Meet the 2010 TED Fellows

I am a fan of TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. I have never attended any conference, but I regularly view their presentations online and sometimes post some of them on this blog.

Two years ago, TED decided to create a fellowship program to bring amazing paradigm-shifters into the TED community. Every year, they nominate 25 eclectic, heterogeneous young thinkers and doers from the fields of technology, entertainment, design, the sciences, engineering, humanities, the arts, economics, business, journalism, entrepreneurship and NGOs.

Meet the 2010 TED Fellows, always an inspiring bunch!

Only 5 business ideas…

I have been lucky to be associated to an amazing innovation incubator. Le Laboratoire de Paris and its founder, David Edwards, are a remarkable source of inspiration and innovation to anybody interested in the creative process.  Here are just five of the many projects that they helped move forward in the past two years…

Le Whif

A new delicious approach to eating by breathing.  With Le Whif, we inhale food, like chocolate, into our mouths and taste it, without chewing, an experience of flavor without a single calorie.

Andrea Air Purifier

ANDREA: Plant-based Air Purifier won  2008 Invention Award from Popular Science Magazine.

Lebone Battery

Lebone‘s bacteria-charged battery was selected among the 10 most brilliant 2009 innovations by Popular Mechanics Magazine.

sOccket - Energy Ball

Using the African continent’s love of soccer to provide power to those without. SOccket is a fun, portable energy-harvesting power source in the form of a soccer ball.

Musetrek

Musetrek is your multimedia guide of the world’s cultural hotspots.

Amazingly enough, this is just a small part of the projects coming out of this cultural center. If you ever go to Paris, go and visit it!

The power of innovation

For the past two years, we have been associated with an amazing adventure: the creation of Le Laboratoire de Paris, a cultural Center located in the heart of Paris, next to the Louvre.

By arranging the encounter of an artist and a scientist on a specific scientific problem, the Center acts as a catalyst to generate genuine breakthroughs in science. We call this process artscience innovation.

The result of this encounter always ends with an exhibit opened to the public. The past two years have seen exhibits on subjects as varied as molecular cuisine, stem cell reproduction, the fight against tuberculosis in third world countries…

The project is privately funded and aims at demonstrating that a new economical model is possible for cultural organizations: artscience experiments sometimes lead to the creation of intellectual property, by patenting and commercializing this innovation, a cultural organization could reach a break-even point and even become profitable.

Le Laboratoire has already applied this process to two major innovations that are being commercialized online and in selected stores around the world:
- Andrea, a plant-based air purifier which was exposed at MoMA in New York and won the Popular Science Innovation of the Year Award
- Le Whif, the revolutionary chocolate as light as air

The adventure of Le Laboratoire is stimulating and heart-lifting. It shows the unstoppable power of vision, creativity, perseverance and risk-taking.

Next time you are in Paris, please visit Le Laboratoire and the remarkable design of the adjoining Laboshop.

Football, a little craziness and lots of creativity

Keith started a new tradition in Marbella. The last Wednesday of every month, twitterers around the Costa del Sol gather for a drink and networking at a bar in Nueva Andalucia. We call it TweetupMarbella. The atmosphere is relaxed, friendly and everybody seems to enjoy putting a face to some obscure twitter names.

This past Wednesday, a special guest attended the event. His name is Bjorn Heidenstrom. Bjorn is an ex-football player from Norway on a mission to raise awareness for the Norwegian Refugee Council. He plans to do so by cycling from Norway to South Africa, collecting football shirts along the way, then creating the largest football shirt in the world as a patchwork of all the shirts gathered and exposing it during the 2010 World Cup. Bjorn´s initiative has already received the approval of FIFA and the World Cup authorities. More information about his adventure can be found at www.theshirt2010.net or following him on twitter @heidenstrom.

In a world saturated by information, it is very hard for any idea to raise above the background noise. Usually, money is the main differentiator as it can muster resources and advertising power. There are alternatives however that can palliate the lack of funds and they all have to do with creativity and brain power.

Bjorn has been able to capture the collective attention with a subtle mixture of a noble cause (40 million refugees in the world), opportunistic timing (first World Cup in Africa) , a popular and mobilizing sport (football), a little craziness (you just have to meet the guy) and a compelling personal involvement (his cycling prowess). His initiative is a great example of how brain power combined with passion and careful implementation can lead to significant achievement. It is an inspiration to be followed in any aspect of life one cares about, be it charity, business, family…

Marbella Family enjoyed meeting Bjorn, wishes him great success in South Africa and hopes that his journey will help bring some relief to all the innocent people chased away from their homes for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. As a westerner, it is sometimes difficult to relate to refugees at the other end of the planet. It is hard to believe that this could happen to us one day. However, we should remember it happened not so long ago to some of our parents in Europe and that the future is unpredictable…

We think Bjorn will have achieved a lot if he can gather a little empathy from us all, and some support in terms of donations or simply in helping raise awareness for the plight of refugees (just forward to your friends). Get ready for the World Cup, help Bjorn!

Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson

Here is a great video by Sir Ken Robinson, an expert in creativity, innovation and human resources. He gave this speech about how school stifles creativity at TED in 2006. Do not miss it. It is exceptionally smart, insightful and hilarious!

¨A child starting school now will retire in 2065. Is school preparing him adequately?…¨

If you do not know what TED is, you must find out. You will find there many enlightening presentations.

Developing the Spanish Web.

The ability to apply well-known solutions and technologies from a field of activity to a new one has always been a great source of innovation and value creation. The Telegraph gives us a striking new example in its article titled ´Heartbeat converted into electric current to recharge mobile phones´. It is the story of an Indian student who thought up the concept of a wristband that converts the human heartbeat into an electric current to recharge mobile phones, while looking at her mobile phone and the self-winding watch on her wrist…

Another amazing example is Le Whif, a new approach to eating by breathing. Harvard professor David Edwards is an expert in aerosol technology applied to the field of drug delivery to the lungs. The challenge in his field is to deposit as much drug as possible on to the lung surfaces without it depositing (being wasted) on the way through the mouth and other surfaces. It has a lot to do with the particle size distribution of the aerosol cloud and the dispensing method… Faced with a new challenge in a culinary experiment, he thought about applying particle engineering to form natural food substances, like chocolate, in particle sizes that are small enough to become airborne though too large to enter the lungs – Exactly the opposite challenge of the drug delivery research – The design directs food particles to the mouth following the air that accompanies a natural inhalation. The result is inhaled food, like chocolate, into your mouth and an experience of intense flavor without a single calorie.

Similar thinking can be applied to the Spanish web. Spain is behind the European average in internet usage. Suffice to look at the activity on ebay.co.uk and ebay.es to see that the gap is still large. I see this as an opportunity, because the Spanish web will certainly be more developed and users more active three years from now. Can you say that about many sectors of activity?

Starting a web project focused on the Spanish market offers good potential for a positive return given the limited competition and cost of entry. The probability of success can be significantly increased by adapting concepts that have worked well in other geographies. That offers an opportunity to evaluate the economics, evolution, critical factors of the project before hand. A luxury that is seldom encountered in business.

The main thing is to start now and overcome doubt and procrastination. There is only one way for the internet in Spain: up!