Winter '12 quarter BUS 111 announcement.

This winter, John Kelly and I will be teaching a new course at  Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. The title of the course is "The Patent Paradox: do patents stimulate invention or stifle innovation?"

Here's a brief description (subject to change):

In June 2011, six unlikely allies—including Apple, Microsoft, and Research in Motion—bid $4.5 billion to buy thousands of wireless, networking, and other patents from bankrupt Nortel Networks. Will these patents free Apple’s engineers to devise dazzling 4G technologies, or will they become exhibits in lawsuits against competitors’ smartphones, such as Google’s Android? Will Google's August 2011 agreement to buy Motorola Mobility and its 17,000 patents for $12.5 billion level the IP playing field or simply lead to more litigation? More generally, do patents stimulate invention or stifle innovation?"

This course will reveal the benefits and costs of patents for inventors, innovators, investors, and consumers. Far from a dry treatment of legal doctrine, this course will engage students in a thought-provoking examination of issues concerning patents, their history, disputes, and proposals for reform. We will address several fundamental questions: How do patents affect commerce? Who benefits from current patent laws? What happens in patent litigation? Do the effects of patents differ across industries? Should we change our patent laws? Learning how the US patent system works will enhance your abilities to invent, innovate, and invest wisely.

The course code in the Stanford catalog will be BUS 111.

 tags: stanford, class

Reverse Brainstorming (continued). It may look like this.

How did we live before blogging?!

Thanks to the wonders of  internet technologies and people who use them, I've found a participant's account from the Reverse Brainstorming session I did at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2009. The session was a part of my guest lecture about invention and innovation for students in a cross-disciplinary course on  Smart Surfaces. 

Peter Hall, the author of the blog, was a Senior studying industrial design. His post and pictures on Flicker can give you an idea of how a real session looks like.

Links:
Smart Surfaces 2009 course website.
Session report, by Peter Hall.
Peter's pictures from the session on flicker.

Note that the group (pictured hard at work) used whiteboards, not flipcharts, to record problem statements. Overall, they generated 70 problems over 40 minutes.

tags: reverse brainstorm, information, class, howto

Lying: an out-of-the box experience

Here's a study that may hint at a reason why so many people are bad at thinking "outside of the box":

A team of researchers has conducted a study which argues that liars betray their actions through drawing.

"Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective."

When we invent and/or work to develop creative ideas we have to lie. That is, we have to use our imagination to come up with a description of events that haven't happen yet. These events are still in a possible future, therefore we can't tell the truth about them. But, since most of the people are trained to tell the truth, they have trouble creating the big picture, e.g. draw the birds-eye view of a problem situation and its potential solutions. Over the last six years that I've been teaching my Principles of Invention class at Stanford, seeing and drawing the big picture has been by far the most difficult exercise for the students. Here's a snippet from a recent e-mail from one of them:

Even in the class discussions one could see people getting trapped in linear thinking and unable to climb above the problem and see the big picture. Practicing “climbing on the roof” to see the big picture is what I will focus on to improve as an inventor.

Drawing by itself is not going to make people more creative. To produce good results, it needs to be combined with systematic tools that teach people how to step out of the first-person perspective.

tags: creativity, magicians, imagination, class, example, dilemma

reference: Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627

While preparing for the upcoming Principles of Invention class at Stanford CSP, by the way we still have one or two slots available, I found a positive psychology paper that places creativity within a wider framework of human virtues and character strengths. The whole set consists of 6 virtues and 24 character traits that are commonly endorsed across many cultures. In this post I decided to focus on a virtue that is most relevant to invention. Here's a snippet of the "Wisdom and Knowledge" category that includes creativity.

Table 1. Classification of 6 Virtues and 24 Character Strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

Virtue and Strength	Definition
Wisdom and knowledge	Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge
Creativity --	Thinking of novel and productive ways to do things
Curiosity --	Taking an interest in all of ongoing experience
Open-mindedness --	Thinking things through and examining them from all sides
Love of learning --	Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge
Perspective --	Being able to provide wise counsel to others

Source: MEP Seligman, TA Steen, N Park, C Peterson. Positive psychology progress. American Psychologist, July-August, 2005.

Later this year I will create a map of the tools and methods I teach throughout the course and specific character strength they help develop.

Subodh Nayar, the COO of Powerline Telco, makes an excellent point about the impact of the so-called smart power meters (networked devices capable of monitoring and reporting power usage in real time):

Empowering consumers with actionable intelligence about their power will not be the outcome of the deployment of smart meters. Rather, it will be exactly what the utilities intend for it to be: a cost-effective way to implement real-time pricing, demand side management and distribution system monitoring.

In essence, his argument is that the data from smart meters is not granular enough for consumers to make informed decisions about electricity usage . We, consumers, can control our usage, and ultimately the electricity bill, by turning on and off specific electric appliances, e.g. TVs, washers, dryers, etc. A smart meter is only going to give us data about electricity consumption for the whole house, not a particular device. The data would still have to be processed further (how?) to help us figure out when and which device ought to be turned on or off to save money.
Remarkably, depending on the system scale, the usefulness of the same data is drastically different. While the electricity supplier can use it directly to make power generation and distribution decisions, the consumer is stuck with more information overload.
No wonder, Google wants a piece of the smart meter action. The greater information overload, the greater the need for data processing services.

==
Notes for the class:
1. A good exercise for the Magicians. The case shows how a change in the point of view (Climb-on-the-Roof Magician) allows us to identify problems in the super-system (power generation & distribution) vs the sub-system ( house & house appliances).
2. Five-element analysis (recursive up and down): House as a Tool in the super-system; Appliance as a Tool in the sub-system (House). The role of Control, both on super- and sub- system levels. The difference between data and information.
3. Assuming that smart meters are deployed on a mass scale (short-term), formulate detection and control problems on the sub-system (House) level. Propose solutions ( tech & business).

mobile browser interface

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

A number of interesting solutions here. May use it for the class this summer

As we've discovered during the last session of the Principles of Invention class at Stanford, server technology is going to be a strong control point in the emerging mobile applications space. Google continues to build a leadership position in technology and mind share among software developers and corporations. They (Google) become embedded into the fabric of the new generation of web applications.
For example, CNET writes:

MySpace's announcement that it has integrated Gears into its messaging system to create a backup of messages (email) to a user's computer and thereby enable faster searching and sorting of the messages. With 170 million messages sent each day on MySpace, this adds up to cost-savings as it needn't process all of the email searching and sorting server-side.

Or look at Google's App Engine, which is one area in which Google keeps trying to "mak[e] clouds of computing power more accessible to all developers." Google is now opening up App Engine to everyone, not an elect few, at pricing that is very compelling.

We'll probably explore further invention/innovation opportunities in this space during our next class, BUS75