Innovation CHEF

There has been some fascination with word searches through the Innovation Taskforce report. The TASC blog post looking for tax to find it 127 times for example.  I thought it would be interesting to create a Wordle out of the text of the report. A Wordle is a word cloud, that gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

What are the big words? Where is tax?
Check it out

make your own Wordles here

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

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Shortly before his death in 2001 Douglas Adams recorded this talk at USCB. Adams was the author of The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and some other great books. I have a great fondness for The Long Dark Teatime of the soul.

This is about animals and their crazy lifestyles. Perhaps it is also about humans and our future.

OK it’s an ad for cereal.
It is pretty good though.

for those of you who have trouble wasting time I recommend Google Earth

Gem from Ellens Blog.

There is going to be a “how-to” session on TRIZ on March 29th. It’s Eastern time so Irish folks might what to catch up on the recording.
There is going to be a micro lesson on Ideality, use of resources and resolving physical contradictions. I spent a good chunk of this week writing up and discussing resource lists.

If you liked it – give some feedback.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/397864283

With calls from the Innovation Commissioner and the recommendations from the Innovation Taskforce ringing in our ears, the Irish Patents office has announced details of Junior Inventor 2010.

Last years winner was Eimear Fitzpatrick from Rathfarnham Parish National School. Her invention was called ‘a lid bin’. Her idea was to fix a small postbox type bin on the front of all glass bottle recycling bins, to collect the bottle tops for recycling and to keep the recycling areas tidy. Good Idea!

All the details of this years competition are here.

Who knows, we could see these young inventors up in the Dragons Den pretty soon.

Colm McCarthy, the UCD economist & chair of the An Bord Snip Nua team, commented this weekend on the Innovation Taskforce report.

He wasn’t overly impressed, describing it as a “flight of pure fantasy”

The 132-page report is profoundly depressing, a cornucopia of buzzwords, singularly lacking in economic context, aspirational, divorced from reality – indeed, contemptuous of reality.

His key point is that the report advocates public spending (that means borrowing) without giving concrete justification for the return on this investment.

All buzzwords and hype? or key outline for business growth

The article from the Sunday Business Post is here.