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Innovation Blog

 Top Social Entrepreneurs Change the World

By Shlomo Maital

 Jeff Sheinbein and Kevin McCracken

Bloomberg Businessweek ran a contest in which several thousand readers voted for which social entrepreneurship idea they most liked.   Here are a few of the top ones chosen, including Social Imprint, #1, which got some 15 per cent of all the votes:

 ●  Social Imprints, a print shop, garnered 15.7 percent of the nearly 3,000 votes readers cast since we published profiles of 25 finalists in June. Co-founded by Jeff Sheinbein and Kevin McCracken, who overcame heroin and alcohol addiction himself, the 3-year-old company employs seven people and had $2 million in revenue last year.

● Dalberg, a New York-based consultant focused on international social and environmental problems, came in second with 15.4 percent of readers’ votes. Founded by veterans of McKinsey in 2001, Dalberg has sales above $15 million and 120 employees in 10 global offices.

● Close behind was Intuary, the maker of an iPad app that helps people who can’t speak communicate, with 15.3 percent of readers’ votes. The 5-employee startup is launched the app, called Verbally, in March and is projecting sales of $200,000 this year.

● Nest Collective, which sells healthy children’s food under the Plum Organics baby food brand and Revolution Foods lunchbox snacks, got 8.5 percent of readers’ votes. The 26-employee company, founded in 2007, had $15 million in revenue last year.

● StayClassy, an online fundraising platform for small nonprofits, received 6.2 percent of readers’ votes. The 6-year-old company had $250,000 in revenue last year and has helped 2,000 nonprofits raise more than $5 million.

     Social entrepreneurship is booming, as innovators act to fill the gap created by growing social distress, on the one hand, and shrinking government resources and energy, on the other. 

    What is YOUR idea for a change-the-world business – note that both the noun and the adjective are crucial.   

Innovation Blog

Entrepreneurship the Hard Way:  In the Eye of the Storm

By Shlomo Maital

 Dov Frohman had an illustrious career with Intel U.S., then decided he wanted to return to his homeland, Israel. Intel agreed to have him set up a development team in Haifa in the early 1970s;  one of the early products, developed by perhaps two engineers, was a math co-processor.  Later the team pioneered the Pentium, and then, the Centrino chipset.  Dov built the innovative culture of Intel’s R&D group in Haifa. 

   In his book Leadership the Hard Way, Frohman makes a key point, which he stressed in a recent interview:

“I think any genuine leader today has to learn leadership the hard way—by doing it. That means embracing turbulence and crisis, not avoiding it. It means “flying through the thunderstorm.” That’s not to say that there are no basic principles to orient you to the challenge. Indeed, I describe some in the book. But there are no simple recipes. Until you have lived it, you don’t really know how to do it. That’s what I mean by “leadership the hard way.”

   I believe the same principle applies to entrepreneurship and innovation. Until you launch a business, and fly directly into the eye of the storm, and then emerge on the other side, you will never really learn this skill.  The longer you delay flying into the storm, the less likely it is you will ever do it.  

   Frohman relates how the idea for the book came to him:

  I’m an active pilot, and one time I actually found myself caught in a thunderstorm. It was too late to turn back; I just had to fly through it. What was so interesting to me, afterwards, was that despite all my years of training and flying, none of it really prepared me for the experience of being in the middle of the storm. All the things that I had ever learned about flying were far from my mind. There were too many things going on at once, too many contingencies that I couldn’t predict or anticipate. Instead, I was consumed by the crisis, operating on instinct, reacting rapidly to the developments of the moment. I think leadership is like that: it can’t be done by the book. Rather, it means having the capacity to respond appropriately in an instant.

   Substitute “entrepreneurship” for “leadership” in the next-to-last line, and the passage works just as well.  

     I teach entrepreneurship and try  to provide useful tools for my students. But I agree with Dov Frohman – Just do it.  That’s always my final message to my students.

Innovation Blog

Lucien Freud Dies at Age 88: What He Taught Us

By Shlomo Maital

  “Benefits Supervisor  Sleeping” 

Sigmund Freud’s grandson, Lucien Freud, a portrait artist, has died at age 88.  I think innovators can learn a lot from his life and work.

   “Don’t try to surprise!  Don’t try to shock!”  he once said.  “That only works once.”  Today a great deal of art, and for that matter, innovation, seeks desperately to surprise and to shock.  For example, Robert Rauschenberg, an artist once painted a canvas pure white.  He was lauded. The painting sold for $2.8 million.  (A deranged woman even defaced it once!).  But, what next? How many all-white canvases can you do?   Freud worked patiently at his portrait skills, gradually evolving a style that was realistic, but also had elements of surrealism and expressionism.  He found his own style, rather than copy that of others.

