Critical Resource Efficiency
What could be more important in the coming years than improving our ability to sustainably grow food with the ever more constrained resources of our planet, for a growing population? The short answer is; not much if anything. Despite the pressing importance of this need, relatively little innovation has happened in the area of revolutionary new agricultural processes, while a good deal is being spent on cool (yet environmentally dubious, at best) ways to commute for example.
Today I came across a promising start-up company that appears to be trying to do something meaningful in this regard. They are introducing a Hydrogel based technology and are attempting to pioneer a business model that will help expand potential arable land to cover marginally productive areas, and to dramatically reduce precious water use.
While it is true that other companies have started with the focus to improve water use efficiency among other goals, most depend on non sustainable processes that centre around aquaponics, and the few that don’t only focus on water and are still heavily dependent on an injection of man made nutriants – again non sustainable, at least given today’s technologies.
Agricel is attempting to improve both water and nutrient efficiency. They are, however, a very young company and it is impossible to assess their chances of meaningful success at this point.
Lessons in Innovation
The success of Apple and the cult of Steve Jobs have contributed to placing Design and Innovation front and center in the board rooms of the corporate world today. There are, however, even better examples for small businesses of the power and success of this approach in much smaller companies as well. New York based Dror is one such example. A furnishings designer who set up shop in New York 10 years ago and began expanding his scope into other areas including Architecture. In the following video presentation from the Indaba conference last year, Dror Benshetrit speaks about several projects, including his latest venture, entitled QuaDror – a structural support system.
QuaDror debut at Design Indaba conference from Dror on Vimeo.
Three important points related to pragmatic innovation come across quite clearly. They are:
- Innovation requires suspending practical concerns during the early ideation phase – to step back into your inner child in order to explore the solution space much more fully. This is not novel, as many writers have discussed this to death in the past. Dror, however, makes the point that you then need to bring in the engineers to make the ideas real, and it is surprising how they can then find practical solutions to even the most outlandish ideas, if then understand that is the key objective.
- There is tremendous power of a single unifying concept in guiding the early ideation phase, and perhaps more importantly, to guide the subsequent engineering phase. This becomes the projects design (or basic pattern) language. This principle is also invaluable to marketing the proposal.
- A single unifying concept (or design element/language) can provide the cornerstone of value creation. Once discovered, the real work begins around identifying potential applications and a value creating ecosystem to leverage the concept. That is the domain of the entrepreneur.
Will Crowdfunding Revolutionize Small Business?
Just like the adoption of stock option compensation in the 60′s inspired a boom in startup creation and tech innovation in California, the Jobs Act that includes provisions for enabling crowdfunding of businesses, promises a further boom to entrepreneurialism in the US. The miserable state of the US economy has already lead to an increase in entrepreneurism. And investment capital is again flowing thanks in part to the improved state of IPOs. Crowdfunding (analogous to Kickstarter) promises to make such capital even more readily available, and could promote a startup bubble in tech hotspots like California.
It is expected that money could rush in, as people all over the world get a chance to invest directly in a portfolio of risky early stage ventures that previously were the domain of large VCs and well heeled Angel investors. As Naval Ravikant noted in a recent Financial Times article, however, some extra safe guards included in the Jobs Act in order to protect the investor, may drive some of the best qualified start-ups to the traditional funding route. In the process this may leave the runt of the litter to the crowd funders. Given the dependence of a fund’s success on the top performing startups, the financial performance of crowd funded investments could be undermined in the process.
As a result, the jury is still out on the long run implications, but in the short term, it will likely lead to another burst of start-up creation in the US.
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Welcome to Lean by Design
This site captures some of my thoughts on software technology and implications for knowledge worker productivity.
The focus of this Blog has shifted away from Telecommunications and Embedded software in particular, to the more general application of these technologies to productivity. Productivity has become a clear imperative for knowledge based industries, from Software Product companies themselves to Health Care service providers. They are all struggling under extreme competitive pressures to improve productivity in order to survive and prosper in today's complex economy.
Software has become central to the value proposition for virtually all major industries. Managing the opportunities and risks associated with software tools has become a critical success factor. The purpose of this blog is to explore the broad area of software centric tools and methodologies to improve knowledge worker's productivity.
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