Posted by: Michael Arndt on January 15
My colleague Steve Hamm has a piece in the Jan. 26 issue of BusinessWeek on one of the most forward-thinking collaborations out there today. It’s called the Artemisinin Project, an unconventional effort by Big Pharma’s sanofi-aventis, biotech upstart Amyris Biotechnologies, a University of California researcher, and the first nonprofit drug developer in the U.S., the Institute for OneWorld Health, to take on malaria.
The goal is to get cheap drugs into the hands of poor people around the world who do not have access to health care, and the partners are on track to have a new semi-synthetic version of artemisinin--the only truly effective treatment for the disease--into Africa and Asia in 2012. They wouldn't be this close without Nina E. Grove, a OneWorld Health vice-president.
Photo of Nina Grove by Timothy Archibald
Continue reading "Creative Capitalism Vs. Malaria: The Back Story"
Posted by: Reena Jana on January 12
The annual National Retail Federation convention and expo is up and running at New York’s Javits Center, and during the trade show chip maker Intel is showing off a strategy to bring in retailers as clients for their chips, taken out of PCs and applied to a new generation of store technologies. I spoke with Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s Embedded Computing Division, on the company’s latest offerings for the retail industry: low-energy, high-performance chips (which can save more than 70% power usage of previous processors) that can fuel point-of-sale displays (information kiosks, cash registers) in stores from grocers to luxury boutiques.
With retailers increasingly reporting disappointing sales, laying off employees, and shutting stores, Intel’s goal of selling money-saving displays could appeal to struggling retail corporations could be timely.
Jensen told me that his team at Intel “started with the realization that existing point-of-sale, or P.O.S., systems consume tremendous amounts of power. They run 24 hours a day even if the store is closed, or a sales clerk isn’t using it.” This was in February 2008. Jensen said the embedded computing experts realized that this could be an opportunity to design a more “green” solution that could save retailers money and open up a new market for Intel. (Not to mention further position Intel as a company dedicated to sustainability.)
“We started to work on some stuff in the lab, to come up with dramatic ideas. We realized we needed to catch retailers’ and shoppers’ attention. While the idea was to help retailers save money, we also wanted to help them entice people into the stores,” Jensen said.
“We realized that one way of doing so was to create a kiosk that could offer a shopping experience that was similar to shopping online, to offer that kind of convenience. And it needed to be physically interesting and compelling.”
So he turned to frog, a design firm headquartered in San Francisco, to do user research and come up with an exciting prototype for such a display. Here’s a rendering, below. It’s sleek and unobtrusive:
Continue reading "Intel Targets Retailers With Store Display Concept"
Posted by: Matt Vella on January 07
CES may have arrived this year with barely a whimper, especially given the dire state of the consumer electronics industry. But, Plantronics Inc. and its consumer audio division, Altec Lansing, have plenty to crow about it seems. The company won a combined six 2009 Innovations Design and Engineering Honoree Awards from the Consumer Electronics Association. (Read the press release here.)
Altec began a transition from a company that was happy to sell derivative, also-ran iPod docks into a more design-oriented outfit late last year. We wrote about how the company's executives are changing its corporate culture back in September. From our story:
[The] plan is nothing short of a relaunch of the Altec brand, refreshing its image—including Web site, packaging, and point of sale displays—as well as the industrial design of its products. Nearly two years in the works, an initial slate of four new products—including iPod docks and PC and MP3 speakers—launching this month will carry a new logo, designed to evoke subtly the shape of the company's classic loudspeakers.
Read the rest here.
Posted by: Helen Walters on January 07
I recently chatted with Michael Raynor, co-author of The Innovator's Dilemma, author of The Strategy Paradox, and currently a Distinguished Fellow at Deloitte Research. We recorded a podcast, which you can hear here, on Michael's latest theory: "The New Contrarianism." Essentially, it's his way for businesses to think about innovation in straitened times. Rather than paraphrase his ideas, I thought I'd just go ahead and publish them, complete with his analysis of how the wireless phone industry could use the current global economic woes to turn itself around. So... Here's Michael:
Your customers are going bankrupt. Your suppliers are cutting off credit. You're struggling to avoid layoffs. It's the perfect time to innovate and grow!
Contrarian investing has made some people fabulously wealthy, Baron de Rothschild and Warren Buffett among them. In fact, contrarianism is hardly contrary at all; it is the conventional wisdom, and it is conceptually straightforward: having husbanded at least some of your cash during the boom, you look for companies with solid fundamentals but prices that have been artificially depressed by the prevailing panic.
Continue reading "The New Contrarianism: Less for Less"
Posted by: Reena Jana on January 07
Today's teens don't see scientists as "nerdy," according to a new study from the Lemelson-MIT Program, a non-profit based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devoted to recognizing exceptional inventors. In the phone survey of 501 American teens, conducted in mid-November 2008, only 5 per cent described scientists as "nerdy." Okay, so this post might seem like a satirical news story in The Onion, but the data in the 2009 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, just released today, suggest that U.S. teens are eager to study science, perhaps against popular belief. (This year's survey, the twelfth, is the first to focus only on Americans 12-17 years old and how they perceive of invention as a discipline. In the past, the sample was of broad ages).
Twenty-five percent of the teens surveyed said scientists are "successful." The majority (55 percent) chose "intelligent" as a way to describe men and women in the sciences.
The study also points out that among those polled, a whopping 85 percent expressed interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And 80 percent surveyed said they feel "their schools have prepared [them] to pursue a career in these fields, should [they] choose." But while this all seems like a rosy picture of America's future in global innovation, two-thirds of the kids polled suggested that they need mentors in these fields and don't have them. They don't know anyone personally in these fields.
So what's to be done? The survey suggests that teens feel their schools are good places to learn science and math. But there aren't enough role models -- Steve Jobs, the Google guys aside--in the real world, in their real lives, to help teens truly understand how to shape careers as engineers and inventors. Does the media need to be better about covering who is innovating, beyond the usual suspects? Should scientists and technologists be more vocal, active, and in the public sphere--and in their communities?
