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Innovation Blog

How to Milk Goats for their Spider Webs –  Say That Again??!!

By Shlomo Maital

 Spider silk surpasses steel

In this blog, I often write about how Nature, with its ultimate patience that uses millions of years of evolution to create winning innovations, surpasses by far human ingenuity.  Here is a story about how human innovation partners successfully, and highly creatively, with Nature’s innovation.   You can learn more by watching the wonderful four-part Public Broadcasting System Nova series on “Making Stuff”.

    Spider silk is amazing. It has higher tensile strength than steel.  Nature has patiently, through evolution, enabled spiders to spin tough silk. Nothing humans make rivals it.

 . A thread of silk can resist more pull before breaking than a thread of most kinds of steel. It is also quite stretchy. In the spotlight recently has been the newly discovered Darwin’s bark spider of Madagascar, which builds one of the largest webs known. The silk of this spider is twice as strong as other spider silks, ranking it among biological materials with the highest tensile strength and toughness known. 

[At the American Museum of Natural History, you can see a large orange blanket, woven from spider silk.  It took four years to painstakingly collect enough thread, by ‘milking’ spiders into an alcohol bath, then retrieving the threads that coalesce in it.] 

   Univ. of Wyoming molecular biologist Randy Lewis asked himself, how can we create spider silk commercially (since humans cannot synthesize it)?  Here is what he does.

   First, he extracts one of the two key genes spiders have, that enable them to produce their silky threads.   Next, he inserts it into goats, creating baby goats that have the spider-silk DNA.

   Next, he milks the goats, and extracts the spider silk compound from their milk.  The level of spider silk in their milk is about 1 per cent (like low fat milk).  A quart of goats’ milk generates a tiny thimble of spider silk material, that can be used to produce ultra-strong threads.

    Here is how Lewis describes his thinking:  “We needed a way to produce large quantities of the spider silk proteins,” Prof Lewis said.  “Spiders can’t be farmed, so that route is out and since they make six different silks, even that would not work if you could.” Spiders also have a tendancy to eat each other, so milking one thread from six out of a solo spider was clearly never going to service the entire human race. Prof Lewis and his team singled out the “dragline” – the outer strand of the web – as the strongest of the six types of silk. They spliced the DNA that creates the silk into a female goat’s DNA, then waited for it to give birth and start lactating.”

   Lewis says he is thinking of inserting the gene into alfalfa, rather than goats.

   It is therefore time to begin thinking about uses.  What uses can you, reader, think of, for ultra-light  [a strand of spider silk that circles the world, 25,000 miles, weighs only one pound!] and ultra-strong, stronger-than-steel, thread?  Fishing line?  Bullet-proof vests (we use Kevlar today)?

Innovation Blog

Art as Common Stock: Will It Fly?

By Shlomo Maital

Vezzoli, Premiere of a play that will never run

The French company A&F Markets has come up with a venture called Art Exchange that will treat artworks as investment vehicles, opening them up to partial purchase by shareholders.  The first two works to be offered by Art Exchange are both owned by Paris’s Yvon Lambert Gallery.  Pierre Naquin, the founder and president of the investment venture, related that the initiative has just launched with an offer of shares in two pieces, one by Sol LeWitt and the other by Francesco Vezzoli.   Now 11,000 shares of LeWitt’s “Irregular Form” are available at €10 ($13) per share, for a total value of €110,000 ($142,000) and 13,500 shares of Vezzoli’s “The Premiere of a Play That Will Never Run” are also offered at the same rate, giving it a total price of €135,000 ($174,000).

    What is the basic idea of this innovation?  Suppose you are an investor, and believe that art is a good investment, as part of a diversified portfolio.  You can invest in it by buying a painting or a sculpture.  But the price is high, and you may lack expertise.  So why not offer ‘shares’ in a painting, so that when the value of the painting rises, you profit (and take the profit when the painting is sold).

   Apparently this art stock market is not the first.   China’s Shenzhen Artvip Cultural Corporation started selling shares last year on the Shenzhen Cultural Assets and Equity Exchange.  Instead of selling slices of an individual work, Artvip sold 1,000 shares in a collection of pieces by artist Yang Peijiang, which sold out immediately.

    Is this idea good for art?  I heard an expert criticize the idea.  But surely, by making art ‘liquid’, you attract resources to art and thus help both galleries and artists. 

