Exploring innovation by blogging the bloggers
As part of my Exploring Innovation project, I spent my second week with the Barbarian Group, a digital services and creative company. In particular, I spent most of my time with Noah Brier, the Head of Strategic Planning, and Ben Palmer, the CEO. I had a great time hanging around with Noah, Ben, Michelle and Stephanie at the Barbarian Group. Right now, they’re going around visiting different GE sites and then blogging about what they see - so I guess I had the ironic role of blogging on the bloggers!
I happened to join them on a trip to GE Healthcare, which for an aerospace guy, is liking visiting a different world. I learned so much about MRIs, CT scanners, X-rays and then a whole bunch about healthcare in general – with a really fascinating look at future technologies. I was really impressed that GE is at the forefront of trying to come-up with solutions for the healthcare system – and not just for specific medical equipment. Ben and Noah have had a chance to visit Global Research, GE Healthcare in Milwaukee, Maternal Infant Care in Maryland, the GE Healthymagination launch in D.C., and even the top of a wind turbine in Massachusetts. After these experiences, I had an opportunity to catch-up with Ben and get his thoughts.
From the perspective of innovation, I learned quite a bit. I am still trying to sort through it in my head, but there are a few things that really stood out. One thing is that a lot of the folks I met are involved in something based off the internet, and their medium is information. This is pretty fascinating environment. Because the “barrier to entry” is so low, it’s relatively easy to very quickly try many different things on the web – and just see which one sticks. And that appears to be one of the keys to coming up with ideas… many cheap and quick iterations to maximize your ability to learn. I am trying to figure out how to apply this to my world, where it simply isn’t practical to build 10 different designs for a jet engine (at billions of dollars and many years of development) – and then take the best one – we’d go out of business! But it is something we can do on a smaller scale in the lab. Also, the other thing that caught my eye was the world of social media. Noah and Ben taught me a lot about this new world (for me). I’ve always used the web as a source of information and entertainment, but Noah taught me that there’s much more. The web is a fascinating place to try all kinds of experiments about human behaviour, as well as a place to gather data about humans. As more and more of the world comes on-line, the web offers the opportunity of one of the greatest social experiments of all time. One of the neatest things is the ability to infer “megatrends” and datamine aggregate trends based on “grass-roots” data from individuals around the world. To me, this brings to mind my earlier blog from SU where Paul Saffo talked about the new economy where individuals behave like consumers and workers at the same time. Somehow, this all ties together – I am still trying to figure out what it all means.
I like GE Adventure blog with its exquisite posts right from the beginning!