INNOVATIVE CANDY?

Here's an innovation that's arriving just in time for Halloween, an innovation in candy.  It started with a question from a kid  Why does the junk food we love have to be so bad for us?

A few years ago, after losing his hoard of Halloween candy (confiscated by his Dad),   a thirteen year old named Nicky did some research online to prove to his dad that candy isn’t so bad.  He discovered that his dad was right (for once).

It’s not that Nicky thought candy was healthy.  It’s that he didn’t know how bad it really was. What Nicky learned was that the worst parts of candy (like hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives) aren’t there to make it taste good.  They’re there to make it cheaper to produce.

Nicky had a hunch that without the junk, candy could taste better. With the help of his older brother Kris, and his dad, they set out to prove it.  This led to considerable, international research, experimentation and testing.   Working with an innovative Spanish chef, they invented candy without the junk, and with more protein, cacao, fiber and caramel.  Even the dyes used to color the candy are natural.

The results, from a company launched this summer named  Unreal™ Brands, are five candies in snazzy packaging that taste good* and don't cost more than other, junky candy.

This company has a mission much bigger than just selling candy. It wants to have an impact on some very troubling trends in nutrition and public health in rich countries. Young people in the United States, for example, are estimated to get as much as half their calories from junk food and beverages. Teens consume an average of 24 teaspoons of corn syrup per day. This trend may be related to projections that by 2020, 40 percent of Americans will be clinically obese and half will be diabetic or pre-diabetic.

* I haven't tasted this stuff yet, but it's sold in ordinary stores, like CVS, Staples, even Target. You can bet I'll try it out before Halloween.  I think I'll start with the peanut butter cups.


Most of the information above is taken from the Unreal's website or this blog post and video from Bill Gates (he's an investor) plugging the new candy.

Innovation is sweet.

3M INNOVATION: NEW PRODUCT VITALITY INDEX

originally posted August 16, 2012

Earlier this summer, I had the pleasure and honor of joining a group of 3M executives for lunch, and was fortunate to sit across from Ken Bartelt.  Half-way through my hoagie, I asked him if 3M kept track of how many of their products were new at any point in time.  Ken’s answer was immediate, detailed and illuminating.

Yes, 3M keeps careful track of new product development, using a measure called the New Product Vitality Index (NPVI), which quantifies the percentage of 3M’s sales from products that were introduced during the past five years.  Stop here a minute, and guess what that number is…

Ken told me that in 2011, the New Product Vitality Index was 32%.  Thirty-two percent.  Think about that.  3M has over 55,000 products, and nearly a third of them are new in the past five years.   There’s a company that innovates!

photo by Brock Davis

How do they do it?   Ken explained that many of the new products are re-makes of existing products, but with a new competitive edge.  For instance, one of 3M’s original products (introduced nearly 100 years ago) was sandpaper.  But almost every sandpaper that 3M now sells is new in the past five years, because 3M innovation in manufacturing has resulted in sandpapers with sharper little particles that do the work, so the sandpaper is distinctly more effective than other brands, and can be sold for a premium.

What Ken didn’t tell me is that 3M has tracked the NVPI since 1988, and that it has risen by more than 50% in the past 6 years. More than 50 percent.  During this time, the percentage spent on research and development has remained steady at 5 to 6 percent.  Larry Dignan of smartplanet wrote a fine article (with a great graph) about this last summer,  describing insights from 3M CFO David Meline about how 3M structures R&D.

Over lunch, Ken had mentioned that 3M is aiming to raise the NPVI to 40% by 2015.   It doesn’t really matter if we reach that number exactly, he mused.  Just having the goal there — aggressive, measurable and very visible — makes the challenge palpable and 3M talent will rise to it.

Hats off to the team that looked at 3M’s NVPI in 2005 — an enviable 21% — and aimed to nearly double that over the subsequent 10 years.   And thanks, Ken Bartelt, for one of the most interesting lunch conversations ever.

