innovation

The 19th century boom in beekeeping inventions (1800s)

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This entry is post 19 of 24 in the ongoing series Landing Board beekeeping history posts

The Industrial Revolution eventually reached beekeeping. In the 19th century, as agriculture and production mechanized, and saw the arrival of all sorts of innovations, so did beekeeping.

It was not just Reverend Langstroth’s patented hive – which beekeepers still use – that emerged. And as with today’s trade in beekeeping innovations, some had merit, perhaps many did not. The critic quoted below made perhaps wise points about the phenomenon in general, whether or not he was right about the specific example he pilloried, Bevan’s Cross Bar Hive.

Thomas Miner wrote in 1849:

During the last twenty years, many new and useless bee-hives have been palmed off on the ignorant and too confiding bee-keepers of our country. Men who have had sufficient brains to devise some new plan and style of hive that did not before exist — who never understood a single principle of the management of bees correctly, have, by dint of unblushing falsehood and impudence, bled the bee-keeping community pretty freely. There seems to be a greater cloud of darkness hanging over the management of bees, than over any other branch of rural economy.1)Thomas B. Miner, The American bee keeper’s manual: being a practical treatise on the history and domestic economy of the honey-bee, embracing a full illustration of the whole subject, with the most approved methods of managing this insect through every branch of its culture, the result of many years’ experience, New York: C. M. Saxton, 1849, p. 117.

Bevan cross bar hive design
One of many inventions Miner denounced: Bevan’s cross bar design of which he wrote: “This is all very well, provided the bees will follow these bars; but they will not.”2)Thomas B. Miner, The American bee keeper’s manual : being a practical treatise on the history and domestic economy of the honey-bee, embracing a full illustration of the whole subject, with the most approved methods of managing this insect through every branch of its culture, the result of many years’ experience, New York: C. M. Saxton, 1849, p. 138.

Thomas Miner did not like Thomas Bevan’s top bars, and suggested not using such.

Every new-fangled ”patent” hive that is brought along, is represented as the ne plus ultra of improvement, and the very acme of perfection ; and the lesson that is so glibly recited by their vendors, of the wonderful and astonishing merits of their inventions, often causes one to become duped again and again, until he gives up in despair, and returns to his first love — the simple box and brimstone management of ages past. 3)Source: Thomas B. Miner, The American bee keeper’s manual : being a practical treatise on the history and domestic economy of the honey-bee, embracing a full illustration of the whole subject, with the most approved methods of managing this insect through every branch of its culture, the result of many years’ experience, New York: C. M. Saxton, 1849, pp. 117-8.

His view on the proliferation of beekeeping and hive gizmos, gadgets and purported improvements:

But a wise Providence has so ordered, that the bee requires merely the simplest tenement. Screens, ventilators, valves, &c., are but hindrances to their natural prosperity, and the thousand and one complicated inventions of the day are but so many deceptive tricks of the astute and keen, to filch our pockets of a few spare dollars.

References[+]

Designing packaging for sustainability

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Working towards sustainability means package designs that acknowledge and respond to the larger system that the product/package is a part of. A package is integral to that broader system, and part of the big system’s sustainability.

A design that merely does not worsen the system’s sustainability is not a breakthrough. And packaging pursuing only its own greenness is missing the chance to help the whole system.

The leading edge of packaging design often falls short. Designers recognize the centrality of sustainability. But they often work with a narrow perspective vis-a-vis the wider total lifecycle and contextual reality of the package. More often than not, the view is too narrow, focused on a simple substitution; “Do it with a renewable material”. 

Another narrow-view solution is finding a secondary use for the package. That is not enough. In most contexts, there will be too many waste packages for the secondary use opportunity. We cannot turn all PET soda bottles into jackets and pullovers.

How can designers and brands work together to come up with solutions?

Each side knows much the other does not. Joining brand owner experts with designers and innovators can move designs to the next level. This means joint explorations of possibility taking a whole systems view, understanding emerging change, learning together, and finding inspiration from parallel and distant situations. For example, drawing on nature, harking back to old approaches, and discovering things from other cultures all can inform and inspire design thinking.

Are consumers really demanding change? 

Designers and innovators should know what consumers want. But they also often have to lead and educate consumers for the need for change. On the old question of technology push versus market pull, the answer is, both.

More consumers live where there are tightening requirements for sustainability, limiting, recovering, and recycling waste. Brand owners’ choices in packaging may hand the consumer a waste problem. A consumer may not make a personal choice for more sustainable packaging. But if their community requires something, it’s part of their daily lives anyway.

