I attended a seminar by Langdon Morris in Taiwan this September. Langdon Morris’ work involves developing “innovation, strategy, and collaboration methodologies to solve problems with very high levels of creativity and innovation.” He is also an author of several books, the recent one being “Permanent Innovation.”

The presentation talks about creating a work culture of permanent innovation, which is a bit of an oxymoron if you ask me, since the word ‘innovation’ is regularly used within the context of change. But Morris argues that it is, in fact, possible to have continuous innovation within any company. It just takes a lot of work and requires a few elements to exist first. The details though, Morris points to his book.

Nonetheless, here are a few notes I had written during the seminar:

1) Innovation is a company’s only sustainable competitive advantage.

1a) Failure is very costly and it doesn’t always produce results that translate into profit for companies

2) Starbucks is a good example of a brand that can sustain selling high-cost products because they provide something extra to your drinks: A unique cafe experience, and the guarantee that your drink will be perfect the way you want it.

3) There must exist three roles for developing an innovative culture:

- creative genius (sees what others do not see)

- innovation leader (sees the future and engages society in the quest to achieve this)

- innovation champion (holds everyone up, makes everyone successful, can break existing rules)

4) Three types of innovation:

- business model innovation (change the way profit is made)

- incremental innovation (change the product/service)

- internal innovation (organizational reform)

All in all, it was an alright seminar – definitely not the better ones I’ve attended. One major reason was the attitude of the speaker, Langdon Morris. He must have been irritated before coming to his presentation since he was pretty rude to the volunteers of the event, and questioned the reaction of the audience at certain times. I understand that the event could have gone more smoothly, but there is no need to talk to people (the same people helping your event!) the way he did. And whenever you are doing a presentation, never ever question the intelligence of your audience!

It may have been that he’s not accustomed to Taiwan’s culture, but irregardless his attitude affected my perception of his character. Just because you are in a foreign country doesn’t mean you can be rude to others.

Ultimately, I came out of the seminar knowing more about his character than his speech.

Peter Kao

Here’s another website that uses the Twitter model: it’s called Sprouter - just launched this week!

Check out their video tour.

I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I’m enjoying this neat little startup though. With Twitter, there is too much noise from too broad of  a network. All I see when I log in to my Twitter account are short, barely-descriptive statuses written by bored people. Too often I see the extended version of these statuses on Facebook, so why even bother logging in at all? (More beef on Twitter later in my upcoming blog post)

I think Sprouter (and also Yammer) did exactly what Twitter needed to do, but didn’t: divide and conquer. There is a need for micro-blogging, but it is important for users to sift through the sea of statuses. Twitter could have done that by implementing filters to segment different interest groups, but they decided to invest in the unfamiliar realm of real-time search instead. This is great, but it requires active involvement – the act of ’searching’ – too bad people are lazy online!

In the near future, there will be more and more startups applying the micro-blogging concept (or Twitter model). And Twitter will be a dead bird – a martyr for micro-blogging – the Youtube comments of the internet.

You can follow me on Sprouter here: http://www.sprouter.com/peterkao

Peter Kao

There are great business ideas, and then there are half-baked ideas. This is where halfbakery.com comes into play. It’s a website that is solely dedicated to ridiculous, improbable, and naturally – hilarious business ideas.

To give you a sense of what the website is like (because, you know, visiting a link yourself is hard) take a look at this invention, entitled, “evil laugh activated hand dryer.” It works as follows: “instead of a button or infrared sensor, people sometimes rub their hands together in the airstream, activate this hand dryer by laughing evilly.” Look! There are even pretty pictures,

Now, this is my kind of humour!

To give the website some credit though, there are some serious ideas. For example, the “Panic PIN“ idea, which is ranked as the top idea on the website, works by “entering [an] alternate ATM PIN number [to summon] help.” The idea is that if you are forced to withdraw cash, you can alert the police without the robber knowing.

Look around, you might even find a solid business idea to stea- err, I mean, examine.

Peter Kao

I received a nice little package from (surprisingly) the Canadian Telecom Summit I attended a few months ago. The package was in my mail after about 1 month the conference ended, which is pretty good considering the have hundreds of these DVD’s and packages to send out (for free!).

I’ve created an .iso file for those interested, but was unable to attend the conference. There shouldn’t be an issue with duplicating the DVD for sharing, since I don’t see any notices saying not to.

Anyways, here it is: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ENCQRQBO

- Peter Kao

NEWS

Ontario’s Emerging Technologies Fund is open for business.

The $250-million fund will co-invest – along with qualified venture capital funds and other private investors – directly into companies in high-growth sectors that are aligned with Ontario’s Innovation Agenda:

Clean technology
Life sciences and advanced health technology
Digital media and information and communications technology.
The fund is designed to help innovative technology companies find the capital they need to grow in Ontario. It was announced by the province in March in response to the current economic conditions and the reduction in investment capital available to emerging and high-growth companies.

Guidelines for investment are now available online at: www.ontario.ca/ocgc.

QUOTES

“The Emerging Technologies Fund is one more step the McGuinty government is taking to help ensure that innovative people and companies have access to the capital they need to continue growing their business and creating jobs in Ontario.”
- Minister of Research and Innovation, John Milloy

QUICK FACTS

Ontario’s Emerging Technologies Fund will address a lack of venture capital activity by co-investing with qualified investors directly into high-growth technology companies.
Eligible companies must have a significant corporate footprint in Ontario.
This initiative complements the $205-million Ontario Venture Capital Fund, a partnership between Ontario and leading corporate and institutional investors that is investing in venture capital and growth equity funds that support innovative, high-growth companies.
LEARN MORE

The Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund

Ontario’s Innovation Agenda

Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association – first quarter venture capital results