Martin Gilliard

About Martin Gilliard

Posts by Martin Gilliard:

Sometimes taking a break and listening to music and having a solo dance party helps me.

by Marla Padilla
(Hesperia, California )

Want to listen to endless music then why not try Amazon Prime music! (affiliate link).

December 1963…

How do they take those movies of skiers winding down the slopes? Professional photographer Red Allin does it this way. He attaches his camera to his helmet (for a total weight of 18 pounds) and takes his pictures while skiing with his subjects.

He is shown at Mount Snow, Vt., while shooting a ski-safety film for Aetna Life Affiliates of Hartford, Connecticut.

In modern times you would probably use a Go Pro such as this one sold on Amazon (affiliate link).

Return To Historic Inventions

I once got even with someone by posting his name and phone number on a gay dating website.

The message said, “call anytime and give a graphic description of what you would like to do to me”.

He got so many offers and explicit messages on his voicemail that he finally had to have his phone number changed!

Return to revenge ideas

July 1963…

Mirror helps level level.

You could make an ordinary bubble level do a transit’s work by clipping on this recently patented side mirror.

To establish a true horizontal line at a distance, you’d watch the bubble’s reflection while sighting along the top of the level, adjusting to center the bubble.

With the mirror folded in, you’d use the level as usual.

Return To Creative Ideas

Remember a time when innovation wasn’t just about the next big app or electric supercar? Imagine a world where quirky, practical, and downright fun personal transport solutions were just as exciting. Back in April 1963, something small but mighty rolled out, promising a delightful blend of transportation and sheer enjoyment: the midget scooter, affectionately known as the Wren.

This wasn’t some hulking gas-guzzler; the Wren was a marvel of efficiency. It could effortlessly whisk you along at 35 miles per hour, all while squeezing an astonishing 125 miles out of a single gallon of gas. That’s better fuel economy than most modern cars can dream of! It’s a testament to how creative minds tackled the challenge of personal mobility long before the current focus on sustainability became a mainstream driver.

The Little Scooter That Could: A Closer Look at the Wren

Manufactured by Bird Engineering in Omaha, the Wren was a cleverly designed machine. It boasted a compact 38-inch wheelbase, making it incredibly maneuverable, and tipped the scales at a mere 62 pounds. Think about that – you could likely lift it with one hand! This feather-light design was crucial for its portability and easy handling.

At its core, the Wren featured an automatic centrifugal clutch, a piece of engineering that simplified operation significantly. No complicated gear shifting here; just twist and go. This focus on ease of use aligns perfectly with modern principles of User-Centric Product Innovation, ensuring the product was accessible and enjoyable for a wide range of users.

For its time, the Wren retailed at $100. While that might sound like a small sum today, adjusting for inflation, it represented a significant but accessible investment for personal transportation. This affordability, combined with its economical operation, made it an appealing alternative for commuters and hobbyists alike.

Lessons from the Wren: Echoes in Modern Innovation

The Wren, though a niche product of its era, offers surprisingly relevant insights for today’s innovators. Its success lay in a clear understanding of its target audience and a focused approach to design, embodying many aspects of what we now recognize as Design Thinking for Product Development.

The Power of Simplicity and Efficiency

The Wren’s remarkable fuel efficiency and lightweight construction highlight a timeless principle: focus on core functionality and optimize for it. This echoes the philosophy behind the Lean Startup for Creative Ventures, which prioritizes building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that solves a specific problem effectively. Similarly, early innovators like those during The Industrial Revolution’s Creative Spark often achieved breakthroughs by perfecting fundamental mechanics before layering on complexity.

Embracing Micro-Mobility’s Roots

Long before electric scooters flooded city sidewalks, the Wren was a pioneer in micro-mobility. It addressed the need for affordable, efficient, and fun personal transport. This concept is incredibly relevant today as cities grapple with congestion and pollution, leading to a resurgence in demand for such compact vehicles. The principles behind its design could inform modern approaches to Service Design Thinking Foundations, where the user experience of moving through urban environments is paramount.

Think of it like this: If designing a complex software, focusing first on a stable, fast, and intuitive core feature, much like the Wren’s simple mechanics, is often more effective than trying to build everything at once. This is a core tenet in Agile Product Development for Innovation, where iterative improvements based on user feedback lead to a more robust final product.

Budgeting for the Bold

The $100 price tag for the Wren also brings to mind the importance of Creative Project Budgeting. While the Wren was a physical product, the mindset of delivering significant value at an accessible price point is universal. This often requires smart resource allocation and a clear understanding of the return on investment, a challenge faced whether you’re budgeting for a scooter factory or a software startup.