How do you balance sustainable design with a better consumer experience?

Work to make sustainability itself par of the consumer experience and do it well.

What role does education play with consumers when designing for sustainability?

It is central. To be able to educate the consumer about sustainability while also handing them a solution that works in their lives is the pathway to success.

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We bring this kind of thinking to our triennial Future of Packaging program. It’s a multi-sponsor program for packaging executives and others with a strong interest in packaging. For more about the program, visit Future of Packaging: 2030. Our program launches at the beginning of 2019.

Foresight fuels product and brand innovation

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You can't innovate in a vacuum. Foresight opens new space for exploring change and discovering opportunities.

In product innovation, it’s essential to look beyond the boundaries of the current market for your products. You need to explore at least five or ten years into the future for fresh insights. And you need to test your assumptions about the marketplace and how it's changing. 

In brand innovation, a futures view tests assumptions about emerging change in values, attitudes, lifestyles, and consumption. It helps you fine tune your understanding of how consumers will understand and value a brand.

Without those enhanced views, you risk misunderstanding the patterns of change and missing opportunities. And you raise the risk of product failure or a mis-fire in marketing or brand development. 

What you can do

For the most robust innovation efforts, build foresight into your work. Innovation teams should discuss leading-edge change and where it may steer the marketplace. Making future outcomes explicit sharpens the view of emerging needs and opportunities.

A baseline environmental scan of the most critical forces and trends shaping society will fuel a team's creative thinking and fortify its understanding of the marketplace.

Scenarios help you test product/service ideas against a clearer view of the future.

Those are just two foresight tools among many that will enhance and enrich your innovation processes.

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You probably need a futurist to help, let me know. jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444.

The power of silence

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Insights come more reliably to an undistracted mind. Have you noticed a little magic in the otherwise purgatorial time you spend with the cabin doors closed, approved electronic devices off, between pull back and take-off? Have you noticed that you had a few moments to think?  That few minutes is a blessing–it’s time you are given to spend un-distracted by the interruption of your digital daily life. Embrace it!

Yet most of us work intently to optimize our distractions: fine-tuning i-devices with apps and connections, so that we might encounter information all the time. Mobile digital life guarantees that you can have something to distract yourself whereever you go, whatever you are doing. Your thoughts are under siege.

You can even listen to music or the radio while swimming or showering. You can take in NPR or a book on tape while walking your dog or doing yard work. But don’t!

  • Turn the radio off when you drive, sometimes
  • Leave the iPod home when you walk the dog, sometimes
  • Don’t use a shower radio, each time
  • Clear some time with your thoughts, all the time

You get the picture.

How does this apply to foresight? Thinking about the future is a tough mental game. To effectively explore and understand it, you need to do think about a lot of things at once. You have to think altogether new thoughts. This is equally true for effective analysis and writing.

There are new connections to be made, insights that need time to germinate and ground to sprout in. “A ha!” moments need to break through, from your subconscious. Must they contend with the latest on the Jets or J-Lo? The Dow or the Dodgers? The boss’s memo? It seems they must, until we reach for the “off” switch, or put down the i-thing for a little while. And when you write, don’t always stop to look things up, consult other sources. Sometimes let the ideas flow, the writing come out. Fact check later.

To have some success thinking about the future, you really need to think about it. That includes time away from distractions, absolutely, but it even includes time away from the facts and finds that you may be using to try to understand your future. If you don’t stop taking in information long enough to think about it, you won’t quite get there.

Image: saturn ?, via Flickr, CC attribution license.

 

If you’re only keeping up, you’re probably going backwards

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Wrong way signToo many businesses put themselves in jeopardy by giving all their attention to today’s problems and opportunities. Their future goes wanting.

Every organization needs foresight to survive. But too many submerge their occasional futures thoughts under overwhelming concern for the problems of the present. Foresight in organizations is typically focused narrowly on a vision of the preferred future, or on fears about what is directly affecting the organization’s business.

People in organizations are experts, rewarded for their knowledge and how they perform in their area of specialty. That too can shut out broader thinking and speculative exploration of change and what it means.

At a workshop a few years ago, an executive in a big chemicals and materials firm reacted to a wide ranging discussion of important trends. He said: “I don’t see what this has to do with fluoropolymers.” He was doing his job the best way he knew how. He evaluated things according to their impact on his responsibility—in fact on his company’s current market, customers, and applications for fluoropolymers. His posture and voice said that it would be hard for me and my colleagues to move him off that position.

