In the Netherlands, all-in-one product image studio removes the need for a photographer
iShopShape’s new StyleShoot suite enables the production of high quality in-house fashion imagery using a flatbed device instead of a photographer.
The expense of professional-looking product photography is a problem we’ve seen many startups tackle in the past – most recently Yoopia, with its innovative business model that provides high quality images to brands for free in return for the rights to sell the product. iShopShape’s new StyleShoots suite is another – this time enabling the production of in-house fashion imagery using a flatbed device instead of a photographer.
The company claims that StyleShoots includes all the hardware and software needed to produce product images ready for marketing purposes quickly and with ease. Items are placed onto the 69in x 45in backlit photo table and a preview of the shot can be viewed on the iPad and pre-loaded app that comes with the suite. After tweaking the image for correct brightness settings, a camera positioned above the table then takes multiple shots. The device produces a high-resolution image with a plain white background, allowing for precise cut-outs and custom backgrounds. The video below demonstrates in further detail how the device could be used:
via springwise.com
Jim Woods
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Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach
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Saturday, May 12, 2012
Innovation: In the Netherlands, all-in-one product image studio removes the need for a photographer | Springwise
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
America's Healthy Infatuation With Entrepreneurs - David A. Shaywitz
REUTERS
America has fallen hard for entrepreneurs.
The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand. Compare the Fortune 500 CEOs interviewed on the HBR IdeaCast talking about Campbell's Soup or Coca-Cola (podcast here) with the entrepreneurs at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar Series discussing Pandora and Instagram (podcast here). The big company CEOs sound just like you'd expect. They are competent, factual, and in control. But while most of them presumably have strong interpersonal skills and a high EQ, they come across as dry, unemotional, and focused on the "core business."
In contrast, the entrepreneurs presenting at Stanford wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are vividly passionate. They exude emotion. They are selling themselves, with a kind of animated desperation. They tell student to "do what you love." It's an appealing message, and you can see why it catches on.
These two personalities generally reside at opposite ends of the business spectrum, presumably reflecting two very different business needs. It's essential to be brash and irrationally exuberant to start a business. But to sustain a large multinational corporation, you've got to be calculating and rational. It's also a well-described phenomenon that as start-ups evolve into progressively larger companies, their character changes, and their needs evolve, or "mature." Mature organizations are supposed to act predictably, responsibly, unemotionally. The qualities embraced (or at least tolerated) at the start-up level can become liabilities. Many start-up CEOs hand over the reins at this stage, or at least share them (as Google did for years when Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt), explicitly acknowledging the need for an "adult in the room." Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.
While many large organizations might similarly benefit from having a kid in the room -- someone who is energetic, passionate, emotional, excitable - it's hard to envision a corporate phenotype that would be more doomed: the environment just doesn't support it. Sure, companies trot out bromides about "cultivating entrepreneurship," while HR departments sponsor group training sessions on innovative thinking. But the reality is that the culture of most big companies is geared to performing established activities in increasingly efficient ways. Simply stated: doing the old things better takes precedence over doing new things well enough. Most employees (and certainly the ones who last) figure out extremely quickly how you're supposed to act at work (Sir Joseph wasn't far off). You could say most large organizations have elected to trade the passion of young love for the predictability of adult relationships.
And perhaps this is why we look so wistfully at entrepreneurs. They seem to exude the raw passion that experience has taught us to modulate, the vivid emotion that we've learned to suppress, the intense energy that we learn must be channeled, the unreasonable audacity that has been replaced by sensible objectives. We cheer for them because they represent our youthful hopes, our idealism, our ambitions and our dreams. And when these entrepreneurs defy the extraordinary odds, and succeed, we rejoice, for at the moment we can sense, if only fleetingly, the exceptional untapped potential within each of us. We rejoice, and wonder: what if?
It would be easy to dismiss our infatuation with entrepreneurs as misty-eyed revisionism, the way we might selectively recall and invoke treasured childhood memories while forgetting the many painful challenges of youth and adolescence. The day-to-day reality of getting a new company off the ground is generally far less glorious than the inspirational experiences trotted out by the small minority of ultra-successful entrepreneurs who are routinely invited to share their stories. There's a significant selection bias here, to say nothing of the urge to write oneself into a heroic cultural narrative.