RESOURCES ON SOCIAL INNOVATION

Social Innovation Catalysts:  The social innovation ecosystem is flourishing.   Here are inspiring sources and places for innovation insights, incubators, training and more.

• Ashoka, the 30+ year old “granddaddy” of social entrepreneur incubators:  http://usa.ashoka.org/

• British Columbia Social Innovation Council:  http://pascalobservatory.org/pascalnow/blogentry/british-columbia-canada-social-innovation-council-releases-final-report

• Centre for Social Innovation in Canada, rich source of models, ideas, training, incubator and more:    http://socialinnovation.ca

• DESIGN COUNCIL in England:  http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/challenges/

• Incommons — new venture in Minnesota for social innovation gatherings, challenges and connections to people and organizations.  http://www.incommons.org/about

• Poptech Social innovation labs and fellows program:   http://poptech.org/fellows

• ISKME turning educators into innovators:  http://www.iskme.org/

• SpringboardInnovation (for social innovation)   in Portland.   Among other things, they have a social innovation incubator called Hatch:  http://blog.springboardinnovation.org/

• Code for America:  accelerator for social innovations in government using information technology:   http://codeforamerica.org/accelerator/

• Bill Gross’s innovation incubator, the Idea Lab  http://www.idealab.com/

• White House:  Office of Social Innovation:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Social_Innovation_and_Civic_Participation

Social Innovation News:

• 10 Great Social innovation reads (every month)  from Social Velocity http://texasenetworks.com/2012/02/06/10-great-social-innovation-reads-january-2012/
• Stanford Social Innovation Review:  http://www.ssireview.org/

ESTONIA'S KIDS CODE

Sometimes you have to look to Estonia for  innovations in teaching kids about computers.
Several recent articles  Forbes, Gigaom,  UbuntuLife) laud a new government sponsored pilot program that aims to teach programming to every child in the country, starting in the first grade.

Here are excerpts from the Forbes article:

Estonia, a small country with a population of 1.3 million people, punches above its own weight when it comes to advancements in tech. It was the birthplace of Skype, one of the first countries to have a government that was fully e-enabled, and now it has launched a nationwide scheme to teach school kids from the age of seven to 19, how to write code. The idea isn’t to start churning out app developers of the future, but people who have smarter relationships with technology, computers and the Web .

There are 550 schools in this Eastern European country, and as the new term starts this month around 20 of them will take part in the pilot program….

This is the brainchild of Ave Lauringson, who  knows it’s unusual for a nationwide school system to teach kids about coding at this young an age. “It’s a unique project. [Other countries] want to start programming in secondary school, but they don’t dare to start in the first grade.”

So why start so early? “We want to change thinking that computers and programs are just things as they are. There is an opportunity to create something, and be a smart user of technology,” she says.

For the youngest students, the new courses  won’t be strictly focused on learning programming languages like Java, Perl and C++. Rather they’ll ease kids into the necessary skills for coding like logic, which has the benefit of some overlap with subjects like math and potentially, robotics.

“We have only 1.3 million people, so it’s very easy for us to develop these kinds of projects,” says Lauringson. “Estonia is like a little model country to start new projects like this.” She adds a note of caution though: “We dare, but we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The Gigaom article elaborates:

“The first e-courses are meant for primary school teachers and they will take place at the educational portal www.koolielu.ee (Koolielu is Estonian for “school life”) that the Foundation maintains,” the group’s head of training, Ave Lauringson, told me. ”We expect about 30 teachers to take part in the first course. So we are just taking our first steps now, but we intend to expand the program significantly.”

The idea — which is being developed with funding from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research — is that children in grades 1-4 will take coding classes as part of their normal curriculum. After that, they can join extracurricular “coding clubs”, explained Lauringson.

Since gaining its independence from Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, its politicians and business leaders have followed a deliberate, direct path to try and build the country into a technologically-advanced nation.

