From humble beginnings in a father’s living room, Ng Cheong Choon’s Rainbow Loom, a kit to make bracelets out of rubber bands, has skyrocketed in popularity; 600 retailers carry Rainbow Loom, and just over one million units have been sold at a retail price of $15-17

August 31, 2013

Rainbow Loom’s Success, From 2,000 Pounds of Rubber Bands

By CLAIRE MARTIN

Cheong Choon Ng, above, designed Rainbow Loom, a suddenly popular crafts kit that turns rubber bands into bracelets. The key to selling the kits, it turned out, was educating buyers about how to use them.

LAST weekend in Fair Harbor, N.Y., on Fire Island, a few dozen children gathered on the boardwalk for the local tradition of selling lemonade, baked goods and painted seashells to passers-by at sunset. Among the children was Julia Colen, a 12-year-old vacationer from New Jersey, who in addition to hawking cupcakes and drinks was presiding over a stand overflowing with brightly colored bracelets. Julia and a friend had made the jewelry out of tiny rubber bands, using a crafts kit called Rainbow Loom. “We had a lot, at least 100,” Julia estimated of their inventory, which they priced at $1 to $2 apiece. Sales were impressive that night — “we made like $68,” she said. Read more of this post

Innovation: Kite Mosquito Patch renders a person invisible to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours

Innovation: Kite Mosquito Patch

By Olga Kharif August 29, 2013

Innovators: Michelle Brown, Anandasankar Ray
Ages: 41, 39
Brown is chief scientist and Ray co-founder of Riverside (Calif.)-based Olfactor Laboratories.
Form and function: Kite Mosquito Patch, a nontoxic 1.5-inch-square sticker, renders a person invisible to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours.

Food companies and innovation: The Greek-yogurt phenomenon in America left big food firms feeling sour. They are trying to get better at innovation

Food companies and innovation: The Greek-yogurt phenomenon in America left big food firms feeling sour. They are trying to get better at innovation

Aug 31st 2013 |From the print edition

A Kurd and his whey-free way to success

FEW business careers have been as spectacular as Hamdi Ulukaya’s. He bought an 85-year-old yogurt factory in upstate New York in 2005 and sold his first pot of Chobani “Greek” yogurt 18 months later. This year he expects to sell more than $1 billion-worth of it. Greek-style yogurt’s share of America’s $6.1 billion market has risen from negligible when Chobani started to nearly half. “No category changed faster,” boasts Mr Ulukaya, the sole owner of the firm that makes Chobani. Read more of this post

Innovation isn’t an idea problem, but rather a biased recognition problem

Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem

by David Burkus  |   8:00 AM July 23, 2013

When most organizations try to increase their innovation efforts, they always seem to start from the same assumption: “we need more ideas.” They’ll start talking about the need to “think outside the box” or “blue sky” thinking in order to find a few ideas that can turn into viable new products or systems. However, in most organizations, innovation isn’t hampered by a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of noticing the good ideas already there. It’s not an idea problem; it’s a recognition problem. Read more of this post

The Picasso Effect: What The Success of Cubism Teaches Us About Radical Innovation

The Picasso Effect: What The Success of Cubism Teaches Us About Radical Innovation

ian leslie, August 6, 2013

Paris, 1907. In a ramshackle studio in Montmartre, a twenty-six year-old Spanish artist presented the painting he had been working on day and night for the best part of a year to a small group of fellow artists, dealers and friends. They were visibly aghast. One considered the work “a veritable cataclysm”. Another concluded that its creator must be on the brink of suicide. None could foresee that it would one day be considered the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The painting, then untitled, was later to become known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is credited as the first work of Cubism, and the catalyst for a revolution in Western art and culture. Read more of this post

MIT’s Innovators List

August 22, 2013, 3:45 PM

MIT’s Innovators List

By WSJ Staff

The MIT Technology Review, a Massachusetts-based technology publication has come out with its annual list of 35 innovators aged under 35. This year it features two men of south Asian origin. Balaji Srinivasan and Vijay Balasubramaniyan, both 33, made it to the coveted list, which celebrates young entrepreneurs and inventors, who have done exceptional work in the field of technology globally. People of south Asian origin and Indian-Americans have regularly featured on  MIT’s innovators list. This year, however their number has gone down. In 2012, five innovators on the list were of south Asian origin. The winners are selected by a panel of judges evaluate the candidates based on current trends in technology and the diversity of innovation. The list is divided into five sections: inventors, entrepreneurs, visionaries, humanitarians and pioneers. MIT selected Mr. Srinivasan as one of the top entrepreneurs. He is the founder of Counsyl Inc., a Silicon Valley startup that conducts low-cost, genetic tests on prospective parents that can identify if they are carrying genes capable of causing hereditary diseases in their children. Counsyl also won bronze in the The Wall Street Journal’s Innovation Awards in 2010. Mr. Srinivasan founded Counsyl in 2007 with his brother Ramji Srinivasan. Before that, he taught data mining, statistics, and computational biology in the department of statistics at Stanford University in California. The Srinivasan brothers’ father, however, didn’t want them to get into medicine and was keen for them to study computer science instead, notes the MIT Technology review. A Stanford alum, Mr. Srinivasan holds graduate, post-graduate and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. He also holds a Master’s degree in chemical engineering from Stanford. The other south Asian on the list, Vijay Balasubramaniyan is the co-founder of Pindrop Security. an Atlanta based company that tracks fraudulent phone calls. The list recognizes him as one of the top inventors. Mr. Balasubramaniyan completed his undergraduate studies in engineering from R. V. College of Engineering in the southern Indian city of Bangalore and doctoral studies from Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S. Prior to Pindrop, he worked at some of the top technology firms such as Google Inc.GOOG +0.45%, Intel Corp. and IBM Research. He is also a regular speaker at technology conferences on the subject of phone fraud. In the past the MIT list has included Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page,Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc.FB -0.23%, Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek and AppleIncAAPL +0.26%’s Jonathan Ive. Read more of this post

“I doubt any great entrepreneur in history got up in the morning and said I think I’ve got a good plan on how to make money. I think Wilbur and Orville [Wright] wanted to fly, I think [Thomas] Edison wanted to make light without candles.”

