Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a doctoral researcher from Helsinki, has provided a number of insights and commentary from the LIFT06 conference in Switzerland on her Hobby Princess blog. One of the most interesting speakers at LIFT06 was Matt Blackbelt Jones of Nokia, who explained why the concept of “play” is so important in the development of innovative mobile devices:

“In Vygotskian psychology, play (in children) is the principal process of learning. Play links with improvising and exploring new things. Currently big corporations are realizing that in order to make their customers play, they have to start playing themselves. Those who are interested in innovation, should also be interested in play.”

Interestingly, this concept of play is starting to gain currency with corporate executives. Check out an earlier guest blog post (Work as Play) from Douglas Rushkoff, who explains the difficulty of creating a playful, innovative work environment:

Establishing a playful career or company isn’t as easy as it looks. It doesn’t require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company’s culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival—not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative mini-societies, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

Tags: Nokia LIFT06 Finland innovation

[image: Matt Blackbelt Jones of Nokia, via Hobby Princess]

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a great story about the legendary Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin, which has developed some of the most innovative fighter planes in the history of modern warfare (e.g. the U-2 spy plane, the F-117 Stealth fighter, the SR-71 supersonic spy plane). Now Lockheed Martin is getting into the unmanned aircraft business:

“As unmanned aircraft prove to be essential to modern warfare in Iraq and elsewhere, Lockheed is shedding its ambivalence and busily developing concepts for newfangled drones. One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.

Lockheed is drawing its drones from the same well that produced its stealth fighters: the company’s secretive Skunk Works unit. And the unmanned craft are just as radical as some of the unit’s past creations. “You have to throw out conventional aerodynamics,” Skunk Works head Frank Cappuccio says of the so-called morphing drone, with the folding wings.”

The bottom line is that it’s too expensive and costly to develop conventional warplanes anymore. Developing drones, however, is relatively expensive. Plus, Uncle Sam is showing an increasing appetite for planes like the Predator drone: in FY07, the Pentagon plans to spend upwards of $1.7 billion on unmanned drones. There’s also the matter of keeping up with aerospace competitors:

Lockheed’s focus on drones comes after years of wrestling over developing unmanned planes for fear of undermining its franchise business in fighter jets. The company now feels both more secure about funding for its fighter programs and more compelled to jump on the multibillion-dollar drone bandwagon. The country’s biggest defense contractor by sales, Lockheed is perceived as playing catchup in drones to Northrop and Boeing Co., and small firms such as closely held General Atomics, whose Predator — armed with a Lockheed-made missile — has been used to hunt down al-Qaeda figures.

Random innovation trivia: Skunk Works is a registered Lockheed trademark, derived from Skonk Works, a mysterious locale in the “Li’l Abner” comic strip where they distilled Kickapoo Joy Juice.

Tags: LockheedMartin SkunkWorks drones airplane innovation

[image: Predator drone, BBC News]