Creativity in crisis time

A German Campaign for the Sparkasse Bank, using the actual crisis time, it shows a strong insight message: Throwing your pennies to a fountain to ask for a wish. Do you copy? :” Wishes? Rather invest your money safely.

Now a days when we spoke about worldwide crisis, the opinions are very wide: invest, wait, to low expenses, discounts, strategies, etc. The point where every opinion converge is that 2009 woun´t be easy. Creativity will be helpful to pass this, using innovative ways to publish your “adds” or to communicate to your costumers, using furniture and media at lower money costs but at high “mind” costs. Take a look at what´s new, here I present these two brilliant ideas.

Got the big picture???

GE: Crisis opportunities

As Einstein said, a crisis time is an opportunity time. Now is when you must look out to make the right choices and take action, invest today when everybody is running out is when the BIG GUYS are getting in: Warren Buffet, George Soros, etc. Get the big picture?

A hint for you, have you saw the GE (General Electric) shares price? If your answer is no, just take a look now:

What do you see? GE shares prices are as low as 13 years! Is know that GE moves cyclic, so… get it?

Just take a look to this kind of companies, take a look to everything surrounding you. There are a lot of possibilities, and please do not run away like everybody does. Good luck and keep on watching what´s happening!

Invisibility it´s a real reality?

Numerous Sci-Fi movies we can watch people turning invisible like a magik trick.By now, cientists have discovered some materials which molecular structure make them possible to "turn" the light to pass bording an spheric object and it will not can be seen.These fibers are called "MetaMaterials", and they are capable to virtually make objects invisible to someone looking infront of them
This video is from a latin TV program (the video is in spanish), just take a look folks!

For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers

Despitethe enduring myth of the lone genius, innovation does not take place in isolation. Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don’t always realize it.

Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, calls this “group genius,” and in his book of the same name he introduces a scientific method called interaction analysis to the study of creativity. Through studying verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Mr. Sawyer shows that what we experience as a flash of insight has actually percolated in social interaction for quite some time.
“Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company,” he says. “Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.”
It’s a perspective shared broadly in corporate America. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation Studios, describes what he calls “collective creativity” in a cover article in the September issue of Harvard Business Review. “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems,” he writes. “Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”
So, we all should brainstorm our way through the day, right? Wrong. That classic tool introduced by Alex Osborn in 1948 has been proved in a number of studies over the last 20 years to be far less effective than generally believed. “He had it right in terms of group process,” says Drew Boyd, a businessman based in Cincinnati who blogs and speaks often about innovation. “But he had it wrong in terms of the method.”
Brainstorming, Mr. Boyd says, is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert. Among the problems are these: Throwing in an idea for public consideration generates fear of failure, and workers looking to advance their own interests often keep their best ideas to themselves until a more opportune time.
Instead of identifying a problem and then seeking solutions, Mr. Boyd suggests turning the process around: break down successful products and processes into separate components, then study those parts to find other potential uses. This process of “systematic inventive thinking,” which evolved from the work of the Russian engineer and scientist Genrich Altschuller, creates “pre-inventive” ideas that then can be expanded into innovations.
Kapro Tools, working with an Israeli company called Systematic Inventive Thinking, used the method to create a new type of bubble level calibrated to help build gentle slopes to improve drainage. Previously, construction workers approximated the slope they wanted by placing a nail or other object under the edge of a standard level.
“Innovation is a team sport,” Mr. Boyd says. “There’s a dynamic that happens between people that produces results I just don’t see with an individual.”
Even Albert Einstein, society’s most common mental picture of genius, needed group input to hone his insights. According to “Einstein’s Mistakes” by Hans Ohanian, the great physicist’s derivation of the famous equation E=mc2 contained several errors; it wasn’t until 1911 that another scientist, Max von Laue, developed a full and correct proof.
“The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem,” says Robert Fishkin, president and chief executive of Reframeit Inc., a Web 2.0 company that creates virtual space in a Web browser where users can share comments and highlights on any site. “We need to get better at collaborating in noncompetitive ways across company and organizational lines.”
THAT’S exactly what innovators at a dozen health care systems throughout the country had in mind nearly four years ago when they formed the Innovation Learning Network, says its director, Chris McCarthy. The problem, he says, is that there are so few health care innovators within each organization that introducing technologies and processes can be painstakingly slow. “We thought if we could get all these experienced folks together to push each other’s thinking continually, we’d all be better off,” he says.
What started as a grant-financed, one-year trial is now a member-financed permanent network, he says. The members bring in new technologies and experiment with them in a faux clinical setting in San Leandro, Calif.,. One of the first large-scale initiatives to arise from the network is KP MedRite, an effort at Kaiser Permanente’s 32 hospitals to ensure that nurses are not interrupted while dispensing medications. Other member health care systems have already begun to introduce the program at their sites.
By using the group’s knowledge and experience, Kaiser Permanente accomplished in less than a year what would have required roughly two years to do without the network, Mr. McCarthy says. “It was a huge jump-start for us,” he says. “The group effort allows us to move much more quickly and become successful much faster.”

This article was extracted form the NY Times.

Marketing Evolution

This video show a little an a simple resume, how marketing were changing in the last 60 years.

Google Adwords 3: Making money with google

I have spent a lot of money developing products, services and ideas that nobody wanted to buy.

A huge waste of resources, specially if we consider in how many other “bad” ideas the people continue and will continue developing and spending their money.

If you understand how to use google AdWords, never ever you will need to invest a huge amount of money, just a few dollars… in the worst cases just a couple of hundreds if you still insist in an idea that does not work.

If you have a product idea and the product developing costs around U$2.500 and you are sure that these product is a good idea and it solve a complex problem.

So now write a little electronic manual (it does not have to be extended) about whom to solve that problem. Create an opt-in web page (this is optative register) where people can get your manual free, just they have to share their contact information. Then just buy a few key words, write some ads, send people to that information webpage and look how many people register to get that report.

Now, if nobody registers in that page… sincerely it is a great sign to abandon the project or reformulate it completely, before to spent more money. But when people register, you can communicate with them and ask for what they are looking for. This can give you a great feedback!

This process will help you to validate if the problem that you are trying to solve is relevant to the consumers, or in the worst case it will allow you to see which problems are most important to them.

Another application for AdWords. Market Investigation.

Just buy a few key words, write two ads (one for every key word). After one week or a month you will have 5.000 clicks that they would have cost you no more than U$750.

Now you will have information about your consumers: what they really made in relation of your proposals.

Just better and cheaper than a market investigation made by a company “specialized” in that area.

Invention & Innovation in Crisis Time

We do not try that the thingsthey change if always we dothe same”. The crisis is the best oneblessing that can happen to him to peopleand countries because the crisis brings progresses.The creativity is born from the anguishas the day is born at night dark.It is in the crisis that is born the inventiveness,discoveries and high strategy.Who surpasses the crisis is surpassed to ifsame without being “surpassed”. Who it attributes to the crisis their failures and shortages do violence to their own talent and respect more to the problems than to the solutions. The true crisis is the crisis of incompetence. The problem of the people and the countries are the laziness to find the exits and solutions.Without crisis there are no challenges, without challenges the life is a routine, a slow agony. Without crisis there are no merits. It is in the crisis where the best thing of each arises, because without crisis all wind is caress.To speak of crisis is to promote it, and to be silent in the crisis is to raise the conformism. Instead of this we work hard.We in one go end the unique threatening crisis that is the tragedy of not wanting to fight to surpass it.

Albert Einstein