   Lucien Freud listened to his own inner voice. In an age when nearly all painters paint in abstract style, he was figurative.   He painted real people, recognizably.  But unlike many classic portrait painters, he never glorified his subjects or air-brushed away the pimples and warts.  The opposite – he revealed the person, as he or she truly was.  He once said, “I want the paint to work as flesh.  The paint IS the person!”  

    In 2008, his nude portrait of a heavy-set civil servant reclining on a sofa, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” sold for $33.6 million at a Christie’s auction, a record figure at the time.

  Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud was one of three sons of Austrian architect Ernst Freud and his German wife, Lucie. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in London.  During World War II, the budding artist served with the British merchant navy.

       Look closely at his portrait of the “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”.  What do you see?  What do you feel?  Do you find innovation in it?  Do you hate it?  Love it?  Or both?   

Innovation Blog

Why Scientists Compete – When They Should Collaborate: “Market Failure” in Knowledge Production

By Shlomo Maital

  A short article in Elsevier’s on-line publication Academic Executive Brief, which covers academic research, *  reveals the following:

      From 2000 to 2008, success rates  dropped  for the National Institutes of Health R01eqivalent grants, from over 30 per cent of all applicants to under 20  per cent,  while at the same time the average age of awardees increased.  This trend exacerbates pressure on researchers who, particularly in the early stages of their careers, are driven by the need to further themselves.    Survey results show that 74% of scientists, on average, believe that access to other researchers’ data benefits — or would benefit — their own research; however, only 54% are willing to allow other researchers access to their raw research data. And the gap is increasing over time.  Academics may also be disinclined to share and collaborate because of the nature of the reward structure in science, which esteems first discoverers.

    This is a massive “market failure” in the production of knowledge.  Essentially it replicates the situation of ‘monopoly’ in business.  By building an incentive system that rewards egoistic selfish behavior, universities have done serious damage to the way research is done.  Just as free competition benefits business, and anti-trust bans monopolies and cartels, so should collaboration on data sources benefit science.  Why should cartels be banned in business and allowed and even encouraged in scientific research?

   There is a simple solution.  Make it a condition of scientific research grants, that all data must be openly shared. After all, the money for these grants is taxpayer-funded.  It is incumbent on universities, therefore, to optimize its use.  By fostering little research-lab monopolies, the money is wasted.  Require researchers to upload their data onto the Web – and watch science take off.   I believe that in the end, this will benefit all researchers.  Knowledge is like love – the more you give it away, the more you get in return.  

     The problem is definitely one of “Prisoner’s Dilemma” – it doesn’t pay for any one researcher to collaborate and give away data, but if everyone did it, all would benefit.  So, on a count of three – one, two three – everybody, say,   here’s my data!  

• Andrew Plume, “Why Scientists Don’t Share – And Why They Should”. 

Innovation Blog

will.i.am (Black Eyed Peas): Intel’s new creative asset   

By Shlomo Maital

   will.i.am,  Black Eyed Peas 

   It has taken me six months to learn about it, but, better late than never – a report in Computer World last January notes that Intel has made a creative appointment to enhance its creativity:

   William James Adams Jr, better known as Will.i.am of the popular music group Black Eyed Peas, was named Intel’s new director of creative innovation, the chip maker said Tuesday.  Adams, a Grammy winner with multiple platinum albums, will work with Intel on developing new technologies, music and in technology advocacy, Intel said in a statement.  It is “a multi-year, hands-on creative and technology collaboration with Intel,” the chip giant said. 

Will.i.am kicked off his own music apps company this week, Will.i.apps, with an app called BEP360 on iTunes, featuring a 360 degree video of the song “The Time (Dirty Bit).” Users can move their iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch around for a 360-degree view of the music video on their screen, similar to the way Google Sky works. Will.i.apps aims to develop applications that more creatively use advanced digital technologies in music and videos.

“That’s the kind of digital media that we want to tap into, that kind of brain,” said David Dickstein, an Intel spokesman. He said Will.i.am already has an Intel employee badge and may soon have a workspace at the company.

  Intel is making desperate efforts to read the future in order to position its new products to capitalize on it.   Intel now believes that multimedia will be a huge new market for its microprocessors.   At the same time Intel appointed will.i.am,  it also  announced that Erik Huggers, director of the BBC’s Future Media & Technology division, will join Intel as corporate vice president and general manager of its Digital Home Group.

   Computer World reports that HP too has joined the parade.  Hewlett-Packard, for example, is using sound technology developed in tandem with rapper Dr. Dre in multimedia laptops, called Beats Audio.  The goal, according to HP, is “to provide the optimal sound experience — the way the artist intended it — when playing music or audio through headphones or external speakers.”

   The Intel and HP appointments indicate a growing trend in innovation – Make the consumer, or in this case, the actual producer (of media), a key partner in the process.   Democratized innovation, the title of Eric von Hippel’s book, has truly arrived.