has grown from 22,000 subscribers in 2005 to more than 100,000 now. Its annual "Maker Faire" in San Mateo, Calif., attracted 75,000 people this year.

"We've had this merging of DIY [do it yourself] with technology," says Bre Pettis, co-founder of NYC Resistor, one of the first hackerspaces, in Brooklyn. "I'm calling it Industrial Revolution 2." 

The resources available for making things are becoming cheaper and increasingly more available to the common tinkerer (product developer?  Inventor?).  The WSJ article notes that university undergraduates are now gaining access to advanced machinery previously only available to senior researchers, and new businesses like Techshop:

TechShop in Menlo Park, Calif., for example, is a for-profit workshop and operates like a gym, except that the members who pay $100 a month are milling iron rather than pumping it.

Founder Jim Newton tallied a list of all the tools he could imagine needing. Now TechShop, opened in 2006, has $500,000 worth of lathes, laser cutters and other equipment.

There are 600 members at TechShop's original location, up from 300 a year ago, and it has opened workshops in Durham, N.C., and Beaverton, Ore. Projects under way include a liquid-cooling device for computer servers and an electric two-wheeled car.

Nobel Prize winning economists have demonstrated that approximately half of economic growth in the U.S. could be attributed to innovation--innovation born out of the kind of "tinkering" and product development that takes place at places like Techshop, or in the rural windmill fields of Malawi.  

The junk lying around you may actually be components for a future product or technology that will have a substantial impact.  All it takes is the imagination and drive of a guy like William.  I would wager that someone in the U.S. is tinkering right now with one of the next major innovations of the 21st century. That might be a dramatic, whimsical thought, but so is reading after dark because your hand-built windmill made of scrap is supplying you power.

The FlipCam, by Pure Digital Technologies.  1 million units sold in the first year.  17% of the camcorder market in approximately 3 years.  Acquired by Cisco for $590mm.  Started by entrepreneurs Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein after a failed start-up attempt in the digital camera market.  A consumer product start-up's dream, no?  For such a simple product, what made FlipCam such a wild success?

Wired Magazine has written a fascinating article, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine, on the concept of the "good enough" revolution.  The idea that industries as diverse as camcorders, law, music, the military, and healthcare to name a few, are experiencing a wave of change in the concept of user value.  It might be considered a return to a greater focus on user value, in the ongoing battle between features/quality for the sake of features/quality vs. features/quality for the sake of...the people who actually use the product.  Companies and products which have long built their competitive leads on continually outrunning the competition with the latest high-quality features and technological advances, are continually having their markets disrupted by low-cost, widely accessible, flexible, "good enough" products. 

The article is a great read for many reasons.  Start-ups developing user-centric, disruptive consumer products should be inspired by the success of products like FlipCam.  Being close to the customer and understanding holes in the market are areas start-ups can often outrun large companies.  Large company engineers developing cutting-edge, technologically based features for new products spend more time in the lab and at their desk than interacting with customers.  Not that the cutting edge technologies aren't important, they just generally aren't important to the mass market.  In the words of Wired magazine author, Robert Capps:

Brisk sales combined with a lack of speedy returns destroyed the company's thin margins, and the camera failed. But the experience taught Kaplan and Braunstein a lesson: Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway.

Kaplan and Braunstein also learned something important about camera retailing in general. The market had long been split into two main segments: point-and-shoots (including disposables) and single-lens reflex cameras, which use interchangeable lenses and other high-end accessories. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of cameras sold then—as now—were the handy point-and-shoots; SLRs tended to attract only serious hobbyists and professionals.

Oddly, though, there was no point-and-shoot analogue in video cameras—and that's where the pair saw their next opportunity. Home videocams were almost without exception expensive, complicated devices loaded with features like image stabilization, night-vision mode, and onboard color correction. And even with tools like Apple's iMovie, it was a hassle to get footage off the cameras and onto a computer for editing and sharing. In terms of complexity and price, the camcorder market resembled the SLR market, but with no low-end alternative. Kaplan and Braunstein suspected that there might be a place for a much cheaper, simpler video camera. So they decided to make one.

There are ample development opportunities for consumer product start-ups like Pure Digital.  In categories where companies must justify massive R&D budgets that result in over-invented, featured-to-death, costly products that the average person doesn't find value in, there are opportunities for the consumer product start-up to tune into user needs and develop low-cost alternatives that offer users 80% of the value, with 20% of the features and cost. 

Developing and sourcing products like this is also easier, as a development team can often find existing components in the market, and working with a manufacturer in a country like China or India does not involve pushing them to source and manufacture technologies that are far beyond them.  The magic lies in learning from users the combination of features and costs that are good enough to meet their needs.  And that magic only requires eyes and ears.

