Innovation CHEF

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, deliverd the 2010 Guglielmo Marconi lecture at the Lisbon Council’s innovation summit Innovation Summit of the Lisbon Council Brussels.

The speech is fairly all encompassing going from industry research to “frontier” research and from service innovation to fuel cells. There a good emphasis on how this huge task will be tackled and some discussion on increasing efficiency and productivity.

• It is a big task. She acknowledges this.
• Europe hasn’t got a great track record in some areas. Also acknowledged

I’d hope that this speech represents a begining of some real co-ordinated work in Europe and not just fine words.

Nuggets:

Innovation is for All, for hospitals, schools & businesses; technical innovation and business model innovation welcome. There is a  recognition that scientists are not the only innovators and as such we need to provide a much broader base of people key skills in innovation.

• Innovation is no longer the preserve of a select elite. It is needed in every walk of life.
• It is no longer limited to the laboratory or the factory. It permeates every area of life.
• It cannot be limited to the prosperous regions. It must spread across the whole territory of the Union.

Ideas into action. “A strong science base is not enough on its own” The emphasis she puts on transforming ideas into action is exactly what is required. She specifically talks about being market driven and being able to transform inventions in innovative products that the customer wants. A strong focus on industry-driven applied research for the next five years strengthening the links between igher education, business and research centres. (sound familiar?) Building to a Single Market for Innovation supported by a fresh look at the entire IP framework (another Innovation Taskforce recommendation)

I have attached the videos below.
The is a bunch of good stuff in there and well worth a listen.

Part 1

Part 2

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Phil McKinney, who is one very successful and passionate innovator, spoke to the SuperNova community. In this brief inteview Phil speaks about Innovation.
Phil is an incredible innovation leader and has excellent material available on a “pay it forward” model on his website Killer Innovations

Check it out.

Perhaps a treat for Thanksgiving

This is a Dr. WHO and 2001 Mashup.
Thought it was pretty cool

Via Rich Johnston

Saw this and was quite amazed really.
You can apparently make your own!

What are sparklines?
Sparklines come from the Edward Tufte book Beautiful Evidence. It’s a great book and well worth checking out. (I was recommended his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as an apprentice engineer and just loved it.)

Sparklines are little data words. A small line graph to give context and meaning to the information that follows.

You see them in a lot of places: here is an example from my Google analytics page    62.30% New Visits.
Lot more information than just 62.30% New Visits alone

Looks like Microsoft has filed a patent claim for sparklines in Excel. United States Patent Application 20090282325. NOW it is just an application but even so it is quite amazing. Of course The USPTO allows anyone to file an application for anything, as long as they pay the fee. It doesn’t give you any rights.

The good news is I now know that sparklines can be generated in Excel!

As we have been talking a lot about Innovation recently thought this could be fun.