Fortunately for us, the fluoropolymer skeptic got an earful from his colleagues, people outside his area of responsibility. They showed him a dozen ways that what he was hearing about social, technological, political, and economic change around the world would shape the challenges and opportunities for his product.

Business faces all kinds of change which has meaning that may not be immediately clear and may not seem directly relevant to current operations and issues. But it is relevant. With the rapid pace of change and the complexity of our world, it is probably more essential than every to make connections between the business at hand and disparate insights and information about the future.

Businesses need to think in the broader context that foresight brings them. They need to at once think more deeply into the future—five to fifteen years out—and to explore a broader range of change surrounding them.

Foresight should be a part of organizational strategy making, product development, R&D planning, human resources planning, facilities planning, etc.

There are dozens of techniques for getting foresight into organizational thinking. You can research futures studies for information on those tools. At their core are the following outcomes, which you can strive for as you help guide your organization:

·        Get colleagues to surface and share their assumptions about the future.

·        Open up thinking to the wider (often) global context in which the organization’s destiny will unfold.

·        Look at how different forces and trends interact, rather than just exploring the meaning of some single, dominant trend.

·        Share knowledge about change more thoroughly throughout the organization.

·        Explore change more deeply, and share ideas about change with more people in the organization.

·        Engage outside experts and stakeholders in exploring the organization’s future: you can invent your future with your customers help, in fact.

·        Preserve an understanding that there are multiple possible outcomes for the organization’s future, and that the organization should be prepared for that range and agile enough to maneuver in the face of change.

·        Involve more people in futures thinking and strategy making, to tap a wider sweep of knowledge and to bring more people into the conversation about change that will shape the organization’s strategy.

Build these goals into your work by making foresight a regular habit, not just an occasional activity. If you do, you can anticipate change and be ready to respond to it more nimbly, and almost certainly less expensively. How many times has your organization’s budget absorbed the shock of making a change much later and more expensively that might have been possible? 

 

Image: Kaiban, via Flickr, cc license

It’s ok to have more than one innovation at a time

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Organizations seem so often to have trouble innovating at all, and if they do change, they often just make one change at a time. More rare is a comprehensive rethinking of a product, or system, or business model. But there may be great opportunities for those who can take on a whole system, rethink it, and make something new happen. 

94 winesThe Dutch company 94wines combines a sweep of innovations in its packaging and products. Many of these are innovations that we’ve been keeping an eye on for our Future of Packaging programs, so it's great to see real product introductions that put them to use.
 
The French variety wines 94wines sells are offered in a broad array of varieties, tapping niche taste interests. Consumers on their site answer six questions to get at their wine taste preferences. That comes in the form of a WineID, which the 94wines site will remember for you.
 
My “Wine ID” (can we assume there’s a play on words: ID as in identification and id, as in the unconscious psyche?) includes three varieties 5—Fresh, 22—Spicy, and 24—Oaky. That may not be quite right, but I rushed the questions a little.
 
The bottles are colored and numbered to indicate each variety, rather than being labeled with appellation and vintner, giving consumers two visual identifiers to help them get the right one. This, I suppose, is a “dumbing down” to suit harried consumers who aren’t and don’t want to be, wine experts.
 
94winesThe wines also allow custom content, not on their standard labels, but as digital content accessible by a QR code (2D barcode) on the bottle. iPhone users, and presumably others with a phone camera with a QR code app, can access the product information on their mobiles. People can also key in a number that is with the QR code on the 94wines website, and get the same information. But customers placing an order can customize the product by uploading their thoughts, images, etc., so that anyone they give the wine to will see that information. Thus, a custom label of a sort.
 
The 94wines system includes these innovations: 
  • “Long tail” niche/variety marketing play
  • Customization via custom label information
  • Mass customization via assessment of a consumer’s taste preferences in their “WineID”
  • Information accessible online, using the package as a point of access, with minimal labeling
  • Interaction of package with handheld device: 2D barcodes, readable by iPhone, etc.
  • Visual/intuitive cues in package design
 
What a great package! It’s terrific to see more than just incremental innovation, but rather a cocktail of innovations. Let’s hope it makes them some money. By the way, for now, they deliver mainly in the Netherlands.
 
Images: www.94wines.com 

Foresight illustrated: Making change — Beyond the low-hanging fruit

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For exploring and explaining sustainability, I developed the diagram at the right. It is a forecast. It focuses on change over time, showing rising degrees of transformation starting in the 1990s, and continuing to about 2025.