Picked up a great blog post on A VC, Fred Wilson (highly regarded VC and principal of Union Square Ventures) about Steven Johnson's Time Magazine cover story on How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.  Fred's exuberance for the article stems from the article's final few paragraphs.  In his words:

The tools we are creating are allowing a much greater population to participate in the innovation process.  Opensource.  Crowdsource.  All new terms that describe an interconnectedness and an intellectual leverage unprecedented in history.  This should make for much more rapid, powerful, and unpredictable sources of new growth.  Google came alive about 10 years ago, captured a space, and quickly rose to become a goliath.  But just as quickly as Google rose to predominance, another rival could come and beat them at their own game, invent a new model, change the rules of the game, or the playing field altogether. 

I very much agree with the point that those decrying the U.S.' falling stature as the center of world innovation, are pointing towards metrics that described previous generations' sources of and success in innovation.  PhD's and patents are no doubt important, but perhaps new metrics describing the interconnectedness of a society, or the mass, quality, and rate of information transferred between members of a society at any given point, will better describe innovation power.  Of course, because this new curve has only just begun, we're far from being able to fully understand it and thus, measure appropriately. 

Before the company Terracycle, the only thing that backpacks, laptop bags, and kites, had in common with Caprisun pouches, Oreo wrappers, and chips bags, is the kids that took them to school everyday.  Not anymore.  Terracycle is flipping this on its head, by creating products like backpacks, laptop bags, and kites out of the trash that we toss out everyday. 

Founded by Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer in 2001, Terracycle started by offering composted plant food, which eventually hit shelves in Home Depot in 2004.  Since then, the company is gaining steam and, according to Ecopreneurist (h/t for the story), is now exploring opportunties with Walmart and Office Max. 

The above video was taken from National Geographic's show, Garbage Moguls, on Terracycle.  Making trash, otherwise headed for the landfill, into a viable material for resuse in a new product, is perhaps closer to a Cradle to Cradle process than anything else I've seen in consumer products.  Through Terracycle's process, the product could be considered to be up-cycled, rather than downcycled (the actual process that occurs in most "recycling", in which a product is broken up into its material components and some or all of those components are reused, or downcycled, into a product that requires a lower quality grade of material). 

Although in embryonic stages at this point, could this be the next disruptor in the materials market?  It will be interesting to watch as Terracycle moves to transform the prototypes developed by their teams into mass-manufacturable products.  It's certainly a challenge that can be tackled by the creative minds driving innovations like this forward in the first place.  I'm ready to buy my Caprisun laptop bag and to start scouting out landfills for potential sourcing and manufacturing applications.

Ok.  That might be a little far-fetched.  But this video depicting the capabilities of robotic technology made me stare in wonder (h/t Marc Andreeson).  The technologies coming down the pipeline in industries such as nanotech, biotech, cleantech, robotics, and so on, will eventually filter into the products we use on a daily basis.  The world of our grandchildren will surely be a greater departure from our reality than our's was for our grandparents.

Innovate or die!  I still remember seeing this sprawled across the cover of an issue of Businessweek magazine in a bookstore in 2003.  I generally don't remember magazine cover titles 3 months prior.  But this one is pretty scary, right?  After reading this title, I went right home and stared at a blank wall for an hour and muttered to myself about new products I could develop.  Thankfully, I've staved off the Innovation Reaper that Businessweek warns of, so far...   

Many folks have different ideas about how innovation takes place.  Generally, it's perceived to be an "aha" moment or epiphany-like moment.  As if, one day three years ago, Steve Jobs was digging through his closet for his old Hari Krisna  shrouds, when a pile of old records, some photos of he and Wozniak playing freeze tag, and an old rotary phone fell off the shelves into one pile on his foot and he screamed in pain "Aye! ...phone."   True story.

Guy Kawasaki recently interviewed Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation.  Berkun's innovation resume includes working on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft back in the 90's, as well as writing the best-selling book, The Art of Project Management.  What I like about Berkun's points regarding innovation, is the theme that innovation, like many other things, is generally the result of a string of small improvements and consistent effort.  In addition, innovation is not just a challenge of conceiving of things never thought of before, but it's just as much a challenge of convincing others of the worth of your ideas or products. Edison knew both of these things.  Berkun explains:   

1. Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?

   Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.

2. Question: Is progress towards innovation made in a straight line? For example, transistor to chip to personal computer to web to MySpace.

   Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.

   If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.

3. Question: Are innovators born or made?

   Answer: Both. Take Mozart. Yes, he had an amazing capacity for musical composition, but he also was born in a country at the center of the music world, had a father who was a music teacher, and was forced to practice for hours every day before he started the equivalent of kindergarten. I researched the history of many geniuses and creators and always find a wide range of factors, some under their control and some not, that made their achievements possible.

4. Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?

   Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.

5. Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?

   Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.

6. Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?

   Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.

7. Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?

   Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.

   The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.

8. Question: If you were a venture capitalist, what would your investment thesis be?

   Answer: Two parts: neither is original, but they borne out by history. One is portfolio. Invest knowing most ventures, even good ones, fail, and distribute risk on some spectrum (e.g. 1/3 very high risk, 1/3 high risk, 1/3 moderate risk). Sometimes seemingly small, low risk/reward innovations have big impacts and it’s a mistake to only make big bets.