These days most of Estonia’s government services are run online, most of its banking is done online, and there’s a significant corps of programmers who have built some really important companies. It’s working, and Tiger Leap’s idea is clearly to try and muscle that advantage along even further.

This project is an initiative  of Estonia’s Tiger Leap Foundation, a 16-year-old, government-sponsored organization that promotes technology and science in schools.  Wikipedia notes that this project was first proposed in 1996 by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, then ambassador of Estonia to the United States and later President of Estonia, and Jaak Aaviksoo, then minister of Education.  Funds for the foundation of Tiigrihüpe were first allocated in national budget of 1997.
Kudos to Toomas, Ave and Estonia!  Keep an eye on this small country.

WHO WILL CODE THE FUTURE?

Minnesotans like to think of our children as above average.  And we pride ourselves on our high tech industry and general high techi-ness.   So you’d guess Minnesota would be a leader in educating our children in technology, specifically in computing and computer science.
But in fact, Minnesota ranks near bottom – 47^th out of the 50 states.  A 2010 report from the professional society ACM, the Association of Computing Machinery, (excerpted here)  gives Minnesota a score of 9 out of 100.    We are failing to educate our children about computing and computer science.
This matters, because programs control significant parts of the world we live in.  If you understand basic concepts of coding, this world is comprehensible, adaptable, manageable.   If you don’t, it’s all gibberish, or magic.
Today’s programmers don’t just crunch numbers, they move robots, manufacture prototypes, build web sites and phone apps, tell stories and connect people across the planet.  Computer professions are expanding – both in traditional fields like information storage and access, and in these new areas of digital media and digital control.
We are not growing nearly enough computer professionals, barely a quarter of what’s needed to meet the current job vacancies.  The National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) supplies excellent statistics, including that only 29% of the 1.4 million new jobs in computing science that will become available between 2008 and 2018 can be filled by the current pipeline of computer bachelor’s degrees.  Even if you include associate and masters degrees, it barely passes 60%.
Another critical issue is that the industry and the pipeline are not nearly diverse enough.  As our nation’s demographics change – “white” males are now less than 25% of the babies born in America – we must attract both traditional and non-traditional students into Information Technology fields.   We need a diverse workforce because diversity of mind and experience are the best path to creative, collaborative problem solving.  And there are plenty of problems to solve in the world!
So who will code the future?  And what are we doing now to prepare them?  Alas, not enough.  Even in 2012, very few kids learn to code in school, though there are organizations, including Computing in the Core and Computer Science Education Week and CSTA  that are trying to change that.
Fortunately there is a growing “ecosystem” of innovative organizations creating out-of-school experiences that inspire kids from all walks of life and help build the next generation of computer professionals.  These deserve your attention, and your support. Two of my favorites are Black Girls Code and Mouse.
Black Girls Code www.blackgirlscode.org  is a non-profit organization founded last year by Kimberly Bryant, dedicated to teaching girls ages 7-16 from underrepresented communities about computer programming and digital technology.  They’ve completed a hugely successful “Summer of Code” hosting classes across the country.  Here’s a great blog posted in Scientific American about their Summer of Code project.
Mouse  www.mouse.org  is an innovative youth development organization based in New York City that empowers underserved students to provide technology support and leadership in their schools, supporting their academic and career success.  Mouse has been in operation for over 15 years, has 439 active Mouse Squads nation-wide and has served over 18,000 young people.
There are many other projects, nationally and internationally, focusing on these issues:

• A new organization www.GirlsWhoCode.com  is doing a terrific job of raising the visibility of closing the gender gap in the computing profession.   Their PR launch last week touted articles by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time and many more, plus financial support from Google, E-Bay, General Electric and Twitter.    Their first 8 week class for 20 girls met this summer.
• Coder Dojo www.coderdojo.com is a global volunteer collaboration based in Ireland providing free and open learning to young people, especially in programming technology.
• For a peek at some innovative possibilities of in-depth engagement, check out the projects funded by The Hive, the Digital Media Learning Fund of the New York Community Fund.

