Outside Innovation

Why Are Design Patterns Valuable?

Design Patterns are valued by software designers, usability experts, and architects—both technology architects and building and landscape architects. Patterns tell us how to design a construct so that it works effectively and efficiently to achieve its end. Patterns are esthetically pleasing as well. Simplicity. Form meets function.

I believe that good patterns emerge from the confluence of three things:

1. Watching what people do and noticing what works and what pleases them.

2. Discovering what people want to do but have difficulty doing.

3. Thinking carefully about, and testing, designs that make it easy for people to accomplish their goals (both tangible and emotional goals) in a pleasing manner as efficiently as possible.

Skip Walter turned me onto design patterns in the 1980s. At the time, Skip was the product manager for Digital Equipment’s very successful All-in-One office systems. He was also an early practitioner of customer-led innovation. The design of All-in-One arose from customer co-development to meet the needs of a small group of customers in the field.

When Skip told me about design patterns, he referred me to the works of Christopher Alexander, who published The Timeless Way of Building, in 1979, A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction in 1977, and, in 1975, my favorite, the small gem of a book, The Oregon Experiment, in which Alexander and his co-authors describe their work with students, faculty, and community members in redesigning the campus of Oregon University in Eugene.  in 1977, and, in 1975, my favorite, the small gem of a book,  in 1977, and, in 1975, my favorite, the small gem of a book,

National Instruments Takes the Next Step in Capturing Hearts and Minds of Budding Scientists and Engineers

Those of you who have read Outside Innovation will recall the story about the partnership between LEGO and National Instruments (brokered by Dr. Chris Rogers who promotes engineering in elementary/primary school curricula, catalyzed by a kids’ robotics competition in Austin, Texas, and cemented during a rain-soaked soccer game). As a result, Dr. Truchard, (“Dr. T”), National Instruments’ founder and chairman, authorized an innovative partnership to embed NI’s $2,000 LabVIEW software platform into the software that would be sold as part of a $200 Mindstorms NXT kit to kids and teachers.

Photo by: usfirst.org

On April 17th, National Instruments took a further leap in extending its market to the younger set. They announced a partnership with FIRST to provide the robotics controllers (hardware and firmware) to be used in the robotics kits for the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC)—the robotics league for High School kids. This is a multimillion dollar in-kind donation.

So now National Instruments is providing hardware as well as software, and it is extending its reach from 8-year-old engineers through to high school age kids.

The benefit to the kids is that this new platform will be less expensive, reducing the cost of the kits from approximately $15,000 down to closer to $2,000. (Each team has to raise the money to purchase the robotics’ kit they’ll need each year.)

LEGO Celebrates the 10th Anniversary of LEGO Mindstorms’ and FIRST LEGO League: Building a Culture of Customer Engagement

LEGO executives celebrated the 10th anniversary of their successful MINDSTORMS robotics kit at the FIRST Championship in Atlanta. Soren Lund, Lego’s Sr. Marketing Director for product and marketing development, joined our Visionaries’ meeting to discuss some of his learnings from 10 years of customer engagement. In talking about the cultural challenges of opening up both your product development and your online presence to customer participation, Soren expressed it this way:

"Like every large company, Lego has a "must" culture - you must do this; the open source developer community has a 'can' culture - I do this because I want to, because I can. The value of the outside-in model is that it brings a different culture inside your company."

Soren Lund at the LEGO booth at FIRST.

“As we launched Mindstorms,” Soren explained, “we thought, wouldn’t it be great if people actually talked about this. So we built a Web community and encouraged customers to engage. It wasn’t a mass marketing thing—we’ll tell you what to think. We wanted people to be able to write about what they thought of Mindstorms, etc. We should listen to our consumers. Corporate didn’t want to do that—they were worried about negative content. We did it anyway and were flooded. We were really excited about the response.”

Girl Scouts Team Up with FIRST

I was delighted that one of the BIG announcements at this year’s FIRST Championship was a new partnership between the Girl Scouts of America and FIRST. Every Girl Scout troop will now be supported and encouraged to form a robotics team. The young women on the Girl Scout’s existing teams will be tapped as mentors. There are already close to 100 Girl Scout FIRST LEGO League programs around the country to date. Two high-school-level Girl Scout teams competed in the World Championship finals in Atlanta.

Emily Tweaks Her Team’s Robot

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Emily Stephens, a senior at Perry Meridian High School in Indianapolis, tweaks the team's robot at the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition—the team was a finalist for the Autodesk Inventor award.

