FEATURE
The brilliant secret behind all great innovations
In this excerpt from Innovating with Impact by Ted Ladd and Alessandro Lanteri, I like the authors' description of innovation: "innovation creates customer value by solving customer problems."
People tend to think that innovation is the preserve of a special few introverted geniuses, driven by “Eureka!” moments and instantly resulting in brilliant new products. However, that's not true.
An innovation need not be a life-changing product or service. It simply represents something new or a new way of making or using something.
The 10 most innovative companies in North America of 2023
Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. They have selected firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, and more. This article highlights the top 10.
CREATIVITY
How can AI support human creativity?
The leading opinion is that AI cannot generate fundamentally new ideas on its own but that it can support humans to do so so by catalyzing human creativity. What’s easy to overlook, however, is that AI can also inhibit human creativity because as AI gets more intelligent, it becomes more helpful and distracting. Therefore, we should know how AI can support human creativity and where it does more harm than good. A recent study by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute explored these questions.
How to unleash creative thinking in your business
You may believe the most important part of a thinking exercise is creating ideas which become the answers to your question. But finding the right question initially is far more important; how much use are brilliant answers to the wrong questions? This article has five steps to follow.
CURIOSITY
Reconstructing images from human brain activity
This paper explores a new method to reconstruct images from human brain activity obtained via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). using using Stable Diffusion.
While the paper is being peer reviewed, this is a fascinating read!
VISUAL
A long-term timeline of technology
The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.
You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing, to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.
This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox, and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us.
UX
How Apple Music could benefit from Spotfiy’s bad redesign
Spotify recently announced what it described as its “biggest evolution yet,” with a new TikTok-style Home feed that combines music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more into a single feed. The redesign has received quite a bit of criticism from music fans — and it could represent a major opportunity for Apple Music.