Innovation through design thinking

The speech was about "Design Thinking" and how it goes hand and hand with innovation. Design thinking is coming up with new strategies that set your company or organization apart from the rest of your competitors. It is connecting your design or innovation to your customers demands. Design thinking can be partnerships with other networks to help in the innovation process. Design thinking can be the stories that customers or society have about anything that could inspire the idea process. It's about knowing your role you play in the innovation process, and being inspired about getting your ideas or stories converted into real innovation projects. Knowledge management supports in this area by giving design thinkers access to easily express their idea's freely. This can be through collaboration, social networks, organizational social networks, as well as consumer feedback blogs. Knowledge management can be used in such a way to where it helps facilitate innovation from the design stage, through implementation.

Democratizing innovation

The speech "Democratizing Innovation" is about how innovation is predominately developed by users. The speaker said user communities are the source of innovation, because users know what they want when it comes to their services and products. Knowledge management can support innovation by offering more tools like collaboration forums, social networks, and the world wide web for users to express what they want. This in return is helping organizations create viable products and services that carter to their users needs. The speaker acknowledges that the cost of computing is decreasing which is allowing users to freely revile what he or she wants from innovation, making it easier for marketing, R&D, and most of all designers.

UC Berkerly

The speech on how to thrive in a rabid collaboration, highlighted several key points to achieve success in rabid collaboration. The first main point was being network rich. To be network rich from the speakers point of view is to learn how to collaborate in such a way that it builds your network base. Having your network base full of high quality knowledge that your network is valuable to what you do as far as decision making, planning, or idea generating. The second point was collaborating and knowledge sharing in such a way that it keeps you on the edge of success by leveraging your position within your given industry against your competitors, and it because, of the trust that is built during collaboration within your network. Both speakers ended with the point of cloud services, and how cloud services will be our life point of achieving the benefits of knowledge sharing. Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in R&D, training new personnel, or purchasing new software. Cloud computing encompasses all the benefits of being network rich, but offering the know how to thrive in a rabid collaboration effort.

Health Care Neural network application in Clinical diagnosis

During my research for a neural network I wanted to find out how neural networks are being used in the medical industry. There's a company named Open Clinical that produces knowledge management software for the health care industry. Open Clinical is producing a neural network called "Papnet". Papnet is a commercial neural network-based computer program for assisted screening of Pap (cervical) smears. Traditionally, Pap smear testing relies on the human eye to look for abnormal cells under a microscope. A Pap smear test examines cells taken from the uterine cervix for signs of precancerous or cancerous changes. Detected early, cervical cancer has an almost 100% chance of cure, but come to find out a pap smear is the only large scale medical laboratory test that is not automated. A patient with serious conditions can have fewer than a dozen abnormal cells among the 30,000 - 50,000 normal cells on her Pap smear, and it is very difficult to detect all cases since there is no automation. Imagine proof-reading of these pap smears is mostly done by the human eye. With no automation, things as small as spelling errors can really cause days of delays making hard to depend solely 100% on humans to read the test. Margret Sordo from Harvard University explains, the best laboratories can miss from 10% - 30% abnormal cases (Sordo, M. 1995 pg 9). Papnet-assisted reviews of cervical smears result in a more accurate screening process than the current practice, and quicker detection of precancerous and cancerous cells in the cervix. I really feel that more neural networks should be in the medical industry, so that more lives are saved most of all, and that it would allow for better efficiency since your neural network can now handle what humans are asked to do with pap smear.

Margin of Difference

I feel that the video offers a great way of teaching a person, a group, and organizations to fully maximize its own potential.To understand how to give more, push harder, and go over and beyond you own capabilities is some what challenging. Because we as humans have to be inspired in a way that takes us past that point of just being good, or even great. I really believe the method in the video can get people to be inspired. The benefits of social networks allows people to collaborate which gets communication moving, which starts driving ideas. Then as  these social networks grow, you or your company gains social capital. Then the process turns into learning the benefits of conservation, which allows us to expand our margin of difference, because human thinking should never stop, because its what drives ideas, and its ideas that's going to make you different from the rest. Conservation then builds the skills needed to understand how to engage with others on all levels, which will drive new opportunities in the form of maybe customers, expanding on your current ideas, or even new collaboration within your existing social network. When people do these things, it opens up our individual thinking, and allows us to be inspired because your personally invested. Once a person, a group, or organization gets inspired, then the endless amount of possibilities are for the taking. To be better than just good, or getting past than just doing enough has to come from you thinking on how, and to turn the how into action takes us understanding these methods, and that will be your margin of difference.

Collaboration and collective intelligence

After watching the video of the three speakers talk about collaboration and collective intelligence I feel each and every human being takes part in a collective intelligence moment some way or another weather they realize it our not. Our own interactions with society presents moments of collaboration which then collective intelligence is generated. As Trebor Schotz pointed out in his speech, with the heavy emergence of the online social networks, the benefits of collaboration and collective intelligence now can be shared with millions of users twenty four hours a day. The down size to these social networks is that it's very expensive, because of all the traffic and content that comes through the site causing and demanding tighter regulations or even charging the users. Trebor argues why not use nonprofit media giants allowing them to have public control over the public content which then lessen the cost on one company.Users shouldn't be charged a fee to collaborate in any form, because businesses even benefit regardless they know it or not.

Cory Ondrejka has already started basically a whole virtual world for collaboration and collective intelligence by giving the users all the tools to do what ever they want to do once a member of second life, but in a virtual setting. Cory explains that by giving their second life users the ability to do what ever they want to do within second life, they found that groups of second life users where collaborating on projects to make second life better for current or existing users of  second life. This didn't cost Ondreika company anything, and the company only gained revenue from letting the users be in total control, only making it better.

Mimi Ito brings collaboration and collective intelligence full circle by referencing how children are given the tools to effectively collaborate and share intelligence with other children by playing games like poke-man. Ito basically explains that collaboration and collective intelligence is happening even as early as children. Collaboration builds and pulls on one's stored intelligence to where it drives content from users in many forms. The content in physical form is what keeps society innovative and striving to be good at what we do.

Zappo's.....Wow

I was completely inspired by the video. What Tony Hsieh has done in Zappo's is completely amazing, and should be the new model for every business. Tony figured out the million dollar question, how to grow revenues while keeping your customer base extremely happy as well as his workforce. Tony referred to his past knowledge and experiences with other people to fully understand what it took to make Zappo's successful. He then understood that trust is the key to allowing decisions to following out even it meant failure. If there were failures, and accomplishments Tony would focus the same amount of time into both, as way of building knowledge to be better in what Zappo's already did, or learning from failures to offer better results in other areas of the business.

Zappo's increasing returns would be it's employee's and customer's. Their focus on being the best customer experience when dealing with Zappo's has made them stand alone in already flooded market. There's not too many places where I can say, that is the best place to shop solely based on customer service. When a company can attract customers based on customer service experience alone, they are doing something right. Tony tapped into the minds of people, and found out what people wanted in the form of products, services, and from their employer. I really believe the saying or quote many friends of mine have said, "To be happy, is to love what you do". Loving what you do is very possible, but you have to have trust, knowledge, focus, determination, and just be real in who you are. We live our lives in not wanting to take risk, because we think, what if, or should I do this, when need to trust our self's more, but learn to trust without it knocking us off our paths. Just like Tony did with his vision with Zappo's.