But I'd argue that if we had to find a group of people to admire and admittedly idealize -- and you know we're going to -- we could do a lot worse than taking our inspiration from impassioned, dedicated individuals seeking against all odds "to make a dent in the world." via theatlantic.com
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For Some of the World’s Poor, Hope Comes Via Design and Innovation
It is late. About 12:10 in Colorado Springs. I am fascinated by the social and business ramifications associated with Mike Kimmelman's New York Times story on design and technology through "Why didn't someone think of this before" solutions. The photos below provide a multitude of implicit ways to better the world locally. Indeed Kimmelman’s article is awe inspiring not from the standpoint of observation but transformative participation. Which is the point.
Below a renovated public walkway, along the canal in Bangkok, where residents are helping to design cleaner places to live. With families in flimsy homes on stilts above polluted waters, architects from nearby Sripatum University were enlisted to devise row houses, detached houses and semidetached houses, along the lines of what residents said they wanted.
In the photo above the solution is absolutely simple. They have enriched a community. That enriches familes. Do you think the value of the improvements have been achieved?
A community cooker is fueled by refuse that residents collect in return for time using the oven.
A few solutions:
- a filtered drinking straw that prevents the spread of typhoid and cholera
- a bamboo treadle pump that helps poor farmers in Cambodia and India extract groundwater during the dry seasons
- The Q Drum, a doughnut-shaped plastic container, easily rolled, even long distances by children, which is used to transport up to 13 gallons of water. I suggest reading this article in entirety via New York Times.
Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation
Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships.
For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact:
+1 719- 649-4118
A Maze Of Tunnels Made Only Of Packing Tape, Suspended In Mid-Air
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IDEO’s chairman and founder David Kelley talks about regaining creative confidence: Innovation 101
Innovators aren't exceptional as much as they are confident. So says David Kelley, the founder of the venerable Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO.
Mr. Kelley, whose company is responsible for designing a wide range of products and services, including the modern computer mouse, believes—and research suggests—that virtually everyone has the capacity to innovate. It's just that somewhere around the fourth grade most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative, he says, so our ability to innovate atrophies.
Mr. Kelley has made it his life's work to help people regain their creative confidence. In his three decades as a designer and as a professor in the design program at Stanford University's engineering school, from which he graduated in 1978, Mr. Kelley has developed a set of techniques for solving all kinds of problems—techniques that he came to believe could be taught as a methodology. His approach is called "design thinking."
Six years ago, with a $35 million gift from German software magnate Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP AG and a onetime IDEO client, Mr. Kelley founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford—dubbed the d.school—a nondegree program that draws students from all seven of Stanford's graduate schools. The program aims to help students unlock their creative potential by teaching them to become, among other things, more open to experimentation, more comfortable with ambiguity and less afraid of failure.
Teaching the Process
The best way to unleash creativity, Mr. Kelley says, is to give students an "experience," or in d.school speak, a design challenge. Under his teaching model, however, students aren't just handed a problem to solve—they must define the problem themselves through research and direct observation.
David Kelley says most of us stop thinking of ourselves as creative somewhere around the fourth grade
One group of students, for example, was tasked with designing an incubator for the developing world, where infant mortality is high and expensive incubators are scarce. But when the students were dispatched to Nepal to spend time with mothers and doctors, they found that most births take place in rural areas far from hospitals, so flooding hospitals with cheaper incubators would be of no use to most premature and low-birth-weight babies.
Equipped with this knowledge, and, as Mr. Kelley sees it, a newfound empathy for their subjects, the students reframed the problem. "This was about keeping babies warm, not cheaper incubators," explains George Kembel, executive director and co-founder of the d.school.
The second step in the process is "ideation," where students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another. The students decided that what was needed was an inexpensive baby-warming device that could function in rural communities—one that was transportable, simple to use and sanitize, and worked without electricity.
Next comes "prototyping." The students made sketches and three-dimensional models of potential incubators that they could test, modify, and test again, in an iterative process that is at the heart of design thinking. By the end of the class they had a finished prototype—a kind of sleeping bag made of special material that could be wrapped around a premature infant and kept clean and warm with nothing more than boiling water. The students went on to form a nonprofit company in the hopes of bringing their Embrace incubator to market.
