All these instances show a specific way to extend the mobile phone usage within different areas. When innovation happens in this direction, it is usually aiming for the most developed open platform, spreading towards the others later on, in order to get the early majority customers. Knowing that, it is understandable that iPhone gets on top of the list.

However, I’ve been often wondering what is the next big thing connected to mobile phone usage. There are several directions in which innovation arise, considering mobile phones: the mobile phones per se, mobile applications, mobile advertising, mobile  accessories etc. Most of the developments and innovation are incremental, however ones in a blue moon we see something that creates a new wave and others join for a ride.

I’d like to post my favorite new frontiers of mobile phone usage and will be happy to get your comments and additional fields of exploration:

- Will start with the result of the Cambridge Nanoscience Center and Nokia Research Center – the Nokia Morph Concept. Amazing opportunities.
- Nokia Scentsory – the phone that can smell! Read a review about it on the Gadget Review portal.
- Apple Black Hole concept. It uses holographic technology for mid-air interactions, also existing as a concept of a bracelet.
- Holographic text messages. Enjoy this video! Seams so close, no matter how far.
- Pomegranatephone: all-in-one phone: usual features + MP3player + projector + global voice translator + coffee brewer (?!) + shaver + harmonica . Watch this interactive video. Have your wow moment and at the end, click on the “Release Date”. Great fun and inspiration!

As I mentioned in the beginning, mobile phone as a remote control is an old news. But, regardless of what happens in the future, one thing is sure: we are going to be more attached and dependent on mobile phones, using them almost as a remote control for our lives: organizer, entertainment device, payment device and security center.

Forgetting your mobile phone at home – big no!… Knowing my ratio of loosing mobile phones, that’s scary!

Actually, considering the € 927m spendings on research and development, over 6000 people working in R&D in all Unilever regions across the globe, over 20 000 registered patents & patent applications and between 250 & 350 new patent applications a year, it is an awesome place to start.

“Innovation in our company is absolutely key to achieve value diversification of product and opportunity to reach the brand loyalty.” – stated professor Genevieve Berger, Chief R&D officer in Unilever in the FT innovate ‘09 conference.

I would try to summarize what do their successful R&D concepts involve in the next paragraphs.

An innovation concept that they practice brilliantly and almost ‘endemically’ is the cross-category application of same technology. They have organizational interface and integration among innovations disciplines for re-usage of patents across completely different product categories (like the whiteness substance in washing powder and in tooth-paste). They are currently reinforcing the cross-category R&D programs, coming up with larger amount of joint programs across their home care, personal care and foods product lines, share the innovation research among different disciplines and create passion and enthusiasm for creating cross-category technology for the scientists.

What amazed me from their approach, is the long-term, yet open, flexible and effective innovation process. They promote global collaboration, extremely important part of the global open-innovation process (which is not a new concept, but they surely do it well). What they do is: find the science where it is and integrate it into their process. They do this by keeping very high standards internally. As professor Berger  said: “You only do very good open innovation if you only have very good strengths in R&D inside the company. Otherwise, you can be sold any kind of development and can not benchmark it.”

When talking about their open innovation practices, one must mention their  dedicated portal for submitting ideas to Unilever, under regulated terms. Also, one can surely not miss mentioning the “Unilever ventures” initiatives, aiming to strategically co-invest in projects that suit their taste. Even more, there is a whole financial organization behind the company called Unilever Technology Ventures, which seeks to invest in technology related ventures and early stage companies, which would be advantageous or relevant to its parent company. Those are engagements which, in simple terms, do not fit Unilever’s strategy and portfolio.
… way to go!

As from the integration point with the marketing department, they take the deep consumer understanding mostly for R&D projects’ prioritization. How do they do that? By organizing a so-called sweet-spot discovery meeting, with expertize from all departments. Simple and kicking!

What is also an established innovation concept in Unilever, as a global player, is the end-point integration of global and local research teams. Local/regional sites bring the specificity of the market, which is integrated into the global concepts.

Strategically organized department, receives highest attention (read money) from top levels and properly networked and run!

…

Looking at globalization one way or another (I will put the innovation hat in this post), globalization brings several opportunities and pressures for domestic firms in emerging market economies to innovate and improve their competitive position, as well as highly influences the transfer of capabilities. There is large amount of theory on this, but that is only one variable of what globalization does to innovation.

What I was more intrigued from, is the globalization of the PROCESS of innovating. In this post, I would like to feature part of a highly descriptive story, on this topic, in the book “The World is Flat” – T.L.Friedman, which goes:

“If I have a granddaughter one day, and I tell her I’m going to India, will she say, “Grandpa, is that where software comes from?” No, not yet, honey. Every new product-from software to widgets-goes through a cycle that begins with basic research, then applied research, then incubation, then development, then testing, then manufacturing, then deployment, then support, then continuation engineering in order to add improvements. Each of these phases is specialized and unique, and neither India nor China nor Russia has a critical mass of talent that can handle the whole product cycle for a big American multinational. But these countries are steadily developing their reseach and development capabilities to handle more and more of these phases. As that continues, we really will see the beginning of what Satyam Cherukuri, of Sarnoff, an American research and development firm, has called “the globalization of innovation” and an end to the old model of a single American or European multinational handling all the elements of the development product cycle from its own resources. More and more American and European companies are outsourcing significant research and development tasks to India, Russia, and China.”

I would just say that regardless of the new truth about the global shift caused by cheap outsourcing offerings, I’m glad that parts of the process of innovation has been tackled for outsourcing and have been structured to details, enabling an outsourcing approach.  What I’m also glad for, is that the global innovation playing field is being leveled.

