<<First Name>>, did you know that people feared vacuum robots? When Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot asked customers if they would like a vacuum robot, all of them responded with a shocked "NO WAY!!!"
As Helen found out, people imagined a humanoid looking robot holding a vacuum cleaner. Once Helen showed them the design of the Roomba, their opinion changed. And today we have vacuum robots for which you can by clothing. People give them nicknames, and when a Roomba is defect, their owners don't want to send them in, but keep asking iRobot for sending a robot ambulance.
"A robot will be truly autonomous when you instruct it to go to work and it decides to go to the beach instead.” - Brad Templeton, Software Engineer
Why do people call for a robot ambulance? Turns out that human interaction is relayed to robots as well. A robot with a little quirk that looks cute and is non-threatening will be treated as human. This is what US soldiers started doing with their robots and drones as well. Robots that that doctors in the robot-hospitals could not repair got proper military funerals by their platoons.
Human behaviors are becoming even more interesting now that autonomous robotic systems start flooding our private and professional lifes. And we will learn a lot about ourselves through that discipline.
October 29th, 2015 is A Day To Remember at Pier 70 in San Francisco.
If you want to hear my talk Respect Gets You No Innovation then buy tickets now!
The Creativity-technique of the day is Mimic Nature. This means taking inspirations from nature and applying them to your problem. Velcro has been inspired by burrs, or sonar by bats. Maybe you find something by observing nature that you can use for solving your problems.
A list of more creativity techniques can be found here.
We have protocols and exact plans for emergencies. When fire breaks out, we know how to react. When there is a hurricane coming in, we know what to do. We even do have a protocol of what to do when we discover aliens! Yes, The Atlantic magazine shared the the steps that astronomers are going to take if they discover an alien civilization.
But what is the plan when somebody says "I HAVE AN IDEA"? Ha, we don't have a plan. There is no protocol, no system rolling, no emergency support team flying in when an employee or team comes up with a creative idea that could be the next billion dollar thing. It's time to rethink a strategy for that. We need to treat innovation as a wanted emergency for which we have plans to make it something great.
News around Gamification has turned quiet and let many wonder (and some mischievously hope) whether this space is dead? Not so fast! Looking at the types of projects that I keep encountering I'd say it has moved from hype to proven concept. When insurances, software companies, leadership academies, education systems or banks are quietly installing and rolling out gamification designs, then you know it's a standard concept that just works.
Read more about Gamification by following the links below.
Volkswagen's Diesel cheating scandal is a larger sign that Innovation in German car manufacturers is not part of their DNA anymore. Although VW has the largest R&D budget of all publicly listed companies with $13.9bn (followed by Samsung with $13.5bn), all the money in the world didn't seem to help them to innovate and do good.
BMW on the other hand builds the BMW i3, which is not only an ugly duckling, but also dramatically disappointing in the performance features of what an electric car should be. You ask yourself if they just put a team on the car that couldn't get into other projects.
Then Daimler (and Toyota) were bashed by Elon Musk when he said that the reason for ending the cooperation between them and Tesla was Daimler's lack of ambition. Daimler just wanted to reach the minimal government requirements on emissions, while Tesla is aiming to change the world.
I could go on and you cannot but wonder, did Germany's automotive industry become too fat, too complacent, and just give up?
NSFW - ALIENS! OMG!!! Aliens Harvesting Energy From Their Star
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - comes from a far place. A very far place. To be precise: 1,480 light years from here. Researchers and volunteers discovered strong and unexplainable levels of fluctuations in the light intensity of a star with the telling name KIC 8462852. By looking for stars that have planets, those fluctuations indicate planets orbiting. Stars with planets have fluctuations that are normally below 5%. But this star has irregular fluctuations of over 20%. Whoooohoooo! A dust cloud from comets? A dirt speck on the Kepler observatory's mirror?
Astronomers are now speculating that this could be maybe perhaps with low probability very unlikely certainly not at all - oh fuck it: ALIENS!!!! FREAKING AWESOME!!! ALIENS!!! Yes, maybe this is a a Dyson sphere of a Type II alien civilization. Read more about some alien mega-structures here.