Mr. Kembel says the learning experience at the d.school is centered on a few basic beliefs. One is that people learn by doing, so the more projects students tackle the better. The same goes for developing prototypes. Speed and quantity are encouraged in the hope that students will fail early and often. "If you go through lots of little tests, you learn more than if you just do one test," says Mr. Kembel.
Another guiding principle is that people learn best by collaborating with others who have radically different points of view, so classes should be made up of students and teachers from a variety of disciplines—the more the better.
Moreover, "everyone needs to have an equal voice," says Mr. Kembel, "because everyone in a sense is learning, even the faculty." So the old model of teacher at podium lecturing students has been thrown out in favor of classrooms that look more like studios, with tables and chairs scattered about.
Mr. Kembel says a lot of time at the d.school is spent helping students unlearn things they learned in elementary school. Fear of failure is rampant among students who have been drilled in standardized-test taking, he says. "What we want the graduate students to do is work with others and go out and take risks," says Mr. Kembel.
Making Waves
The d.school is reporting progress on several fronts.
It now enrolls 700 students per year, up from 30 six years ago. Applications are running at two to three times the number of available slots, Mr. Kembel says, and increasing numbers of students are choosing to attend Stanford because of the d.school. He also says employers are starting to seek out students with d.school credentials.
The d.school has produced several companies, including d.light design, which makes solar-powered lanterns for the developing world; Alphonso Labs, which markets Pulse, a news-reading application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices; and of course, Embrace, which hatched from the incubator project.
Almost weekly, educators from around the world make the pilgrimage to Palo Alto to take tours and get advice on how to set up d.school-like programs of their own. Dozens of colleges have programs in various stages of development.
More recently, the d.school has been teaching K-12 teachers how to employ design-thinking techniques in their classrooms. Last year alone, more than 500 educators attended workshops at the d.school's K-12 lab. Research is under way, but early indications are that K-12 students exposed to design thinking are more engaged and motivated to learn, say Rich Crandall, director, and Adam Royalty, founding member and lead researcher, of the K-12 lab.
To Mr. Kelley, that is the Holy Grail of design thinking. He says it is behavioral change that enables students to gain innovation confidence, something he believes is as important as gaining literacy skills. "For me this is a mindset," he says. "It's a way of thinking that you can use in every part of your life."
Ms. Geer is a writer in Connecticut. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com. via online.wsj.com
Speaking
As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.
If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. Thank you!
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Snap a photo of physical junk mail, become unsubscribed
Snap a photo of physical junk mail, become unsubscribed
Seattle-based Readabl’s PaperKarma mobile app lets users submit a photograph of each piece of junk mail they’d like to stop receiving, and then works to make that happen.
30th March 2012 in Life Hacks.No one likes junk mail, and the average US household receives some 850 pieces of it over the course of a year. Whereas French Pubeco aims to shift such communications to the online sphere, Readabl’sPaperKarma mobile app lets users submit a photograph of each piece of junk mail they’d like to stop receiving, and then works to make that happen.
Roughly 44 percent of unsolicited mail in the US ends up in landfills each year without ever being opened, according to Seattle-based Readabl. Aiming to help address that problem, the company’s PaperKarma app enables users to simply snap a picture of an unwanted piece of junk mail and press “send” to become unsubscribed from the mailing list that generated it. The company explains: “We work closely with the source companies to help you unsubscribe from catalogs, magazines, credit card offers, etc. and optionally – i.e., if you explicitly choose to – convert you to the corresponding online (email) versions.” Launched earlier this year, the free PaperKarma app is now available for Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone.
Of course, unwanted mass mailings aren’t just a problem for consumers — such fruitless effort also represents a significant waste for the companies that send them. How can your brand help to reduce the many resources wasted this way?
Speaking
As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.
If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Take a Look At This Innovative TREK Kiosk for Bicycle Parts #Innovation
Unless they happen to be near a bicycle shop during business hours, bicyclists who break down are typically out of luck if they don’t already have the parts they need to make a repair. Aiming to make bike parts more accessible, two different vending machines we’ve spotted are always on hand with critical parts.
