Wikimapia

Wikimapia is a very interesting ‘mashup’. It is a great example of how sophisticated applications can be created on the web using other, existing online technology and just a little bit of programming to customize a unique solution. In this case, the creators have used Google maps to deliver the map content and have layered over their own markup layer. Where available, places on the map are linked to articles in Wikipedia. They have used two existing content services and put them together to create a useful new tool.

The site creators have not had to do any of the data entry. Every day new and interesting places are added. The content and place descriptions are created by users of the site. Anyone can add a place and it becomes permanent once other visitors have given it enough positive votes.

And how is the site supported? How do they make money? Again, they have used an off the shelf solution by incorporating Google AdSense in the detailed place descriptions. Because these ads are content aware they will be relevant to whatever a visitor is searching for, and therefore most likely successful.

With some good ideas and just a little bit of know-how anyone can built really useful web tools – you just have the be the first to think of the idea!

Quintura

Here’s a really cool new search engine.It works like a conventional search engine on one level in that it will return a list of pages that match your criteria. But it adds a very interesting and useful layer: a cloud of topics that it believes are related to your primary search. By clicking on each topic, new results are displayed.

And a really cool feature is that it can be embedded! Here it is:

Thinking Creatively

People in the business world are taking an interest in how designers think. Product and service innovation and new design are creating a lot of value for many companies. As we move further into a knowledge economy, innovation is becoming THE way to compete successfully.

But creativity seems to be rare. Innovative problem solvers appear to be scarce. Are there so few people capable of creative thought, or is there another problem at work? What if creativity is not an unusual skill? What if we are being constrained by the way we have been taught to think?

I saw an interesting presentation by Dev Patnaik from Stanford University. One of his points was that the way we reason restricts the solutions we can come up with. In modern culture we have focused our intellectual training on deductive reasoning. We are taught concepts, we learn the laws of physics and the underlying principles of various disciplines. We then apply these principles to the situations and problems that we face in the world around us. With good models we can come up with consistently good solutions. The problem is that we are restricted. Deductive reasoning can only operate within a certain boundary. Deductive thinkers limit themselves by their models.

Dev suggests that if we want to be creative problems solvers we should employ inductive reasoning. We should bring together many things – many points of view and many observations. When we look at all of the specifics, is there a pattern that emerges? Can we induce new relationships or a new model that we had not seen before? The point of inductive reasoning is not to jump to conclusions, not to frame situations by the rules that we know but rather to suspend judgment and to look for something new.

Roger Martin in his article ‘The Business of Design’, http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/pdf/rotman_mgmt_winter03.pdf, takes this concept of reasoning one step further and suggests that beyond the inductive model there is the abductive one. He sees this as the mental model that designers use. Abductive reasoning strives to come up with new ideas and explanations that might be true and then seeks to explore and test them.

Creative thinking requires that we NOT apply what we have learned, or at least not right away. To be creative means not applying best practices, or rules of thumb, or standard procedures. We have to be – for a period – indecisive. To reach a creative solution we must carefully consider all aspects of a situation and be prepared to see things in unfamiliar ways. If we can change the way we think, we can all unshackle our creativity – and come up with valuable new ideas!

Creative Process

If we consider the development of the economy over the coming years it is clear that intellectual capital will be the primary generator of wealth. It will be ideas, new technologies, new products and new processes that will drive the global economy forward. For companies, it will be the ability to foster creative thinking in their people that will differentiate the winners from the losers.

If creativity is the source of value, having so many of our team involved in the design profession should give us a strategic advantage in business. To gain from this advantage, we will need to expand the scope of creativity beyond the design services provided to clients. We need to expand our creative approach to everything that we do.

How can creative thinking build value for us? I suggest that creativity is the ONLY way we can successfully build our company. We will be successful only if we can bring value to our clients:

• Offer new and integrated solutions.
• Provide ideas and valuable advice.
• Design new and innovative software tools.
• Communicate our value through compelling marketing messages.
• Streamline our integration with client systems.
• Build a workplace that attracts smart and creative people.
• Since creativity will be the source of value creation, our collective success will be based on two things: First, we will need to develop all of our creative talents. We must learn to become more creative in every aspect of what we do. Second we will need to create a culture that will foster, develop and implement new and innovative ideas.

Here some of my research on this topic. I have focused on ideas for how we can hone our creative talents and harness them for success.
 

Here is a list of techniques to help teams and individuals become more creative. I got these from Dilip Soman, a professor at the Rotman School of Business at U of T. His idea is that creativity is innate but our mental habits restrict us from fully using our talents. People are judgment machines. We are particularly fast with their judgments, especially if it is negative. The problem is that we are often too quick to dismiss ideas before we have fully thought them through. We need to train ourselves to avoid being judgmental before critically evaluating ideas. Here are some techniques for achieving this:

Technique 1) Constrained Brainstorming:

This is a technique to widen the total number of ideas and points of view when considering a problem. The technique involves team members coming up with as many ideas as possible even if they are obscure or seem silly. The rest of the team then has to add comments under each idea about why it is good. No negative comments are allowed. At the end of this process the team should have many more options to explore further. Some of the crazy ideas (that would normally have been dismissed out of hand) many not be so crazy after all!

Technique 2) Problem Reversal / Reframing:

Look at the reverse problem. How can I make customer service bad? How can I damage the health of Canadians? How can I decrease sales? Worsen public relations? As absurd as these reversed objectives sound they can give us insight into root causes of problems that we have not yet considered. By looking at a problem in reverse, we may seen things that we were previously blind to.

Technique 3) Imitation:

In this technique we look for ideas in other fields and disciplines. If someone else is doing it right, it doesn’t hurt to imitate them. The revolutionary distribution system that FedEx’s founder Fred Smith came up with was based on his study of how cancelled checks were cleared and returned between banks. The original typewriter design borrowed a great deal from organ mechanics. The imitation techniques are used in other fields as well: Inventory managers study ants; town planners study beehives. The idea here is that the problem we are facing may already been faced and addressed in another context.

Technique 4) Assumption Smashing:

When considering a problem we should look at the constraints. What assumptions are you implicitly making? Is there any way in which the most obvious assumption could be overcome? What would be necessary to do that? Can that be done? If not, is there another implicit assumption? The idea here is that we may be looking at a problem too narrowly. The solution may not be in the scope that we have defined for ourselves but within the bigger context – a context that we are incorrectly assuming to be immutable.

The underlying theme in all these techniques is that we all have the capacity to come up with creative solutions. To develop our creative abilities we have to delay our judgment of ideas and we have to expand our view of the situation we are considering.