    This art stock market is not for collectors.  They are well-heeled, and want to own paintings, so they can enjoy them while perhaps making capital gains.  This market is for ordinary people who feel that perhaps, the market for art is bullish and worthy of, say, a 10 per cent tranche of their total investments. 

    There are some open questions.  How is the decision made to sell a painting, and when?  By a ‘shareholders’ meeting’?  Majority of shares decides?  How are shareholders consulted?

   Like all innovations, the market will determine this one’s success.   I think it might just work. Stay tuned.

Innovation Blog

“I Have a Dream!” – Merging Spontaneity and Discipline in Innovation

By Shlomo Maital

Today America celebrates Martin Luther King Day.  We recall the remarkable “I Have a Dream” speech given on Aug. 28, 1963, for only 17 minutes, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – a speech that influenced millions and probably changed history.  But how did those memorable words at the very end of his talk happen?  Where did they come from?

  The particularly moving and dramatic segment, with the refrain “I Have a Dream”, almost didn’t happen.  King came to the end of his prepared speech.    And then, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, on the stage with him, had an insight.  As a performer she realized that King had failed to energize and impassion his audience – which is what gospel singers do, and do it wonderfully.  And she also knew how King could do it.  She had appeared with him at various rallies, and recalled one particularly powerful speech King gave earlier that year in Detroit, when he marched at a demonstration with legendary labor leader Walter Reuther. 

    “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”  Mahalia Jackson said.  You can clearly hear her speaking these words on most of the YouTube versions of the speech.  “Tell them about the dream!”. 

    M.L. King listened.  He got it.  He understood.  He seized the moment.  He was able to improvise, turning an ordinary speech into one of the most extraordinary orations in history.  He did this with a combination of spontaneity – he probably made the decision to add the “I have a dream” segment in a split second – and discipline, because he had given the “dream” segment before, prepared it, thought about it, and it was like a perfectly designed suit of clothes ready to be taken out of its wrapping and worn immediately. 

    Spontaneity, and discipline – the oil-and-water combination that when combined, create history-making innovation.  This for me is one of the messages of M.L. King’s wonderful speech.

Innovation Blog

No-Huddle Offense in Oregon: ‘Subtraction’ Wins Again

By Shlomo Maital

  Chip Kelly, Oregon Ducks Coach   

For years, in college football, University of Oregon was a laughingstock, playing in the tough Pac-10 conference against superior teams with winning records and even national championships.  Even its name arouses laughter:  The Ducks.  Ducks??? The fighting (quacking) ducks?  Pit a ‘duck’ mascot against, say, an Indian warrior mounted on a Palomino pony, or a bulldog? 

     What do you do to create a winning team?  Well – innovate. But how?  Football is a century-old game with a lot of proven rules.  Why not try breaking a rule? Perhaps a key one?  Let’s say – the rule that the quarterback calls the offensive plays in a ‘huddle’. 

      One of the proven principles of innovation is ‘subtraction’ – take the key ingredients of a product or service, then remove one of them, and see what happens.  OK – let’s take away the huddle and see what happens, said innovative Oregon Coach Chip Kelly.  Take away the huddle???  How then can the quarterback call plays?  Perhaps – just audibly, right at the line of scrimmage. 

Kelly’s innovative, spread-option, no-huddle offense thrives on speed.  Run a play. Race to the ball. Run another play. And so forth.  No huddle.  You only wait for the referee to ‘spot’ the ball…and off we go.  Give the opposition no time to gather their thoughts and organize defense.  Start the offensive play quickly, before the defenders can even figure out what play you’re likely to run. 

   At times Oregon takes only nine seconds from the end of the previous play to the snap of the new one.  National Football League teams have used no-huddle offense, mainly toward the end of the game, when they lack time-outs and have to race against the clock to score.  But Oregon, under coach Chip Kelly, uses it all the time, every time, every offensive play. It has even led opponents to feign injuries, just to stop the clock and slow down the superfast Oregon juggernaut. 

    According to USAToday:  “They are so good at it, and so fast at it, that a typical game sees them run about 80 plays and score about 50 points, which is the biggest reason the Ducks are playing for a national championship.”

    And play they did. Improbably, Oregon played in the Bowl Championship Game against Auburn, for the title of National US #1 College Team. 

    They lost.  But so what?  They made it to the championship for the first time, they played well in a hard-fought close game.  And they proved that creativity and innovation, through ‘subtraction’, can offset other disadvantages and create competitive advantages that can take you (almost) to the top.