Most recently, bike manufacturer Trek set up a prototype Trek Stop Cycling Convenience Center at the end of June, just off the bike path in Madison, Wisconsin. Located outside (and operated by) bike shop Machinery Row, the Trek Stop is a 24/7/365 convenience center for cyclists that provides access to cycling products, information and a safe place to work on a bike. The full-service vending machine is stocked with bicycle products such as spare tubes, patches, tire levers, CO2 cartridges and more, along with food and cold drinks; it also features an information center with maps, a message board and advertising space for local announcements. A covered maintenance area, meanwhile, offers a work stand, free air and even how-to videos–available at the push of a button–for those trickier repairs.
The idea for Trek Stop was born a few years ago when a crew of industrial designers at Trek led by Mike Hammond began thinking of ways to make bicycle commuting more viable. “Motorists have it easy,” says Hammond. “Gas stations, convenience stores, auto parts stores, tow trucks–you name it. The support network for cars far outclasses cyclists. The Trek Stop aims to change that by breaking down some of the ‘worries’ attached to cycling.” While the Trek Stop is currently just in prototype form and slated to run for only another month or so, Seattle-based Aaron’s Bicycle Repair has actually had a similar vending machine in place since 2005. With items like inner tubes, flat repair items, energy bars and gel, the machine is located just outside Aaron’s for after-hours service.
As environmental concerns and skyrocketing gas costs lead to increasing numbers of bicyclists around the globe, it’s not hard to imagine vending machines like these popping up all over–particularly in spots where there aren’t bike shops nearby. Time to get together with a bike shop or manufacturer and bring some machines to the trails near you? via springwise.com
Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. We are one of the very few consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Email or call us at 719-649-4118 to speak at your event or devise an effective competitive advantage and innovation strategy for your organization. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter?
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Mike Brown: Competitive Strategy
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Recently, a full-time freelancer complained about a part-time freelancer, who also has a full-time job, using a strategy of undercutting the market with overly low-priced proposals for creative projects. She complained that part-time competitors’ pricing strategies were unfairly bringing down client perceptions of market prices.
Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. We are one of the very few consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries increase their growth strategies through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Email or call us at 719-649-4118 to speak at your event or devise an effective competitive advantage and innovation strategy for your organization. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Stephen Wunker: The Two Routes Out and RIM's Innovator's Dilemma
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In the late 1990′s, the giants of the wireless industry didn’t give Research in Motion much thought. Before the company created its soon-to-be-ubiquitous BlackBerry devices, it was building two-way pagers aimed at a corporate market that barely existed. The behemoths — companies like Nokia and Motorola — focused on the big consumer market where the hardware, software, and sales process looked completely distinct. Over the next 10 years, up to the introduction of the iPhone, RIM romped from triumph to triumph, dominating the enterprise market and building upon that success to create a strong position with consumers as well. In hindsight, the industry incumbents were trapped in a classic Innovator’s Dilemma in which they focused on their biggest, most profitable customers (consumers and the wireless carriers who sold to them) while ignoring new sources of growth that demanded new competencies and business models.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Why You Should Work With Your Innovating Users
Using a GPS system and small tags to create a way to find things that get lost in a house. Creating a coat that’s easy to put on and take off while in a wheelchair. Coloring the two halves of a clock different colors to teach children the concepts of “past the hour” and “before the hour.”
- Understand that “lead users” are key. “Some users — termed “lead users” — are much more likely to develop commercially promising innovations than the average consumer,” write von Hippel, Ogawa and de Jong. “Lead users are those who are both ahead of the majority of users with respect to an important market trend and have a high incentive to innovate.”
- ID those lead users. Co-author von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, offers at his website free training materials to find lead users, including a lead user project handbook and videos.
- “Stop attacking your innovating users, whether intentionally or by mistake!” The authors are emphatic about this. It is counterproductive, they note, for companies to deter through criminal threat users who might simply be trying to inspect and alter a product to make it better. Ditto for consumer innovators who are using products in new ways that could lead to new markets.
- Actively support consumer innovation. “Create documented, open interfaces to support modifications to your products,” suggest the authors. Create “developers’ toolkits.” Create websites where users can share information and innovate together. Consider even providing special access to in-house developers.