Can We Still Learn from the Wren Today?

Absolutely! The Wren’s story reminds us that innovation isn’t always about the biggest, fastest, or most complex. Sometimes, it’s about elegant simplicity, extreme efficiency, and understanding the simple joys of movement. This is where modern tools can help us rediscover such principles:

Ideation Techniques: We can use modern Brainstorming Strategies to think about simple solutions to complex problems, much like Bird Engineering did.
Prototyping: Imagine using Digital Prototyping Tools or even 3D Printing for Concept Exploration to quickly test small, efficient vehicle designs.
AI Assistance: While the Wren predates AI, we can leverage tools like Generative AI for Artistic Expression to visualize new micro-mobility concepts or even use AI for simulations to predict efficiency.

The Wren may be a relic of the past, but its spirit of innovation—focused, efficient, and fun—lives on. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the smallest packages deliver the biggest breakthroughs. Understanding its context helps us appreciate the long journey of personal transportation and inspires us to seek out those elegant solutions that make life easier and more enjoyable.

Learn more about the history of personal flight and transport

More companies are outsourcing innovation which is in part due to global markets, geographically dispersed subject matter experts, and a faster emergence of disruptive technologies.

Companies may also choose to outsource in an effort to lower their research and design costs or when they are trying to tap into a market that they have little knowledge or experience. Sometimes they may outsource simply because the project does not fit strategically with their core competencies or to avoid internal bureaucracy and politics or because they have limited resources.

Done well outsourcing innovation has the potential to reduce risks, reduce cycle times, and lower innovation costs.

Research by Linder, Jarvenpaa, and Davenport in their 2003 paper “Toward an innovation sourcing strategy” highlights that 45 percent of innovations originate from external sources and this figure is nearer the 90 percent mark for service-based industries.

SUCCESS DRIVERS FOR OUTSOURCING INNOVATION

Building a high degree of trust and strong communication channels with your innovation partner. Meet and communicate regularly and build trust by doing what you said you would do.
Ensuring that your partner has the appropriate knowledge, competencies, and resources to complete the project. Check for evidence of competence by analyzing your partner’s efforts on previous projects.
Ensuring that you as the purchaser of the innovation have enough related knowledge. Outsourcing a project in which you have no related knowledge is highly risky.
Having the problem clearly defined. This is a success driver for most projects but needs to be mentioned as it is essential for an outsourced innovation project in which the uncertainties are much greater. Define the problem, define the business case, and define your success metrics, goals, or targets. To reduce the likelihood of disagreements further down the road define these in a legal drafted statement-of-work and master service agreement documents. Meet with your partner to discuss and ensure an understanding of the statement of work prior to signing.
Define the key stakeholders of the project and enable communication channels to these stakeholders on a regular basis.
Employ an experienced project manager to manage the project. The project manager can report back in monthly or weekly meetings on progress related to defined milestones.
Involve your customers: Reach out to them for ideas, requirements, and expectations. However, be aware that they can be a source of risk for radical innovations.

Service innovation can be a significant aspect of a business’s strategy.

We all know how important good service is. Good service leads to happy customers and “word of mouth” based referrals. Bad service gives the exact opposite, an unhappy customer and one who is ready to inform as many people as possible of the bad service received.

DEFINITION

Service innovations are defined as new services offered by organizations to meet an external user or market need. Three types have been identified.

Total innovations: These provide new services to new users
Existing services: Provided to a new user group and therefore expanding the reach of the service
Evolutionary innovations: Delivering a new service to an existing set of users

EXAMPLES

Examples of businesses that have based much of their core strategy on an innovative service model include:

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

Started in Texas on March 15, 1967, by Rollin King and Herb Kelleher, WestJet transformed the airline service model by offering cheap fares, frequent service, and fun for its customers. It was originally developed to compete with on-ground bus and automobile services. Its innovative service led to SouthWest being one of the most profitable airlines in the United States. Many other airlines copied their innovative ideas towards service, including Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe and WestJet in Canada.

DELL COMPUTERS

Dell revolutionized the service delivery model of computers by cutting out the middleman and selling its custom made personal computers directly to the end customer. Later they also made innovative changes to their supply chain management which ultimately led to them being one of the most successful computer manufacturers in the world.

REFERENCES

Katz R (2009) The Innovators Toolkit – 10 Practical Strategies to Help You Develop and Implement Innovation, Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing

Walker, Richard M (2008) An Empirical Evaluation of Innovation Types and Organizational and Environmental Characteristics: Towards a Configuration Framework, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, Vol. 18 Issue 4, p591-615

A warm welcome to the promoting creativity page.