   The other idea is people: I’d invest in people more than ideas or business plans—though those are important of course. A great entrepreneur who won’t give up and will keep growing and learning is gold. It’s a tiny percentage of entrepreneurs who have any real success the first few times out—3M, Ford, Flickr were all second or third efforts. I’d also give millions of dollars to authors of recent books on innovation with the word Myth in the title. The future is really in their hands.

9. Question: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?

   Answer: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.

10. Question: What’s more important: problem definition or problem solving?

    Answer: Problem definition is definitely under-rated, but they’re both important. New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it’s easier to solve. Einstein and Edison were notorious problem definers: they defined the problem differently than everyone else and that’s what led to their success.

11. Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?

    Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that they guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.

12. Question: Is innovation more likely to come from young people or old people? Or is age simply not a factor?

    Answer: Innovation is difficult, risky work, and the older you are, the greater the odds you’ll realize this is the case. That explanation works best. Beethoven didn’t write his nineth symphony until late in his life, so we know many creatives stay creative no matter how old they are. But their willingness to endure all the stresses and challenges of bringing an idea to the world diminishes. They understand the costs better from the life experience. The young don’t know what there is to fear, have stronger urges to prove themselves, and have fewer commitments—for example, children and mortgages. These factors that make it easier to try crazy things.

Since making a verbal commitment to myself that I would fill this blog with multimedia (my success ratio on verbal self-commitments like this is about 58%), I am blown away about how easy it has been to have my last three posts involve just that--multimedia.  More great fodder for an interesting topic, found in video format...

The video entitled "Clothes Hangers" demonstrates, what I think to be, an amazing, yet wonderfully simple innovation on an ubiquitous, household concept: the closet and hanger.  I would love to have this in my home.  But, it demonstrates the power of someone taking a common item, asking "what do I not like about this and how could it be better?".  I can't speak to whether that was actually the concept development process that designer, Daniel To, went through.  But, in my experience, this is often a simplified form of the thought process that people go through when developing simple, but highly effective innovations to existing concepts and products.  If you're looking for product ideas, perhaps you can walk around your home or office and ask that question.  If you come up with something like this, I'll buy it. 

If I explained to you some of the product and invention ideas I've run across in the last year, I'm guessing your reactions to the overwhelming majority of them would be "who would want that?" or "good luck making that."  I have had to train myself to refrain from the impulse judgments that run through my mind when people begin explaining their ideas, because the reality is that it's extremely difficult to predict what is going to do well and why.  We never turn away a project just because we personally don't think it will find a market. 

To emphasize the point, I ran across a list put together by Inventors Digest which lists 264 products created by university or independent inventors.  I've listed a few I found interesting.  Im sure the creators of the following products met considerable resistance when developing these items.

• Airbag (Allen Breed)
  • Can you imagine trying to explain this product?  "So let me get this straight, when your car crashes, a bag blows up in your face...?"

• Apple computer (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak)
  • It's well known that IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation (the 2nd largest computer manufacturer in the 1980s) missed the boat on this one. In 1977, Ken Olsen, Founder and CEO of the Digital Equipment Corporation, said "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home". 

• Dishwasher (Josephine Garis Cochraine)
  • Thanks Josephine.

• Hula Hoop (Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, founders of the Wham-O Company)
  • Who knew that gyrating at the waist, alone with your clothes on, could be that much fun?

• Jell-O® (Peter Cooper)
  • If I wasn't told what this was and walked in a room and saw this on the table, eating it would be the last thing on my mind.  Now, I think of Bill Cosby.

• Parking meter (Carlton Magee)
  • This might be one product that if Carlton Magee came to me and asked me to work on, I might have to say "no".

• Safety pin (Walter Hunt)
  • Such a simple and small idea, and ubiquitous in our society.

• Snowboard (Tim Sims)
  • When these guys developed this product, not many people thought an alternative to skiing was necessary or that this one in particular would be it, if there should be an alternative (some still believe this).  In 2004, the National Sporting Goods Association reported that their are 6.6 million snowboarders.  I am one of them.

• Water Skis (Ralph Samuelson)
  • I couldn't find whether the water version or the snow version was invented first.  Either way, one was a derivative application of skis to a new medium.  Placing ideas or products into new contexts can open up a wealth of opportunities.

• World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee)
  • I didn't know a single person was credited with this.  Along with computers, I believe the societal impact will someday rank up there with the wheel and writing. 

Believe in your idea or product as long as you feel is necessary.

Google's ever-expanding wings brings us their patent search engine, making an initial patent search a few clicks away.  For those who are the kind to sprout forth new ideas with every new activity, challenge, or chore, and also have internet access via a cell phone, you can now run a few quick, initial patent searches to see if anything like your idea is already patented.