A key principle of The Slingshot Framework is to harness the 'Innovation Shortcut' - combining traditionally separate resources or applying unconventional resources to create new value. And low and behold, animals are a great source of such innovation shortcuts.

One great example is from my visit to Santiago, Chile a few years ago. There, one of the business units of a B2B service company was providing pest control to municipal office buildings. Instead of using poison to quell the bothersome pigeon population, they hit on a much more simple, humane, and eco-friendly approach: They brough in a couple of falcons whose presence frightened away the pigeons. Where did the birds flee? To the top of the next office building. Naturally, the company then offered their services there, so that the process created a continuous loop of falcons chasing pigeons around the city and a brilliant, self-perpetuating business for themselves.

A more recent and equally ingenuous example is from the Czech Republic. Officials in the Brdy region had over a million dollars of funding for a new dam but were at an impasse due to the lack of needed building permits. To everyone's surprise, the dam was erected almost overnight by none other than a team of beavers.

From the National Geographic article: ""Beavers always know best,” Jaroslav Obermajer, head of the Central Bohemian office of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency, told Radio Prague International, which first reported the story. Their structures create habitat for scores of other species, such as aquatic insects, fish, and amphibians as well as larger creatures like herons, whooping cranes, moose, and bison. Beaver dams can also serve as natural firebreaks, carbon sinks, and they provide flooding control. Beavers are the original ecosystem engineers."

There you have it.  What animals can you recruit for your next innovation?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beaver-dam-czech-republic

#innovation #animals #leadership #resourcemanagement #creativity

What happens when your customers start to use your products in completely unexpected, unintended ways, taking creative control of their utility? You should just let them go crazy and observe. Afterall, their exploration of the absurd may just lead you to discover completely new market spaces worth pursuing.

One extreme example of such product use deviation is the story of Larry Walters, a truck driver who gained instant celebrity status in 1982, when one afternoon of heightened curiosity or boredom, he attached 45 weather balloons to his lawn chair, lifted off, and quickly ascended to a height of 16,000 ft (nearly 5,000 meters).  After drifting around in the sky for a while, he got cold, shot some of the balloons with a BB gun he was carrying, and started to descend. On his way down he got in the way of commercial aircraft landing at Los Angeles airport and crashed into some power lines. 

In this case, Larry was clearly not satisfied with the more banal and conventional use of a lawn chair, and took it upon himself to transform it into a cockpit.  And in the process, he pioneered an entirely new, possible direction and market opportunity for the lawn chair industry: recreational flying machines.  

#customerexperience #humor #designthinking #innovation #transformation

Are you simply imitating your competitors or only seeking an incremental advantage over them? Why not sidestep them altogether, by focusing on what customers really want? By understanding and maximizing how your offering creates lifestyle or workstyle enrichment, you can do just that.

Consider an example from the world of sports. In the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea qualified for competition not by meeting the minimum time standard, but by winning a wild card entry.  Such cards are randomly allocated to athletes from small, third world countries who otherwise would have no chance to meet the competitive standards.  The intent is to make the Olympics a truly world-encompassing event. 

This particular athlete gained instant celebrity status by flailing and splashing his way through the race in over twice the time of the other swimmers.  Being exposed to a full size swimming pool for the first time, and uninitiated in the ways of a diving start, he still somehow managed to finish the 100-meter heat to the spectators’ uproarious reception.  

Such a display of courageous dilettantism made him one of the most talked about athletes of the games, winning him worldwide fame, celebrity invitations and attractive promotional opportunities.  Why such raving success for the worst swimmer in Olympic history? Because he unintentionally sidestepped head-on competition with his infinitely more qualified rivals, and instead gave spectators what they really wanted most of all: inspirational entertainment.

#leadership #disruption #smartstrategy #transformation #innovation

This year’s Nobel Prizes are being currently awarded, and you rightfully may consider them to be a serious affair. However, there is a much more humorous, purposely irreverent, and arguably no less important version of these awards: The Ig Nobel Prizes.

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at a wild and wacky ceremony on September 12, 2024, at MIT university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 34th annual awards, given out by the editors of the humorous scientific publication ‘Annals of Improbable Research’ to achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think”.

This year’s ceremony had the theme of Murphy’s Law, and featured Murphy’s Law song contest opera, ‘24/7’ lectures in which experts first explained their subject in 24 seconds, then in seven words, silly costumes and paper-plane throwing.

The much heralded, 2024 winners included:

• Demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

• Studying if the direction people’s hair swirls in the southern hemisphere matches that of people in the northern hemisphere.

• Finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

You can watch the entire, outlandish ceremony here: https://improbable.com/ig/archive/2024-ceremony/

Fun fact: Sir Andre Geim has the distinct honor of bagging both the Nobel Prize (in 2010 in physics for his work on graphene research) and the Ig Nobel Prize (in 2000 for the magnetic levitation of frogs). Such direct connection between highly valuable and highly ridiculous should not be the least surprising. As Albert Einstein famously said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

#humor #Nobelprize #leadership @creativity @futurism

One of the most endearing, timeless pastimes rooted in our childhood is stone skipping or skimming.  It is also a fun, cross-generational activity that immerses us in nature and fosters bonding mindfulness.  Which is why I have incorporated stone skipping into my leadership events and recommend it as a great way to reconnect with your childhood sense of adventure, creativity, and curiosity. 

So, I was very pleased to learn of the World Stone Skimming Championships, which takes place on Easdale Island in Scotland every September since 1997. This year’s contest saw competitors from five continents and 27 countries, with the contestant limit of 350 selling out in less than 30 minutes.

Spectators and judges watched as challengers took turns at the "Skim of Destiny", the platform from which they unleashed their stones into a water-filled quarry. See more fun details about this seminal sporting event in the BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240905-scotlands-offbeat-world-championship-of-stone-skimming

Why not seize the moment, and start training this weekend for next year’s competition?

#selfimprovement #mindfulness #creativity #culture #outdoors