Across the country and beyond, kids are programming robots, creating smart phone apps, producing animation,  inventing video games, mastering digitally controlled manufacturing and more.  When kids learn to code, they move beyond just USING technology, to making, building, producing.  A non-profit called Code Now says it best:
“Coding is the new literacy. It gives individuals the power to innovate and create. We need to empower our youth – especially those from underrepresented communities – to be the next great technology pioneers. “

TEACH ALL OUR KIDS TO CODE

Earlier this year, The Kernel published a great piece by Andy Young, worth reading in full, that makes a passionate case for teaching kids to code.  Here are a few excerpts:

The use of tools is a big part of what make us human, and the computer is humanity’s most powerful tool. . .  In offices and homes the world over, each and every one of us at some point undertakes tasks of a repetitive, tedious or complicated nature, tasks that could, are or eventually will be automated or eased by computer. The computer makes us more efficient, and enables and empowers us to achieve far more than we ever could otherwise.

Yet the majority of us are entirely dependent on a select few, to enable us to achieve what we want. Programming is the act of giving computers instructions to perform. This is true whether the output is your word processor, central heating or aircraft control system. If you can’t code, you are forced to rely on those that can to ensure that you can benefit from the greatest tool at your disposal.

Who can shy away from the attractiveness of giving instructions and having things done on your behalf? The ability to code is what brings the power of computing to the masses. We need to break away from a culture where we consider people to be “technical” or “non-technical” – not everyone takes to literature or eloquent composition of prose, but we need to attack the phenomenon of the “non-technical” in the same way that we tackle illiteracy.

Young also takes care to articulate what coding is and isn’t.  Learning to code, he explains, is not training to be a professional programmer. Learning to code is not even necessarily learning to become fluent in the syntax and functionality of a specific programming language.   Learning to code is learning to use logic and reason, and express your intent in a consistent, understandable, repeatable way.  Learning to code is learning to get under the skin of a problem and reduce it to its simplest form.
Learning to code, he continues is learning not to be afraid of experimentation and developing a basic understanding of concepts that allow you to take things and tweak them to fit your needs.
Young also points out that early training in computer science will allow future professionals to potentially get a decade of early experience, giving them expertise that will accelerate their professional training at university or on the job.
He concludes:  “a thorough grounding in logic, reason and problem-solving – coupled with the empowerment and inspiration that being able to harness technology to our personal advantage brings – will result in a smarter workforce, more engineers, innovators and managers that better understand technology, and a better quality of life for all. So let’s teach the kids to code. All of them. ”
There are many interesting links in the article and a lively discussion in the comments that follow.
Coding for Success by Any Young published January 23, 2012 in The Kernel

CARDBOARD CHALLENGE

Can you make an arcade game or something else interesting out of cardboard?
This is a very open ended design challenge from the Imagination Foundation, with a fascinating story.
It sounds like a fairy tale.   Once upon a time, a 9 year old boy named Caine created an elaborate set of arcade games using mostly cardboard, tape, time and lots of imagination.  The arcade, located in the front of his dad’s auto parts store in Los Angeles, grew more and more elaborate, but never attracted any customers.  Until one day, a young filmmaker named Nirvan Mullock came to the store, looking for a door handle for his car, and became the first customer of the marvelous arcade.
Nirvan was entranced with the arcade and its earnest young proprietor.   With help from Caine’s dad, George, Nirvan hatched a plan to get a bunch of people to come and play the arcade, and made a short, incredibly sweet movie about the results:
Some amazing things have happened in the intervening year.

