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Bob Schwartz of GE Health shared with us how they changed the blood donation experience. The first thing they did was watch over 10,000 blood donations. They found tremendous advantages through changes in ergonomics. They made it easier to set up a blood donation site, and then they turned that knowledge into a better mobile blood drive experience. It was really inspiring. He talked about a few other inspiring changes in medicine. The one that captured everyone’s heart was a project intended to make MRIs more approachable for children. They did it by making an MRI experience part of play and part of a story. They did it to reduce sedation. If it’s part of a game, kids are more likely to stay still on their own. It worked. They were able to reduce sedation by 90% in the trials they did with kids. Absolutely incredible story.
Next up was a real treat. Bill Taylor, Alan Webber and Saul Kaplan were a regular trio talking about starting, building and finally selling Fast Company. They recalled seeing the changes that were taking place in the market on the trip to Japan: globalization, the beginning of the digital revolution, diversity, and a generational shift. The goal of Fast Company was always a normative/advocacy magazine. They wanted to express a bunch of ideas and get people to join in the conversation (back in the day, a print magazine was the best platform) for new ideas, a new curriculum, and a new set of values when it comes to building companies. They knew that all money is not created equal, and they didn’t want stupid money, dirty money, or impatient money. They wanted thought leader money, executive leader money, academic leader money, they wanted the buy-in from the community they wanted as an audience (the power of networks). They also saw the shift in marketing from monologue to dialog (an old idea now, but new then).
Jonah Lehrer had one of the best stories of the day. First, he won my heart by talking about Montana, Gates of the Mountains more specifically, 30 minutes from home. He told the story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch Fire. – moments of insight – don’t know where the idea came from (connotes deep subconscious research), and the second hallmark is a confidence of the solution. Had CRAP problems (example: pine, crab, and sauce), using metaphors and processing jokes in this particular brain section with remote connections. You can predict an insight 8 seconds in advance of the insight via EEG. Alpha waves are the predictor (long walk, warm shower, otherwise relaxed) most likely to have moments of insight. Brain hears the activity in the quieter corners of the brain rather than processing the external stimuli. The exact opposite way to solve an insight problem is to keep focusing, chain yourself to his desk, working harder.
Patricia Seybold told us the success stories from an innovative program in rural Uganda that focuses on education for women. The program goes far beyond providing just an education, it calls for its students to be the drivers of change in their own families and in their own communities. For example, each girl has a project at their home, which ends up being part of their grade. The results are pretty amazing. The amount of education for these girls is directly correlated to poverty reduction in their families. If they get through a university education, the poverty rate is reduced to zero. I think Patricia is on to two things that Africa needs in order to develop: it has to come from women, and Africans have to do it themselves. Inspiring to see these young women making their own lives and the lives of their family members better.
Jocelyn Wyatt from IDEO spoke next about human centric design. She talked about the necessity not just the technology, but innovation in how to encourage behavior change as well. (Behavior change being literally the hardest thing I know.) She talked about the three pillars of human-centric design: empathy, sustainability, and lead-user solutions (i.e. the innovations that the people who have the problem every day use to meet their needs). She saw the difference between development based initiatives based on interactions with people on the ground rather than handing down solutions from afar. She was fairly jaded by way some NGOs were approached solutions, but luckily found some innovators who approached development with a more humanistic approach. Now she is working on the Ripple Effect project with IDEO which incorporates all three pillars of human centric design and is effective in getting clean drinking water to more people in Kenya and India. Sounds like the program is successful because clean water producers have found innovative education initiatives and other locally-generated awareness tactics to increase the uptake of clean water.
Alan Webber spoke to the degradation of our daily existence, not the words he chose, but my understanding of our hard-to-define state of being in which there is a national disease fueled by celebrity, framed by some very strange values, where discussion of serious issues is thin. (As a reference, this societal decrepitude is why I don’t have a TV.) He recommended keeping two lists: one of things that get you up in the morning and another for what keeps you up at night. (Happiness experts also suggest you should keep one for things for which you are grateful.) He made another good point: Change happens when the costs of the status quo is greater than the price of failure. It’s a rather pessimistic view of preventative implementation of innovation, but probably largely true. He explain the slowness of change in part by saying that the costs of the status quo are not often fully weighted against the costs of change. Then he said something I found really interesting. If you look at where problems develop, it’s often between the cracks in categories, whether it’s in research, business, or government. The problem grows bigger and bigger until it requires a redefinition of the category itself or a new category all together. (My example: homeland security.) Overall, a really intriguing set of ideas.
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist with the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic and Lab in New York City. She had very interesting ideas about how designed can be used to innovate our spaces and our environments. As the leader of the Environmental Health Clinic, Natalie takes on what she calls “impatients.” By that she means “free agents” within the community that fulfill community prescriptions. It sounds a bit more lawless than it actually is. Morally and ethically speaking, we are all dependent on the state of our environment, and some of us feel the sense of urgency to improve our environment more than others. She had so many interesting designs to share. The one I think I liked the best was tearing out the asphalt were there is parking only for fire lanes. This space goes to waste most of the time, and if it’s need in the event of an emergency, the fire trucks can squish a few flowers, that’s alright. Besides adding beauty to the city streets, it helps catch pollutants in runoff, which in turn keeps our water supply cleaner. What’s not to love about that kind of design?
Bill Buxton had the honor of closing out BIF-5. It’s hard to encapsulate the things Bill said into one thought. Here are a few I found interesting. In contrast to Jonah Lehrer’s epiphany theory of where great ideas come from, Bill talked about collaboration with people as the engine of ideas. He pointed to this idea in society of the lone genius, but in reality, good ideas come from interactions with many people. He believes that theory of ideation to the point where he tries to structure his life to always be in places to get good ideas (i.e around good people). He talked about ideas and technology. He said the future is already here, it’s just not uniformly distributed. If we think about how long we’ve had the technologies that are really revolutionizing our lives now, they are about 30 years old. The natural conclusion then is that anything that is going to be a billion dollar industry in the next 10 to 20 years is already about 10 years old (I say, keep your money on nanotechnology and biotechnology). He closed his talk with an analogy of a slate (the kind you write on) in a classroom. He said that all it takes to totally change the experience or the market is an order of magnitude change in one dimension. For example, if you take a slate and change the size by an order of magnitude, it’s a chalkboard for students to write. If you make it digital instead of analog, it’s a laptop. If we have connect those laptops (or digital slates) together and project them on a screen in the classroom, do we the next generation digital chalkboard? It was a really intuitive way of thinking about new product innovation. I’d like to see the next generation of chalkboards myself.