If you manage or supervise people then one of your objectives should be to get people interested and focussed on being more creative.

Spurring people to be creative and ultimately innovative is good for you and the organization that you work for.

The trick though is to encourage creativity with subtlety. Creativity just doesn’t happen if people are put under pressure to be creative.

To promote creativity within your team consider the following areas…

PASSION

People tend to be most creative when pursuing something which they are passionate about so look for work areas that your subordinates excel in and encourage them to excel yet further in these areas by learning new knowledge. This can then be combined with knowledge of creativity techniques so as to look at work areas or work problems from new perspectives.

MANAGEABLE RISKS

Encourage your team to take small and manageable risks. Experimentation is key to the creative learning process. Praise failed experiments as these provide new knowledge in terms of what won’t work as a creative solution. Thomas Alva Edison one of the greatest innovators of recent times would conduct thousands of experiments in his quest for new innovative products.

OWNERSHIP

One primary method for encouraging creativity is to give your team members a sense of ownership of a particular project and a degree of autonomy in terms of how that project is completed. Let your people determine the constraints and parameters of the project don’t define these for them.

AWARDS AND REWARDS

What may surprise you is that rewards can deter the creative process. People need to have the intrinsic motivation to complete the project by themselves. If you need to award (bribe) an individual to be creative then they don’t have the appropriate interest required to be creative with the project in the first place.

Awards and rewards must be used carefully…

use them to celebrate milestones.
Do not formally mention that rewards will be given on successful completion at the start of a project.
Do give rewards and recognition even when projects fail. After all, if you are promoting creativity then you should be rewarding the creative effort and not the outcome of that effort. This should act as a powerful motivator for your team.

FUN AND ENJOYMENT

Tests have concluded that if you put two separate groups working creatively on the same problem domain; let’s say Group A and Group B and Group A is informed that they are competing against Group B whereas Group B is informed to simply have as much fun as possible the Group B will be the most creative.

So to conclude from this try and avoid getting your team members to compete with one another instead try and instill a sense of fun and enjoyment with the problems that people are addressing. Competition only adds to the pressure which can act as a barrier to creativity.

Managing Creativity and Innovation (amazon affiliate link) is a key management skill these days with many managers expected to drive more and more innovations forward in order to increase competitive advantage.

In order to be able to manage innovation, the manager should be first aware of the different types of innovation.

In particular, she should know the difference between radical innovations and incremental innovations as well as process innovation and service innovation.

Ideas provide the creative input to the management process and therefore managers should be aware of techniques to enhance creativity.

Scanning the external environment can aid in finding new ideas, you should monitor customers, suppliers, competitors, and any news bulletins or journals directly related to the markets in which your organization operates. In fact, a term has been defined specifically related to reaching beyond your internal environment with respect to innovation – see open market innovation for further details.

Also, you should attempt to define the culture (create an environment where people at all levels feel free to generate ideas – see the suggestion box article. If people feel that their thoughts and ideas will be valued then they are more likely to come forward with new ideas.

All ideas should be documented and the best chosen based on potential market value and costs/resources available. It is important not to outright dismiss any ideas not chosen for immediate implementation.

Keep detailed documentation of all ideas as they may prove useful as the market or circumstances change.

The innovation process is an inherently complex process and is therefore difficult to predict or control and occasionally innovations simply emerge by luck, chance or just being in the right place at the right time rather than good management. Take the examples of:

3M scotch guard where the product was accidentally spilled on a tennis shoe and the material was noted to stay clean of stains for longer, or post-it notes, which were a result of glue that wasn’t quite sticky enough.
Or consider the Splenda sweetener product which originally started out as an insecticide product but when a chemist was told to test the product he mistakenly read the word test as taste, which he did despite the fact that the product could have potentially been extremely toxic!
And then there is the discovery of penicillin that came about when Alexander Fleming was curious as to why bacteria would not grow near the penicillin fungus on his desk. This discovery ultimately changed life forever by saving millions of people from potentially fatal bacterial infections.

A core challenge related to managing creativity and innovation is stimulating and motivating people to come forward with ideas – the creativity aspect. Then determining which ideas are worthy of pursuing further, followed by a strong method to quickly put the idea into action – the organization and management aspect of the process.

When choosing an idea you should know what you are, what you do, and where you are going in terms of the organization in which you operate. Look closely at your mission statement, company values, and major strategic direction. Ensure ideas that are put forward for implementation complement this.

