“We call our Danish model Flexicurity.It is based on the idea that flexibility and security are not contradictions but can be mutually supportive”
“Employability enhancement is the overall goal of Danish model of labor security”
“Employers are not afraid to hire new people to risk in new ideas or business if it is also easy to fire employees”
“It is not easy to receive the unemployed benefits in Denmark if you do not really look for a job proactively. For instance, if you receive these benefits, you have to make at least four job applications per week”
“There is not a simple recipe, not a universal medicine. You could in Spain learnt the concept and then see what can be adapted”
“A model like the Danish model needs political consensus, commitment and acceptance of the role of social partners”
Michael Pritchard shared what he has learned on his “journey” to market Lifesaver:
“Any idea has to meet two criteria: it has to be fantastic an commercial.”
“You have to ask yourself why you are doing it. Do you want to manufacture it? Do you want to license it? If you don’t know how to answer these fundamental questions, you will find yourself not fulfilling the potential of your product.”
“Work with experts. They will be with you when times are hard.”
“Choose your brand-name right. Naming is important. Try to hit the name to describe what your product is and does, otherwise you will loose the message.”
“Deliver version 1 first. You can do version 2 when you make money with version 1.”
“If I stop, everything stops: keep going!”
“When you realise your dream, focus on the commercial.”
“If you have any idea, don’t do it next year, or next week, or even tomorrow. Do it now!”
Watch the video of Andrew Ritchie at the Ifest’08:
The best example of what a company does is its product. Andrew Ritchie came up to the stage with one of the Brompton bicycles, which folds easily and quickly into a highly-compact and portable package in only five steps.
Afterwards, he explained the story of the company and how difficult were the beginnings. He started working in his “bedroom”, in a “typical sort of garage start,”where he began putting a lot of effort in designing the small wheels and other parts of the bike. “I’ve never been confident they could work”, he said. This phase lasted 13 years.
From 1988, Brompton have been in full production and the bikes are sold in 27 export markets.
Andrew Ritchie underlined that the idea has required a lot of “energy and enthusiasm”. Moreover, he admits “a lot of Brompton story is due to luck” and, of course, “hard work”.
What is a designer of User Experience? Someone that strives to create dialogue between man and machine that is fluid and intuitive. When such dialogue becomes monologue, when the computer tells us “Error XXX” and we respond with “Damn it!,” this man-machine interaction is not working.
Microsoft Live Labs, an organization centered on rapid incubation of new technologies for the Internet with the end of improving the evolution of business products, that develops technologies that change the manner of managing and organizing images.
· Seadragon, is a technology that will change the manner of managing and organizing images.
· Its strengths include
o Its speed
o Its high image resolution
o Elegant transitions
o An almost perfect zoom capability at any resolution.
This technology permits the user to see very minute details of images at great resolution. At the same time, it is possible to zoom out to a level where hundreds of images can be viewed as tiny pieces in a grand mosaic.
Seadragon is based on Photosynth, a program that uses photographs to create a three-dimensional simulation that can incorporate hundreds of images.
This is the first step towards an entirely visual and interactive web experience, where there is no intervention by the person but instead, the machine intuitively creates links that facilitates communication between man and data on the machine.
“The quantity, here, does reflect the quality.”
Photosynth is going to be available very soon and “it will be interesting to see the ways this application will be used.”
“We are much less innovative today than we had been in some parts of the past”
“The emergence of research universities in Germany during the 19th Century is one of the main seminal events that shaped today’s world”
“Imagine the wonderful, fascinating and revolutionary things we could talk about in a event like this one if it happened one century ago, in 1908: the electrification of cities, the recent advances in the brand new discipline of pharmacy, the newly discovered atom, new sciences in their first steps such as genetics, psychology, sociology, new concepts in arts as expressionism, abstraction, new forms of literature, architects designing the first skyscrapers…”
“We can not compare the difference between the step from horse to train with the advance from the conventional train and the high-speed TGV”
“Copernicus showed that, contrary to that we believe today, revolution could come from a timid and conservative mind”
“I do not think philosophy has keep pace with science during twentieth century”
“Networked society is a more liquid society, but I’m not sure what that does mean. Facebook certainly changes the concept of friendship but I cannot say if in a positive way”
One of the next areas of innovation in textiles will be the generation of energy from our body movements”
“Paper and textiles are technologies, and a very complex ones, though we are not used to see them as technologies, because they are so old.”
“Pleasure is one of the most desired goals, therefore pleasure should be a main function in products and services”
“Most of money for research in electronic textiles comes from the military, health or sports, but we believe the future of these technologies is in the social and cultural arena”
“With Skorpions we wanted to develop garments that have a conversation with the body”
-A successful company has energy. The concept is innovation energy.
-There are three important factors to get this energy. It’s the “Energy Sweet Spot”:
1) Attitude
2) Behaviour
3) Organisation
-Attitude refers to how do you feel about the place you have to work. “We have to believe in what we are doing”.
Encourage your employees. “Most people want to contribute and make the world a better place.” Steve Jobs says: “I want you to create products so good you can lick them.”
-Behaviour consists of “listening, doing things quickly and making things real”. This means “getting down on your knees”, taking action instead of doing PowerPoint presentations and meetings.
-In the organisation, stories are better than rules to support us to be innovative. Stories about innovation experiences are “motivating and understood by everybody.” “Experiences creation action. Reports are filed.”
-”Innovation has to be dangerous”. You have to take risks.
-There isn’t a Google or Apple-like company in Europe. Why?
-The number of companies existing in Silicon Valley and those based in Europe is dramatically different, as well as the age of the founders. For example, Bill Gates was only 20 when the founded Microsoft in 1975. In the UK, only 2% of young entrepreneurs are less than 30. “We are 12 times slower than the US”.
-Don Valentine, an influential venture capitalist who’s been called the grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital, says there are only two visionaries in the history of Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel. And there are two adjectives to describe both of them: “passionate and competitive”.
-The key to start a company is “being young and crazy” (Paul Graham).
-A start up is like a baby. There are plenty of things you don’t know when you are a parent for the first time. So, “why do we say to founders to gain experience first”. “And why founders are paranoid about losing control?”
-”In industry and academia, we are not taking enough risks today”.
-The immigrants entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley come mainly from India (34%), but Europeans, who are dwarfed in numbers by China and India, outpaced China in the proportion of immigrant entrepreneurs (23% compared to 4%).
-”If you are ambitious you have to try”. Learn from Steve Jobs. Lebret mentions the co-founder of Apple at Stanford University urging graduates at commencement to “Stay hungry, stay foolish“.