    Look for Chip Kelly to make it to the NFL as head coach.  And look for other teams to emulate Oregon’s amazing innovation.

Innovation Blog

Wikipedia – 10 Years Old!   When Vision Defeats Greed

By Shlomo Maital

  Jimmy Wales

On Jan. 15, Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia whose entries are written by the users and readers themselves, celebrates its 10^th anniversary.   What can we learn from Wikipedia’s decade of innovation?

  An entire new discipline known as wikinomics has sprung up, based on the notion of products and services created and developed by the users themselves.  Many companies, notably Procter & Gamble and Lego, have enlisted users successfully as an integral part of their product development, and MIT Professor Eric von Hippel has written a book about democratizing innovation (to be consistent, he offers free downloads).  Lately, IBM and other global firms have implemented versions of this idea.

  Founder (co-founder?) Jimmy Wales could have made a huge fortune from Wikipedia, because it is one of the websites that attracts the most eyeballs, and that could easily be transformed into advertising revenues.  But he refuses.  His vision is to retain the popular open flavor of Wikipedia and stay away from revenue, bottom-line and money-making and wealth creation.  I salute him.  There aren’t many entrepreneurs who willingly turn down a check for $1 billion. 

   Wikipedia has many many flaws.  Some of its material has clear biases, written by those pushing a special interest.  Some of its material is inaccurate.  Political wars are fought in Wikipedia.  Yet for sheer ease in getting basic facts about almost anything, Wikipedia is unrivalled.  It has changed the way I work and write, and I am sure has changed the world for millions of others.  

    Wikipedia has some 3.5 million articles in English alone. According to one of its principals, Susan Gardner, Wikipedia’s vision is  “to offer “the sum total of all human knowledge” in the native language of all of Wikipedia’s users.  This vision reminds me of Google.  Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, sought to bring all the information in any language to any person, at any time.  But Google took a commercial route, with advertising revenue and an IPO.   It reportedly has over $30 b. in cash stashed away, waiting for its next strategic play.   

    In contrast, Wikipedia relies on contributions, struggles to raise money, depends on hard-working volunteers, and steadfastly refuses to play the capitalist game.  Instead it wants to implement its vision, bringing all the knowledge to everyone, anywhere, in any language. 

    The big question is, can Wikipedia triumph and implement its vision without resources, without a true business model?  Would it serve its users better with an advertising business model?  Jimmy Wales is steadfast.  Let’s wish him well, and follow this wonderful experiment with interest and affection.

Innovation Blog

Oh, Say, Can YOU See?  Innovating the EyeGym

By Shlomo Maital

Sherylle Calder

   A former South African women’s hockey team member, Sherylle Calder, has made a breakthrough innovation in performance enhancement in sport.  She did it by introspection – by understanding her own special gift,  then developing methods to help others acquire it.  And she has proven results: She helped coach two World Cup rugby champions, South Africa and England to world titles. 

        The basic idea is simple.  Athletes need superb eye-hand coordination, and eye-feet coordination.  Training methods focus on the hands, the feet, the body – strengthening muscles, and making them quicker and more resilient and durable.  But what about the ‘eye’, a heretofore neglected aspect of physical ability?  Is vision simply a ‘given’, determined by DNA?  Nothing, in fact, is wholly determined by DNA – everything can be improved, by hard work.

       Calder developed a series of pathbreaking eye exercises, in what she calls the EyeGym, to improve what players see on the field.  I imagine she works on peripheral vision, and on quickening reaction time to what the eye sees, and in particular, to anticipating where the play will move to, on the field.  “You have eyes in the back of your head”, she was told, when she played field hockey.  And that is literally true.  The brain can cooperate with the eyes, to translate what the eyes see into a near-term scenario, what will happen a second from now, or a split-second.

     Introspection and empathy are powerful tools for innovators.  First introspection. What do you do well, or what do you know, or what skill do you have, that are distinct and special?  What is special about them?  Second, empathy.  How can you apply those skills, to help those who may not have them?  Can you teach them? Can they be developed?  How did YOU acquire them? Can others follow suit?  And can you apply Malcolm Gladwell’s approach – 10,000 hours – can you invest 10,000 hours to sharpen a skill, insight or competency, and transform it from something unusual to truly extraordinary? And, can you make a living doing it?

•  Developing a better eye for the game, by Emma Stoney.  Global New York Times, Tuesday Jan. 11, 2011.