 

Corporate Execs Learn from FIRST How to Inspire Young Inventors and to Harness Their Creativity

In mid-April, we held our semi-annual Visionaries’ meeting in Atlanta where we witnessed the preliminary day of the FIRST robotics championship. Our goal was to wrap our minds around our next-gen customers and employees and to absorb some creative energy from these bright kids. But our visit exceeded my expectations. By spending time to understand the structure of the design of this very successful program to inspire kids to engage in science, technology, engineering, and math, I think we discovered some principles that could be transferred into our corporate environments to make innovation a more repeatable and systemic activity.

Thunderchickens Competing in the Final Round

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Team 217, “ThunderChickens” of Utica Community Schools from Sterling Heights, Michigan, maneuver their winning robot, which would eventually reign victorious as part of the 2008 FIRST Robotics Championship winning alliance.

Some of the key take-aways:

• Make sure that people are working on intellectually HARD problems.

• Have them work in teams on the same problem.

• Give them incentives to share and cooperate with other teams.

• Build in real-world, real-time feedback and lots of iterations.

Here’s a link to the full report and pictures from the event.

A Team Controls Its Robot via Remote Control

Photo by Akill11, Flickr

Team 868’s robot from Carmel High School in Indiana in the midst of the challenge. The robot is successfully herding a 40 inch. ball around the track. Its next feat will be to lift the ball 6 feet in the air and throw it over the overpass and then collect it again.

Who Will Use Google App Engine?

At Web Expo 2.0, I attended the session on Google App Engine and listened to the Q&A between the Web applications developer community and the Google App Engine product development team. I also managed to get my own coveted code that will let me in to the beta program. Now, I just need to find a real developer I can work with to take advantage of this application platform. I’ve already gotten some push back from people who have looked at Google App Engine and claim that no real applications will wind up there. So I thought it would be useful to think about the kinds of Web Applications that are most likely to gravitate to Google and the kinds of people who will create them. The short answer is this: If your product or service is information, Google App Engine is of interest. If accessing and manipulating the information about your products and services is increasingly important to your prospects and customers, then Google App Engine should be of interest.

Business Strategists Who See the Potential. As the CEO of a small consulting/publishing business, I may not be Google’s target audience for this development platform, but I believe I actually represent the ideal strategist who can take advantage of this environment. There may be lots of other small business owners and professionals like me who will be early adopters. In my case, I’m looking for a Web applications platform upon which I can start over. I want to re-envision and redeploy Web applications that will provide value for my clients. Not just a new Web site, but a new Web platform. I want to be able to design, throw away, and redesign an iterative series of information-based applications. Why not start fresh with an infrastructure that I know will scale, that will be easy to search, and one that will have hundreds of thousands of developers sharing tips and techniques (as well as applications)?

Microsoft Mesh--File Sharing; Not Cloud Computing

Synchronizing Your Life in Microsoft's Cloud

Another theme at Web 2.0 Expo this week is that the Internet IS the computer. The “computers” that you THINK are computers, e.g., the various devices we use to interact and do our jobs, are simply that—devices—that are connected (on and off) to the REAL computer in the sky—the CLOUD. The concept of cloud computing isn’t new, but it’s been getting a lot of attention recently as Google announced its App Engine and Amazon dramatically increased the storage and utility of its Elastic Cloud. I listened in anticipation as Microsoft’s Amit Mittal unveiled Microsoft Mesh at Web 2.0 Expo.

This first instantiation of Microsoft Mesh is a fairly simple concept. It’s a utility that lets you synchronize all your contacts, calendar entries, music libraries, and file folders across all of your devices. Right now, these are Windows devices, and soon they’ll be Mac devices. Next, add your set-top box, mobile phone, PDA, and your car’s music library.

It’s not too surprising that Ray Ozzie, who brought us the best offline/online synchronization services as instantiated in Lotus Notes, would out-Lotus IBM with this “replication/synchronization in the Microsoft cloud” utility.

It’s also interesting to note that Microsoft’s first mesh application is about “my stuff”—synchronizing my stuff and sharing my stuff with trusted colleagues. Eric Schonfeld’s post at Tech Crunch offers the best current description of the Microsoft offering and strategy:

“A hundred of Ozzie’s engineers have been working on Mesh for the past two years. At launch, it may not seem like much more than a combination of Windows Live SkyDrive and FolderShare, but under the hood it is an ambitious platform play. Mesh is really aimed at developers. Not only does it provide a framework for syncing files between devices, it can also sync applications. The way it does this is by using a two-way RSS or Atom feed developed by Ozzie called FeedSync, formerly called Simple Sharing Extensions.”