When ideas are converted into innovation projects ensure that you have key stakeholder buy-in and that you have defined what is in scope and out of scope with all of the major deliverables defined.

While managing creativity and innovation, try to get your team to complete something quickly this will help them maintain momentum you might consider starting with a prototype to better aid approval and buy in from key stakeholders. Once complete and you have something to demonstrate then look at making incremental improvements.

On the way, you will probably make mistakes as change is inherently risky and therefore always raises the possibility of mistakes. Take mistakes as learning opportunities and pick yourself and your team up as quickly as possible and move on. It is better to make mistakes and move in a positive forward direction than it is to simply maintain the status quo.

Managing creativity is key to competitive advantage because the successful generation and exploitation of ideas are essential for sustained success in the marketplace.

DEFINITIONS

It is probably best to start with an understanding of exactly what is innovation and a definition of creativity as the two are often used interchangeably, however, there is a clear distinction.

Creativity is the thinking that puts forward different understandings of a situation whereas innovation is the actual implementation of creative ideas, which often results in a new product, service, or process.

SOURCES OF CREATIVE IDEAS

When managing creativity you need to be aware of where creative ideas can originate…

Employees – Your employees work closely with your processes, day-to-day issues/problems, and with your customers. They will no doubt have very detailed knowledge of such and be in a position to recognize threats, opportunities and suggest ways that things could be improved.
Customers – Your customers are an important source of information. Customers usually purchase a product or service to assist then with some task, job, or requirement. Understanding that requirement and in particular how well you are meeting that requirement can be key. Listen, understand, and think about complaints, feedback and praise that you receive from your customers.
Suppliers – Relationships with suppliers can be used to your advantage. Look out for ideas and processes used by your supplier that could be translated over to your organization.
External environment – Ideas can come from many sources and therefore being aware of the environment beyond your organization is key. Read widely, newspapers, journal articles, trade / professional papers.
Chance – Creativity can often stem simply from some unplanned circumstances. For example, it is said that 3M’s Scotchgard product was developed after an employee spilled some chemicals on her running shoes and noticed that the area affected by the spill kept cleaner longer than the rest of her shoe.
Competitors – Actively seeking intelligence on your competitors can alert you to new developments, which in turn can lead to new ideas on how best to compete.

YOU SHOULD ALSO CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT OPEN FOR CREATIVITY

When managing creativity you should also allow your team to set aside time for being creative – for example, at Google staff are encouraged to set aside 20% of their time to work on projects unrelated to their main job.

Also…

Have a staff room or cafeteria where employees can chat with each other.
Have reading areas where employees can have quiet thinking time or can research a particular topic of interest.
Put in place web-based chat and knowledge management tools to enable employees to share ideas on projects or offer subject matter expert type information to other project teams.
Encourage a climate of creativity where people have respect for one another and where energy and enthusiasm rule the day. Limit rules and bureaucracy.
Set aside meeting times where ideas can be discussed in an open forum. Include all ideas, not just the ones that you think are good.
Encourage people to put forward ideas. Provide incentives and an idea submission box or a web-based tool for the submission of ideas.
Try and replace the tried and tested with the new and imaginative

PROMOTING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

Creative, value-driven ideas can form the basis of strong competitive advantage and are therefore advantageous to yourself and the organization that you work for. For this reason, when managing creativity it is also important to promote creativity and innovation within your team.

Welcome all ideas however ridiculous they may seem at first and praise people for coming forward with ideas. Use tact to graciously put aside any ideas that are unworkable. Don’t judge too quickly though… many great ideas are rejected prematurely due to not enough time been taken to make an informed decision. Please see how to judge creativity for a full article on this interesting topic.

Also consider that ideas that at first seem unusable could become useful in a different context, time period, or when combined with other ideas. For further details please visit promoting creativity.

USE TECHNIQUES FOR CREATIVITY

Creativity techniques can greatly assist the idea generation process an essential element of managing creativity…

Consider using such techniques as:

Brainstorming where you usually meet as a group and have an open-ended discussion related to generating new ideas. The key to this process is the logging of ideas i.e. no idea should be dismissed regardless of how crazy it may sound. Evaluation is kept for a later meeting.
Lateral thinking – pioneered by Edward De Bono is a method that encourages different ways of thinking by changing concepts and pre-conceptions
Mind mapping – developed by Tony Buzan is a tool that mirrors the way we map, link together, and retrieve facts in the brain. It uses pictures, images, and colors to further emphasize ideas.

CREATIVITY PROFILE

Visit the creativity profile page for information on undertaking a profile of your creative abilities.