August 21, 2013, 7:50 p.m. ET

Inventing With an Eye on the Future

Even with an exceptional idea, budding entrepreneurs can struggle to move past the brainstorming stages. They face challenges in execution like building a cohesive team, coming up with a business plan and even understanding how to present their product or service. This week mentors on “WSJ Startup of the Year,” a documentary on wsj.com, offered some words of inspiration for all entrepreneurs. Here’s what some science and technology innovators had to say. Edited excerpts:

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google Inc. GOOG +0.45% : “Ninety-five percent of the innovators I meet would actually do exactly what they say if given the resources, but most of those projects would fail because the timing is wrong. A lot of business and technology plans assume the world three or four years from now will be kind of like it is today, and that’s not the world you need to aim at. That’s going to be a completely different world. The world is completely changed in just a few years time, and it will change at an even faster pace in the future. So a key harbinger of success is to actually understand this exponential pace of change and make your project relevant for the future world and meet the train when you get there.”

Peter Diamandis, chairman and founder of XPRIZE Foundation: “What I’m interested in seeing is someone who’s passionate about what they’re doing; that they love it; that they’re excited about it. Because a business plan isn’t worth much of anything. What really is worth something is a set of entrepreneurs whose mission this is to make happen beyond anything. That at 3 o’clock in the morning when they hit another brick wall, they’re going to wake up and take a different direction. Ultimately a business plan is going to be out-of-date as soon as you begin writing it. And it is really that internal dimension of passion, of commitment that will carry through all the hurdles along the way.”

Bob Hariri, founder and CEO of Celgene Cellular Therapeutics: “It’s the mission and the man. You establish a clear mission, what you want to do and then you go and find really great people. You have to have the kind of outgoing, engaging personalities that let [you] pull the best and the brightest. You’ve got to be evangelical about your mission. And then when you get them to sign on and you can inject some of that passion in them, then you can build a remarkably successful business.”

Dean Kamen, Segway inventor and health-care innovator: “If you believe that what drives a person to be an entrepreneur is money or not wanting to risk money, I’d say that’s an early sign that this is not an entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur I’ve ever seen is driven by the passion to do something, believing that if it’s as good as they think it is, of course somebody will make money. And probably if they stay with it, they’ll make some of it, maybe most of it or maybe all of it. But I doubt any great entrepreneur in history got up in the morning and said I think I’ve got a good plan on how to make money. I think Wilbur and Orville [Wright] wanted to fly, I think [Thomas] Edison wanted to make light without candles.”

In college, Meredith Perry wondered why wireless devices needed wires for recharging. That question has led to her work on a way to transmit electrical power via sound waves

August 17, 2013

An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About

By JACK HITT

Meredith Perry with a covered prototype of uBeam’s wireless charger, which is under wraps until its release date

SOMETIMES, there is an actual eureka moment. For Meredith Perry, it was in late 2010, during her senior year studying astrobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She was searching for an idea to enter into the college’s innovation competition. “It was my last year to do it,” she told me, “so I literally would just carry around a notebook and write down any annoyances, because that would be an opportunity to solve a problem and have an invention.” An admitted “professional Googler,” she’d been researching all day on her computer when she decided to pack it in for the night. “I was just standing in my room,” she said, “wrapping up my laptop charger and trying to fit it into my bag and suddenly it occurred to me: Wow, this is so archaic. Why are we using these 20-foot wires to plug in our quote-unquote wireless devices?” “See past old paradigms” is one of those cheesy riffs one might hear from an innovation expert working the business speakers’ circuit. Yet here it was, a question that inched just past what was simply accepted: Why, in a wireless age, do we still have electrical wires? Read more of this post

Johnson Matthey has come far from its roots as a gold assayer in London’s Hatton Garden to become the world’s largest supplier of vehicle catalytic converters by volume

August 15, 2013 4:55 pm

Johnson Matthey looks to Brussels to drive up sales

By Mark Wembridge

Although devoid of links with famous historical figures that encourage such monuments in London, the British chemical engineering company believes that an event in 1974 at its plant is worthy of such note – it is the location where the world’s first catalytic converter was manufactured. Nearly four decades on, Johnson Matthey has grown to become the world’s largest supplier of vehicle catalytic converters by volume, with sales of devices that alter environmentally damaging car and truck emissions comprising more than half of the FTSE 100 company’s £2.7bn annual turnover. The group has come far from its roots as a gold assayer in London’s Hatton Garden, where it regularly burnt the floorboards and carpet in shops located in the London jewellery district to extract any leftover precious metals. Read more of this post

The Best Of Jeff Bezos’ Lessons In Innovation From His Amazon Shareholder Letters

The Best Of Jeff Bezos’ Lessons In Innovation From His Amazon Shareholder Letters

TIM KASTELLE, INNOVATION FOR GROWTH AUG. 12, 2013, 6:53 AM 4,653 2

With Jeff Bezos in a news a fair bit right now, I thought it would a good time to look at some of the important innovation lessons that we can draw from his annual letters to Amazon shareholders.  It’s worthwhile to read them all, but here are some highlights:

 It’s All About the Long Term

The first letter is from 1997, and Bezos has included it as an appendix to every other annual letter that Amazon has sent out because it includes a summary of the firm’s long-run view. Here are a couple of the key parts of that:

We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.

We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures. Read more of this post