T.L.Friedman continues with some statistics about this phenomena: “According to the information technology office of the state government in Karnataka, where Bangalore is located, Indian units of Cisco Systems, Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments, and GE have already filed 1,000 patent applications with the U.S. Patent Office. Texas Instruments alone has had 225 U.S. patents awarded to its Indian operation. “The Intel team in Bangalore is developing microprocessor chips for high-speed broadband wireless technology, to be launched in 2006,” the Karnataka IT office said, in a statement issued at the end of 2004, and “at GE’s John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore, engineers are developing new ideas for aircraft engines, transport systems and plastics.” Indeed, GE over the years has frequently transferred Indian engineers who worked for it in the United States back to India to integrate its whole global research effort. GE now even sends non-Indians to Bangalore.”

Enjoy this video if you haven’t read the book!

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

How does it work?

Well, the best way to find out is to watch his presentation on the TEDindia conference, which he gave several days ago.

The true power of Sixth Sense lies on its potential to connect the real world with the Internet, and overlaying the information on the world itself. He is connecting our digital and physical worlds in a sense we can only imagine. Yet, he makes it look so simple!

What I consider as more important in his case, is the brilliance of the model he is employing to get the technology and the software into the market. He announced an open source platform release in near future, so that every gadget&software-maniac can develop upon the concept. He’s also promoting it as a cheap alternative to the more robust and commercialized interactive “surfaces”.

• One projector can save the effort of implementing an expensive multi-touch computers.
• One camera can be combined with revolutionary software to input extracted important data from the environment into a digital devise.
• Several sensors can follow human movement and create an interactive environment, whenever you are.

and yes, one man can make a difference!

Get ready for this one!

Just to give a perspective on this innovation, here are some developments in gesture control systems:
Gesture remote control iPhone/iPod and a Mac
Toshiba gesture recognition
Eye-movement recognition
Brain-to-brain communication

Here is how they made it: “Using a “sample jet” and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.”

One would think that chemical sniffing iPhones seems like something that would be way down their list, provided we have no more data to operate. Amazing that they would like to commercialize such a knowledge and make it public. Either they’re trying to worry people or they know something. Just to get your minds going, I will post a set of extreme scenarios, being talked about on the tech forums:

- There’s no doubt that the military is not already considering this device to be used with their infantry. You can have this bio/chemo detector anywhere and have it GeoTag the location and time of detection and have it easily upload the data to Central Command or a data collection server to monitor possible Bio attack or Chemical leaks. It’s a great move and will push the use of iPhone/smartphones to a higher level.
- Since the device sends WiFi signals to a computer or tel.network, this is probably the case where it is monitored by the Federalies, this would be a perfect way for finding out who is, lets just say – making a bomb – and where that person/cell phone is.
- Radon is currently a present threat in many homes. On a global scale, it is estimated that 2,400 million curies of radon are released from soil annually. Typical domestic exposures are of ≈ 100 Bq/m³ indoors. Is this in their requirements specs?

You decide what you believe in!

I’ll just say that the geek community is now happy! They have their own mini version of Spock’s Tricorder!

This video had that effect to me, today:

I have closely observed some of the developments in this segment, and there have been lots of integrations and process innovations in online payment in the previous years. What strikes me the most, in this market, is that new ideas constantly arrive, they involve new payment technologies, they integrate, make our lives easier, and yet there is so much more to be done.

Moreover, one of the market leaders, Paypal, has sat down and created an extreme of an future service set.

Will this happen with their API release? NO!
Will this happen in near future? NO!

But hopefully visions like this will inspire people to do cool things!

One minute of brand reinforcement for the clients, one minute leadership vision for the employees, and most importantly, one minute inspiration for the market!

I’ll try to elaborate why is this a crucial issue for me, in the world of innovations.

I have often thought about how changes in technology are irreversible. The possible bad choices of default implementations, whether influenced by economics of scale, or by simple taking for granted are haunting us even today. Taking into consideration that technical changes are mostly influenced by its antecedents, even when random, they may have a weight of its own.

Here is a perfect example. We are stuck with the “QUERTY” typewriter keyboard, because of the irreversibly of acquired system-scaled economics, prior investments in education and equipment. Therefore, technological change does not have the reversible and ergodic qualities of most market phenomena. This aspect gives the appearance of autonomy to technological momentum, leading us to believe that invention is the mother of necessity, not the reverse.

Believe it or not, the QWERTY keyboard is actually designed to slow typing speed. Early typewriters had problems with the plates jamming in the mechanical arms if users typed too quickly. Christopher Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard layout to force typists to type slower so that typewriters wouldn’t jam. QWERTY became the model in typewriter production and the standard for business use.

We are surrounded by things—tools, technologies, ideas, institutions. They make us who we are. It is the era when the layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are no longer viable, because no technological factors are in-calculated. As our creations evolve, these status-quo elements adapt to changing needs, but often they retain vestigial traits, throwbacks to earlier times. There’s just not enough momentum to switch!

So it seems we’re stuck with QWERTY. And not just that! We are sometimes stuck with ancient working processes in our companies. We are stuck with outdated educational programs. And most of the people are not even bothered with that?

Are we too lazy? Or, there is nothing in it, for us?

I have few dilemmas, though, for the other innovation segments:

Is it because we are mostly creatures of habits and stability in what we already know, instead of creatures that want progress?
Has the entropy already entered because we refuse to put energy in some areas and does it create weak links to evolution?
Do we just wait for somebody else to react, and is that somebody always the one who has financial interest in the changes?

I’ve recently participated in a class for strategic technology management, whereby the following video was discussed. Wanted to share it, since it examines most of these issues, in an industry that remains its status quo because of the before said.

Enjoy watching it!