Call me selfish, but I’ve never been a big fan of charity. I don’t mean things like giving time or money to help find a cure for cancer or to help the EFF to keep fighting for freedom. I’m happy to give a little to the EFF. I don’t like charity that’s just a hand out. I don’t care if its to corporations or individuals. I think its entirely counter productive and cultivates dangerous dependencies.

This is why I love the idea behind Kiva. Kiva connects people in developing nations who need micro investments with people who want to give micro investments. Each investment seeker works with a local NGO, posts a profile of themselves, thier need, thier projected repayment period and the amount of investment (rarely anything over $1000). Kiva shows you a bar of how much of their needed investment has been contributed so far.

I dropped into my new Kiva account $50 that has just been sitting in my PayPal account for months doing nothing. You probably have a few dollars sitting you PayPal as well, also doing nothing. I then looked over a number of business opportunities in areas of the world I’m interested in helping, and loaned $25 each to two latin american women trying to grow their little shops.

Check out Maria Pilco and Melvis Merchan. I know my portfolio isn’t terribly diversified, but these businesses had the shortest repayment periods, and I want to see if this really works before investing more. Remember, this ain’t charity.

I don’t know if they actually get the money (Kiva promises the businesses get 100% of your loan), or if I’ll ever see it returned. But for $50, and the amount of good a model like this could do in the world, I feel that its more than worth the risk.

“The problem is not ignorance, it is preconveived ideas”

This is so worth watching on so many levels. TED had some good stuff, some not so good stuff, and some stuff that seemed good on the surface but in retrospect wasn’t that good.

This one, however, is great. Watch this for the content of Rosling’s insight. Watch this for the powerful presentation of these insights in motion graphics. Indeed this might just be the first use of motion graphics I’ve seen where the motion actually conveys insight.

Watch the video, and if you want to play with Hans’s data yourself, head over to gapminder.org for all of his fully interactive charts. You will be further amazed by both the content and it powerful presentation.

click to watch this video on NibTV:

I posted an example of how bad branding by committee can be. But committees are not alone in their capacity to produce crap.

I used to work for a publishing company many years ago. The owner would bring in graphics done by his nephew for our opinion. They were without exception, attrocious. Of course we lied. But we were careful not to lie so strongly that the owner would actually consider putting his newphew on staff. Forever more we called all bad graphic arts, nephew art.

Looks like more than just a few nephews have been busy making logos for hockey teams:

http://mirtle.blogspot.com/2006/09/worst-hockey-logos-of-all-time.html

Oh the humanity!

It feels like I’ve been fighting an uphill battle about what design really is and is not. Time for another round…

It pains me to read someone claim that people who can draw well are good designers. It pains me even more to read this nonsense repeated by one of my favourite blogs. *sigh*

Folks design is not about drawing. Design is an endeavour to model and solve the problems people experience. Drawing, on the other hand, is about expression and communication. It has no necessary connection with problem analysis or solution synthesis. And even when drawing proves to be an important design tool, drawing skill is largely irrelevant.

Here’s some purely anecdotal evidence. I know people who are wonderful illustrators, but have no ability to grasp experiential problems nor to think of new solutions. I also know people who can reveal incredible insights into problems and concieve of brilliant solutions, but couldn’t draw to save their lives.

As Despair.com says, none of us are as dumb as all of us. The mathematics of group dynamics seems to agree. If I have half a brain, and you have half a brain, and George down the hall has half a brain, that comes to just over 1/10 of a whole brain (.5 x .5 x .5 = .0125).

So, what do you get when you apply that kind of brain power to branding? Well you get this.

I have a new HP, and IE’s search shows what can only be described as brand diarrhea. Good Lord! Am I using AOL, HP, Compaq, Google, Microsoft?? Why not throw in Burger King and Restoration Hardware as well? AOL?!?! How the hell did that get on my computer? And did you notice that 1/3 of all the words are “search”?? I realize this is a search tool because I clicked on IE’s search button. Jesus, even I’m not that forgetful.

This is so craptacular it could only have come from a committee.

(speaking of the stupidity multiplcation table, what happens when you multiply failure by failure? Well Ford and GM might be about to show us)

I’m sure this is frequently complained about elsewhere. So now its my turn. I am increasingly offended by blatent corporate blog astroturfing. IBM provides two great examples of bullshit in blog’s clothing.

The first is thier Next Level Blog 2006, a blog ostensibly about innovation. And the second is HealthNex. This one particularly bad. I haven’t found a single post that isn’t a commercial for the corporation or some corporate product.

I don’t really have a point with this, other than it makes me mad. Grr.

Its hard to really know for sure if this is true viable, it is a fascinating new approach to air travel from a purely technological perspective. While this may not the perfect solution, we need a lot more thinking like this in aviation, healthcare, government, everywhere.

watch:

In my effort to ripoff myself, I thought I’d start by outlining what i mean by innovation and other related terms.

My working definition of innovation refers to a capitalization on new business opportunities through new products, services, processes or experiences (collectively referred to simply as product hereafter). New ideas that cannot be tied to business opportunities may be wonderfully creative, but ultimately inert in terms of capitalization, and so fail my working definition.

Opportunities are situations that afford both a chance to create value for someone or something at a profit in some new or unique way, and a chance to achieve and maintain a position of competitive advantage.

Now here is where things get a little controversial. I believe that people and organizations are more strongly averse to pain than they are attracted to pleasure. This negative motivation means that one will most consistently provide higher value by helping to alleviate pain. This is of course a philosophical position I cannot (yet) prove with empirical evidence.

I’m defining pain to refer to a problem that 1) costs a subject time, money and/or attention, 2) the subject experiencing the problem accurately recognizes it, and 3) the problem is sufficiently acute to warrant spending time, money, and/or attention to alleviate it.

Pain then boils down to cost, in terms of time, money and attention (and in the case of consumers, perhaps personal ego as well). If the cost to alleviate the pain is less than the cost of living with it, we have ourselves a business opportunity ripe for a great new innovation to capitalize on. Please forgive the Fischer-Price economics—I’m just trying to lay some very basic definitions.

With consumers it appears most (if not all) pains are costs related to at least one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or another needs hierarchy like Clayton Alderfer’s ERG). Henry spends a lot of money on diet books because he feels that his weight is costing him more in terms of belongingness than the books cost financially. Buying these books is his way to solve the pain of not belonging to his perception of a certain group.

These definitions raise further questions, such as:

• Other than pain what else can give rise to business opportunities?
• Should focusing on pain differ between consumers and businesses (what pain does the iPod solve? and is that why people are snapping them up?)
• Are there pains other than time/money/attention/ego costs that give rise to business opportunities?
• Does something like Maslow seem appropriate for classifying pains?
• Could it provide some insight into pains in order to drive innovative solutions, or is it just too academic?
• Is there a similar needs hierarchy for business customers, or does Maslow apply to businesses too?

Niblettes is 1 year old now. Isn’t that like middle-aged in the blogosphere?
(did I really say ‘blogoshphere?)

So for my next couple of posts, I will dust off a few of my very early posts and see how they’ve held up over the past year.

This might be the coolest video I’ve seen online. Sure kids these days might have mySpace, but we had funked up Stevie Wonder singing Superstition live on Sesame Street.

What does this have to do with design or innovation? Well watch the video and compare it to, say, the VMA. On the one hand we have an increidbly cool, intimate and authentic experience. On the other we have generic, prefabbed, homogenized posing. What is an authetic, from the heart, expereince worth to you?

(yes folks, those are real musicians playing real instruments, live. who knew?)

watch: