All about innovation

Well I'm off to Sydney tomorrow night, just for 2 days to visit Visa and some other people who are also interested in my research, so here's a few things to read while I'm gone! =)

Did you know that BusinessWeek's Innovation section is filled with really insightful articles? I especially like the slide show about 'How to Learn Creativity and Innovation' - it sums everything up so well in such a succinct, graphical way. I especially like this diagram showing how coffee progresses from being a $0.01 commodity to a $5 experience.

And I haven't had a chance to read this properly yet, but it looks very promising:

Mapping Emotions
"Consumers crave "personal meaning" in products and services. To innovate, new methods are being developed to help designers understand the emotions that drive consumer decisions.
We are at a point in time where companies can no longer compete simply on technology. Technology has become relatively inexpensive -- and rampant. Many companies face competitors that are equal in technical expertise. The competition has simply caught up."

Finally, on a somewhat unrelated note, textually has a nice post about mobile phones specifically designed for a certain age group, namely older people.

In Mobile Phones, Older Users Say, More Is Less
"At a time when cellphones are letting users do more tricks, from video calling to downloading digital music, one of the latest models from Vodafone has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons, reports the WSJ Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking."

It also has a really good list of links to other 'elder phones', which may be useful later on. But yeah, there's definitely a market for these beyond just older people - there are plenty of late adopters and laggards for which these kinds of bare-essentials handsets would be ideal. And of course, ease of use will benefit everyone - even (or especially) tech-savvy innovators and geeks will appreciate it. =)