That’s the attitude of Replenish, what they’re saying is that 95% of the volume of a household spray is water, water that costs them to mix, fill the bottle and ship to you. What if they shipped you the chemicals and you use your own water? What a brilliant idea.
Swapping it around, highlight what’s not there instead of what is.
Thanks to Gizmodo for bringing it to my attention.
Interesting note via Twitter today, @EmilyRHarris sent me a note to this press release by SEGlet it reads:
“Owners and Building Managers can now list their rooftops as available sites for leases and partnerships for solar energy, wind energy, urban agriculture and more. SEGlet automatically calculates solar radiation, wind speed and direction, and climate data about each rooftop listed so that energy and urban agriculture companies can quickly qualify the rooftops as compatible for their projects.”
I only blogged about this a couple of days ago (Rooftops are abundant) – it’s great to see ideas in action (and so quickly). It’s quite serendipitous, with so many people in the world no idea is original (really), it’s about those that move on them.
Creativity is like getting fit, often you need to nurture it to be more creative.
At a basic level, creativity is creating new links between existing ideas. The Wikipedia definition is excellent:
“Creativity is the ability to generate innovative ideas and manifest them from thought into reality. The process involves original thinking and then producing.”
So how can you be more creative? It’s all about creating new patterns, but here are some ideas:
Go, try one of them, get creative! If you think you’re boring, I bet you’re not, we’re all creative in our own ways – just give something a go.
A favourite of mine:
“#11 of the bwagy marketing manifesto:
“You are always wrong, you just need to be less wrong than your competitors.”
It is so true – no matter your stance someone can always come up with a solid reason why you are wrong.
Don’t stress about being 100% right, you just need to be less wrong than those you compete with.
(And take action.)”
—
Original here.
Risk Homeostasis is a theory that humans have a certain level of acceptable risk and we will seek to keep that in equilibrium.
If we take high risk in one part of our life we will seek to minimise it in another part.
For example, in a Munich Case Study two groups of taxis were monitored for accidents. One group had ABS brakes installed, the others stayed with the regular breaks. You would think then that the ABS guys had less accidents right?
Wrong. What they found was the accident rate was about the same, the group with ABS having gained better braking would take other risks (ie braking late).
Have a read over at WikiPedia. Watch my video below on RadioWammo discussing it:
It has interesting implications for all change, innovation and risk when you think about it.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for the inspiration in his latest book What the Dog Saw.
I was quite a curious kid, always asking questions, the ever curious question of WHY? My first job was classic of this, it was assisting the local fire wood producer, chop up and distribute firewood.
My boss was an aging man, putting in the last few years before retirement, and it was his little one man band. Our first job was to go out and collect the firewood, he would use the chainsaw to cut trees brought down by flooding. Firstly he would cut the trees into rounds, my job was to then grab the rounds, put them in a pile.
We would then split the rounds in half, load them on the back of the flatbed truck and take them back to his wood yard. Back at the yard, unload all the wood, put it in a pile. The next step was to cut the wood with a log splitter, stack in another pile.
Finally we were ready for orders! Orders were by the cubic metre, and so a certain amount of barrow loads was a cubic metre. We would then load the truck up an order at a time and deliver it.
It took me all of one day to speak up and go, hang on we are double, triple handling this wood. Why don’t we split the back of the flatdeck truck in half, then into little stalls, the horizontal sides of the stall being such we could pull them out.
Then we could cut the firewood, split it on location, throw it into the stalls (which could be measured out on a cubic metre basis) then deliver straight to the customer. We could save sooo much time. ”No Ben, this is the way I do it”.
This frustrated me to no end, but hey I got $10 for a mornings work and that bought me basketball cards. I hung in there annoyed at partaking in such an inefficient process, as soon as the opportunity came up I quit my job and moved on.
What I rapidly learned was the concept of idea development, failing fast, modifying and moving on. It’s no big secret, smart people understand it and embrace it. Fail fast. However whilst there is understanding – we fall short of having a mechanism for it.
That’s what the 12 Hour Startup (my first idea in The Best Ideas are Free) is about – formalising a mechanism that allows for remarkable ideas to be shared, tested, proven and ultimately to create significant change.
I just want to clarify (since I share ideas each and every day) an idea alone isn’t a business.
A business is a collection of ideas, executed in a fashion that generates profit.
An amazing idea helps a business spread, it forms the messages, builds the word of mouth but it is the collection of ideas and systems executed that make the business. In essence an amazing idea provides a wave for the business to ride but that wave is short lived unless you have something behind it…
You need to take your amazing idea and mix it up with some others (usually standardised ideas) to turn it into a business. Then you have something of amazing value.