In the recent past and today, most green efforts involve things we can do easily, such as replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, selling more gas-electric hybrid cars, and buying carbon offsets for some of our impacts on the planet. Those steps are valid efforts to be greener, but they are Low-Hanging Fruit—that is, they can be done at only slight expense or inconvenience.

In some places, we can say we are Getting Serious, with initiatives to install alternative energy, increasing regulation, and more economic incentives. Cap and trade systems for emissions are a “getting serious” initiative. For some people, Getting Serious also includes changing their lifestyles and consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprints, for example, by eating more locally-produced foods. Voluntarily home-installed solar panels are another example.

A further stage we can anticipate is Big Systems. Mostly aspirational, that is when we will or could substantially replace carbon-based energy, require people to change their lifestyles, radically cap emissions, or force reductions through regulation, and so on.

You can argue with the years spanned by each period. You can also challenge the forecast: Will we really get serious, and ultimately make big systems change? But the years are approximate–I only mean for them to help people think about the changes we are seeing and can expect to see over the next 15 or 20 years. The chart has proven useful to our clients, and I thought it worth sharing here, as well.

You can also look at this chart a different way. Considering only the vertical axis, it differentiates our degrees of willingness to change. Then, the bottom is easiest, the top, hard to imagine. That is why most people expect that the big systems change will happen gradually over the next generation. That is a reasonable expectation, but our situation with energy and other systems may force Big Systems change sooner than we want, and sooner than this chart suggests.

I’ve already found this basic breakdown, Low-Hanging Fruit, Getting Serious, and Big Systems, to be useful in looking at other kinds of change, too. Examples include primary education, where teachers have begun to introduce some experiential moments in their classrooms—e.g. showing video clips, role-playing, but our classrooms are still typically four walls, one adult, and kids in chairs. Big systems change might mean immersive learning using virtual reality, or sending older students out to teach themselves using a city as their classroom.

Another example is corporate change. Companies routinely innovate on the margins, e.g. by introducing a new product at relatively low risk, before truly getting serious and challenging their broader strategies. Low-hanging fruit means brand extensions, or adding related and complementary products, for example. Big systems change means entering a new market, radically changing the mission and product mix of the company, and so on.

If you know you want to get beyond Low-Hanging Fruit, and want or expect to have to make Big Systems change, you need to begin the process of comprehensive change now. In that sense the bars on my chart are deceptive. You can’t wait until 2012 to launch big systems change for sustainability. The work, the discussion, the plans, the research have to start now.

Know your type, or, Stop beating your head against a brick wall

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Myers Briggs TypesI am a strong believer in the power and value of understanding personality and cognitive styles as a part of effective work in exploring the future. That’s true even if you are working alone–you need to know your own mind in doing futures work. Are you a black and white thinker, or do you see lots of grey areas? Do you like to use logic or focus on how you feel emotionally about things? Knowing about your cognitive styles and others’ is extremely valuable if you are part of a team that needs to confront change and build strategies for dealing with it. If you’ve found doing that work hard, maybe you don’t know enough about the personalities and cognitive styles on your team.

Most organizational executives have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and at one time knew their Myers-Briggs Type. Mine is I/ENTP, the I/E indicates that I rated about evenly between extroversion and introversion. The N means intuiting, the T, thinking, and the P, perceiving. I first took the test about 20 years ago. It helped me clarify things about my work style and my personal interactions with others.

If you never have known, or have long since forgotten your Myers-Briggs Type, you should go back and take the test. There are several versions free, online. One can be found here, and another here. The online tests are not perfect–they tend to try to find a type with fewer questions than the longer printed versions, but give one a try.

A less-well-known, but particularly useful indiactor is the Kirton Adaptation Innovation Inventory [Link]. It is based on a theory of cognitive style that says everyone is creative, but that there are distinctly different styles of creativity that fall on a continuum from adaptive creative–people who create "inside the box" and innovative creative–those who see no boundaries on their creative ideas. Knowing your place and your colleagues’ place on the continuum can help you understand how you and they will explore choices and potential innovations together.

Unfortunately, the Kirton Centre, which controls the KAI, does not make a do-it-yourself test available, and they believe firmly that you should be tested under the guidance of a certified KAI consultant. No KAI type is inherently good or bad, but as with the Myers Briggs, knowing more about yourself is inherently good–it can make it possible to be more effective and less uncertain in work, dealing with others. 