“The basic foundation of Mesh is this feed-centric programming model. A Web developer can build an app using any programming language or tools he likes (Python, Ruby on Rails, Flex) and then sync it across devices and other applications using two-way feeds as the basic data and communication channel. The promise for developers, says product unit manager Abhay Parasnis: “If you Mesh-enable your application, we will let you extend it to other devices.”

“Microsoft is offering a set of Mesh APIs that include storage services, membership, sync, peer-to-peer communication, and a Newsfeed feature that tells users the status of different folders and who’s accessed them. The same programming model works whether a developer is building an app for an offline device or for the Web.”

“In many ways this effort is a counterweight to what we are seeing with Adobe Air or Google Gears, which are efforts to take browser-based apps offline. With Mesh, Microsoft is in effect reasserting the primacy of client-based applications. They need not be Windows-based, but I’m sure that won’t hurt. Developers can customize their apps for whatever device they originally reside on—whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or a set-top box—and then Webify them by syncing them to other applications across the Web. These apps could be more powerful than apps confined to a browser-like sandbox without giving up the connectivity of the Web.”

 

Schonfeld goes on to compare the LiveMesh replication feature to Geni—a non-Microsoft synchronization service. He also quotes from Ray Ozzie’s internal positioning of LiveMesh to Microsoft’s employees and describes Microsoft’s developer strategy. Take a look at his analysis and description as well as the flood of comments that are already pouring in.        

Web 2.0: Time to Tackle BIG CHALLENGES

The theme of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (April 22-24, 2008) is “let’s harness our global brainpower to change the world.” I find this even more exhilarating than last year’s focus on the Programmable Web. During the opening keynotes, Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly laid down the challenge: it’s time to step up to the plate, harness our collective intelligence, and use it to change the world. Scott Berkun put the punctuation mark on this discourse by reminding us, amid a backdrop of social networking gadgets and icons, to “think about what PROBLEMS you’re trying to solve.”

Clay Shirky’s keynote was the most profound. Clay said: It all started with gin. At the outset of the industrial revolution, when everyone came off the farm and started working together in factories and living in cities, humankind dealt with the enormity of this change by drinking gin. That’s right. The only way to cope with the enormity of the change in culture was to numb ourselves through alcohol for almost a generation. Then, humans figured out how to create new ways of coordinating and interacting that made us more productive and prosperous. The changes in media and global communication had the same effect on humankind. We couldn’t deal with the enormity of the societal changes, so we numbed ourselves down with television. Gilligan’s Island and other Sitcoms became the anesthesia that Baby Boomers grew up with. Now, we’re waking out of that stupor, and we’re ready and able to participate with the interactive media environment that we’ve created. We also have a huge collective cognitive surplus to devote to working on really important things. Where does this cognitive surplus come from? We are reclaiming a few of the hours we used to spend numbed out watching TV.

Roles and Responsibilities for Managing Your Customer Communities

Communities are hot! Everyone is talking about them. Every company says it wants one—or to grow the one (or more) already in place. But, as Matthew Lees points out in his report this week, creating, deploying, and managing online customer communities is a nascent science. To help you truly prepare for launching or running successful online communities, he provides advice on the responsibilities, skill sets, and roles needed to make your communities a valuable part of your overall business. After reading Matthew’s report, think about whether your organization has the right people in place to launch itself into the community world!

Adopt a Mac over a Weekend

This past weekend, I decided that I could afford a few leisurely hours to migrate my work life—no, actually my entire online life—from my Dell Latitude 610 running Windows XP to my new MacPro Notebook running OS X (Leopard). I was really looking forward to it.
       
       
I had already enjoyed the “Mac out of the box experience”—unpacking my new laptop, plugging it in and marveling at Steve Jobs’ signature power supply (with “ears” to loop the cord around, as well as the sliding hook on the cord that makes it easy to create a quick and tidy loop to get excess cord out of the way, and the magnetic connector that lets the plug click satisfyingly into the MacBook). I even marveled at Steve Jobs’ packaging. Who knew that styrofoam could be so elegant! I’m convinced that Steve J personally approved the styrofoam design. My husband and I joked about making a wall hanging out of it.