Innovation [2009-10-18]

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

Are we wasting our time searching for the next brilliant idea? That idea that’s going to drive a disruptive innovation. The race for the new-new thing. The innovation silver bullet. Or is innovation the result of combining many small, commoditised ideas? With the real challenge being the identification of interesting problems and synthesis of a new solution from the sea of good ideas we’re swimming in, in today’s hyper-connected world.

  • The good enough revolution: when cheap and simple is just fine [Wired]
    Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein made a cheap, feature poor video camera, the Flip. Two years later, the Flip Ultra and its revisions are the best-selling video cameras in the US, commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.
  • Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millions [New Scientist]
    By leveraging good enough, low tech tools and techniques, the Low Cost IVF Foundation (LCIF) has transformed IVF from a luxury of the rich western countries, into a tool for alleviating the public ridicule, accusations of witchcraft, loss of financial support, abandonment and divorce, not to speak of their own shame and depression associated with being childless in the third world. “If you are not able to conceive, you are not [considered] normal,” says gynaecologist Abdelrahim Obaid Fadl Allah of the University of Khartoum clinic.
  • Forget lawn mowers, bring in the goats [TreeHugger]
    Sometimes the old school solution is the best solution. They chose the goats because they’re a non-polluting alternative that’ll eat up just about anything. “They [goats] can clear vegetation from hard-to-reach places, and they’ll eat the seeds that pesticides and mowing leave behind, preventing vegetation from coming back next year.”
  • Conservative innovation [Nicholas G Carr]
    Many of the of the innovations which drive the corporate world forward are the result small, incremental steps and not large, bold strides based on brilliant, game changing ideas. Toyota’s hybrid is a good example of this incremental, conservative approach.