In my work as a futurist and in collaborating with others in foresight, it has been valuable to know my personality type and cognitive style, and those of my colleagues. It has been clear over the years that some people are not comfortable with conjecture–a critical part of futures work, and some are not instinctive about looking at grey areas, which is also critical in exploring future possibilities. It’s possible to clarify those things in exploring personality and cognitive styles. In almost any setting, having multiple cognitive or personality styles on the team is a good thing. But not understanding the different styles is not a good thing, and can destroy any benefit you might get from variety.

If you are pretty well convinced that one or another colleague is crazy, or that they are of limited mental ability, you may be reacting to their personality type or cognitive style. Surely they are not crazy or stupid, just different. And maybe they’ve got the missing piece you need, if only you could see it and know how to fit it with what you can do.

Foresight is difficult enough without adding layers of misunderstanding and opposition to the effort. Try to understand who you are and who your colleagues are, how they think and react. Your chances of success are much greater if you do. Don’t beat your head against a brick wall.

Creative apartheid, and other organizational sins

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Avoiding silos in the organizationThe blog Innovation Weblog cited Gary Hamel’s book The Future of Management a few months ago, and I’ve meant to share its key points on impediments to innovation. Here they are along with my interpretations:

Creative apartheid–The long-held notion that creativity is a gift few have and that creative things should, and perhaps can only come from the “creative types” in the organization, or, perhaps, only from outside consultants. We need everyone’s creativity to be nurtured and set free.

The drag of old mental models–Organizations get stuck in modes of thought and conventional views that endure and hold fresh thinking at bay. They need to be able to change the way they think.

No slack–Cost cutting and lean practices leave little room for the free thinking and experimentation that might lead to innovative practices, new products, and new business models. Innovation needs slack.

To these, I’d like to add what I’ve observed over and over again in groups I’ve worked with. Too many companies have a mental template and an obsession, that has them looking at market share and bottom line growth as not just critical measures of success, but, sometimes, the only measures. They demand that a new idea deliver $50 million to the bottom line in year 2. They insist that changes not cost more, even if there might be a long-term payoff.

Better foresight and habitual longer-range thinking can make a big difference across this range of chronic organizational disabilities. If only by modeling longer-term good outcomes, the tools and habits of foresight can help organizations get beyond this barriers to innovation.

Image: my-aim-is-true via Flickr, cc license

As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder

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A lot my after-hours life is centered on baseball this time of year, so allow me to look for a strong lesson for the business world from my favorite sport.

Baseball today is much the same game that was played over 100 years ago. It has deeply-rooted conventions and established ways of doing things. [link] And it’s slow to change. There are tremendous pressures not to break the bounds of common practice in baseball. A ruled error for a player in baseball means not achieving something that, conventionally played, should have been doable. In fact, sometimes a fielder who misses a ball gets no error because he doesn’t try to make a tough play.

As baseball stats guru Bill James has noted, “A blunder by a manager is a move that is A) unconventional, B) doesn’t work and C) occurs at a moment of focus in the game. If you put those three things together, you have a blunder. As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder.”

The disincentive to innovation in baseball, like in so many areas of life, is powerful. That means a lot of potentially-successful and innovative approaches to the game will not even get a tryout.

For example, conventional practice has the best pitchers go in as starting pitchers, at the beginning of the game. Late game, a series of relievers come in to finish the pitching. Some innovative thinkers in baseball management would love to try starting the aces in the third or fourth inning, using the one-inning talent first. The potential in that is great for having the best arms hold on to a win or help the team come from behind. But starting the aces late would be odd and unconventional, and no one wants to try it (and fail).

The few baseball managers who show a tendency to “think outside the box” are the exceptions that prove the rule. For example, in April 2008, Bobby Cox, the Atlanta Braves manager, temporarily moved his pitcher to left field so he could bring him back to the mound later. The Braves lost, but fortunately Bobby Cox has the status in baseball to avoid his unconventional move being seen as a terrible blunder. Still, the baseball bloggers and other commentators reacted as if a crazy-like-a-fox manager had done something truly odd. But what he did was logical, legal, sensible, and could have worked.

We need the leaders in organizations to feel empowered to buck convention, to try new things, and to fail sometimes. Baseball managers, with their ancient game of traditions, are starting to wake up to new ideas. Are business people caught in their old trap of sticking to convention?

Many are. We need to do some careful reflection on how much that’s true and get conversations going about it. If more people are aware of how traditions and conventions in their game might be inhibiting them, we’ll have a clearer shot at making the changes that need making, and maybe we can win more games.

Image: bobbychuck24 via Flickr, cc license

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