• The movie went viral on the Internet with more than 2 million viewers in the first week (and another 5 million since) and raised over $200,000 for a college fund for Caine.
• Kids around the world (encouraged by wonderful parents and educators) started building cool stuff out of cardboard and sending ideas and pictures to the Caine’s Arcade web site.
• A creative funder (the Goldhirsh Foundation) awarded Nirvan a substantial challenge grant to start an organization devoted to creativity and imagination.
• In the first 2 months, a school pilot project reached over 100 schools in 9 countries.
• A rousing collection of education visionaries endorsed the project.  As luminary Sir Ken Robinson said, “One of the greatest challenges we face in education is tapping into children’s natural powers of creativity and one of the appeals of Caine’s Arcade is it’s demonstrating how deep those powers are, and how readily people will rise to the challenge if you give it to them.  And I think if we can make that systemic in our education systems, we’ll transform the world for our children and for ourselves.”
• With a new movie Nirvan and his new Imagination Foundation launched the Cardboard Challenge and Global Day of Play.
• And today, October 6, 2012, the first Cardboard Challenge was celebrated at more than 200 events in 38 countries.   Follow the Imagination Foundation to find out more about this phenomenal movement/celebration of children’s imagination.

Kudos to Caine and all the imaginative kids in the world.  And bravo to Nirvan Mullick and his new foundation. The idea, as Nirvan says, is not only to give kids the tools to build the things they can imagine, but also to imagine the world that they can build.
Now go build something interesting out of cardboard.

EGG DROP CHALLENGE

Can you build a container that will enable an ordinary raw chicken egg to survive a lengthy fall?
This was one of the earliest engineering design challenges, and is still a great one:  many museums, camps, colleges and classrooms have yearly egg drop contests.  By varying the rules – limiting the materials, the size of package and the height from which the package is dropped – the challenge can be made accessible to kindergarteners, or engaging for university students and other adults.  Scicenter in Ithaca New York has been hosting an annual egg drop contest for more than 25 years, with categories ranging from Best Freefall to Most Ecological Design to “Splat.”
     Illustration by Melinda Beck

Some contests have design goals other than mere survival.  How light can the package be?  How small?  How creative?  Participants can be given a limited “budget” with different materials costing different amounts.  Some contests require the package fall within a target area, to discourage gliders.
Creative selection and limitation of materials radically changes the contest.   Even a young and sloppy builder can easily make a successful descent using enough bubble wrap.  Advanced students and engineers will be challenges by a contest that uses only a small amount of paper, or cardboard or straws, string and tape.  Rubber bands and toothpicks are also challenging materials.  For safety, it’s good to forbid anything breakable or flammable.
It helps to be specific, very specific.   For instance,  ScienceMom suggests using a dozen drinking straws, a dozen craft sticks, 4 pieces of loose-leaf paper, 1 yard of string, and one yard of masking tape gathered into a “kit” for each participant.
The eggs are usually added just before the contest;  this ensures uniformity, and prevents cagey contestants from hardening the shells with tape or glue.   Thoughtful contest organizers avoid mess by requiring the egg – or the whole package – to be contained in a closed baggy, and by putting drop clothes on and around the landing area.
A fine challenge in packaging engineering, the Egg Drop Challenge can also be used to highlight Newton’s Laws,  animal physiology or the difficulty of landing a delicate payload

A few more hints:

• Kids of all ages love prizes, even if it’s just a certificate documenting brilliance.

• Raw eggs bring a small risk of salmonella poisoning, so make sure the eggs are properly disposed of, and that everyone washes their hands with soap after the contest.  Some contests use light bulbs to avoid this problem.

• An egg drop contest is innately exciting, but gains additional pizzazz with patter from a charismatic announcer or master of ceremonies.

A Google search will produce lots of contests, and sample rules.   Here are a few for starters:
http://montshire.org/programs/special-events/egg-drop/
http://www.theworks.org/files/docs/Egg%20Drop%20Challenge%202011.pdf
http://www.tnengineering.net/eweek/Demonstrations/Egg%20Drop%20Demonstration.pdf

Eggs away!