Scalable Innovation. Figures for Section III (chapters 21-27)

This post concludes the series of detailed figures from our book Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals.

Figures from the previous portions of the book are here:
- Introduction and Prologue: Unlearning What's Untrue.
- Section I. Using Systems Thinking for Understanding Technology, Inventions, and Patents.
- Section II. Thinking Outside the Box.
- Section III. System Evolution and Innovation Timing (Chapters 11-20)

Chapter 21.  Deconstructing Luck: Factors Affecting the Success of a System

Scalability is an inherent property of successful systems.

FIGURE 21.1 In large cities people walk faster than in small ones. Walking speed as a function of city population size. (From http:// www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.)

FIGURE 21.2 Monthly minutes per active user, photo and video apps. (From http:// blog.␣urry.com/.)

FIGURE 21.3 One of the early Facebook patents. Aaron Sittig and Mark Zuckerberg, US Patent 8,099,433

FIGURE 21.4    Network architecture diagrams from Baran’s 1962 paper on network reliability. Diagrams courtesy Rand Corporation [66].

FIGURE 21.5 Nicira platform as an interface between network software and hardware. The interface layer separates hardware and software, enabling rapid pace of innovation for both. Diagram courtesy of Nicira. US Patent Application 20100257263.

Chapter 22. Seeing the Invisible: The System behind the New Internet

FIGURE 22.1    A higher-level view of Facebook and other Internet services.

FIGURE 22.2 (a) Stated versus (b) actual distribution of privacy settings for individual posts.

FIGURE 22.3 Time that users spend on popular social networking services. (From http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/17/facebook-engagement/.)

Chapter 26.  System Efficiency: Solving Detection Problems to Improve Control

FIGURE 26.1 TiVo Thumbs Up and Down interface, US Patent 7,840,986 [86].

FIGURE 27.1 Example: Reinvention of the brick-and-mortar shopping cart.

Scalable Innovation. Figures for Section III (chapters 11-20)

This post continues with detailed figures from our book Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals.

Previously, on this blog:
- Introduction and Prologue: Unlearning What's Untrue.
- Section I. Using Systems Thinking for Understanding Technology, Inventions, and Patents.
- Section II. Thinking Outside the Box.


In Section III, we apply the model and outside-the-box thinking to determine the timing of a particular innovation.

Chapter 11. We start with the S-curve that describes a surprisingly diverse range of system evolution scenarios.

FIGURE 1.1a A generic S curve: Time/effort-performance. (From R.A. Burgelman, C.M. Christensen et al., Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation, 2009 [3].)

FIGURE 1.1b A typical age-weight S curve for a mammal, e.g. rat (From Geoffrey West, Ted Talk, July 2011 [4].)

FIGURE 1.1c Walmart: Time-Sales S curve. (From Geoffrey West, Ted Talk, July 2011 [4].)

FIGURE 1.1d Market adoption S curve. TVs and PCs. A 1984 actual and forecast. (From Everett M. Rogers, The diffusion of home computers among households in Silicon Valley, Marriage & Family Review 8, 1985 [5].)

Chapter 12. A Stage of System Evolution: Synthesis.
Here, we start looking why certain inventions can be too early to the market and what kind of problems innovators have to solve to get the system off the ground.

FIGURE 12.1   1979.  Electronic book, US Patent 4,159,417. David P. Rubicam [8].

FIGURE 12.2 Gartner hypecycle. (Fromhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle.)

FIGURE 12.3 Dr. Philips T. James et al., The worldwide obesity epidemic, Obesity Research 9, 2012 [11].

Chapter 13. A Stage of System Evolution: Early Growth. We talk about the key elements of system growth, including the Dominant Design and Copycats.

FIGURE 13.1 Dominant design: An ancient Roman bathtub in the Science Museum in London. The vast majority of modern bathtubs have the same form and function as this 2,000-year-old exhibit.

Chapter 15. A Paradigm Shift within the System. We discuss how growth enters a virtuous cycle.

FIGURE 15.1   The original shopping cart, US Patent 2,155,896

FIGURE 15.2    Shopping cart with multiple baskets, US Patent 2,196,914. You can see that Sylvan Goldman designed it using a folding chair and some wheels.

Chapter 16. Infrastructure Innovations: Timing Is Everything.

FIGURE 16.1    Google Fiber project diagram. (From a construction update, Google Fiber Blog, April 04, 2012 [33].)

Chapter 17. Infrastructure and Growth: Zooming In on the Micro Level

FIGURE 17.1 Moore’s original projection from 1965 to 1975. (From Gordon Moore, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, Electronics 38, 1965.)

 FIGURE 17.2 3-D representation of a multilayer IC metallization scheme. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit.)

FIGURE 17.3 Optical versus electrical interconnect. (From Andrew Alduino and Mario Paniccia, Interconnects:␣Wiring electronics with light, Nature Photonics 1, 2007 [45].)

FIGURE 20.1   Wired: The web is dead. (From http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/ all/1.)

(To be continued...)

Scalable Innovation. Figures for Section II.

This post continues with detailed figures from our book Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals.

Previously, on this blog:
- Introduction and Prologue: Unlearning What's Untrue.
- Section I. Using Systems Thinking for Understanding Technology, Inventions, and Patents.

In Section II, we introduce tools for thinking outside the box, considers the role of luck in success of inventions, and presents tools for flexible thinking and imagination development.

Chapter 6. Outside the Box: Developing Skills for Creative Thinking.

The picture below illustrates how even a minor change in perspective can make a great change in  life of a "surprised turkey" from the Nassim Taleb's parable:

A turkey is fed for 1,000 days - every day lulling it more and more into the feeling that the human feeders are acting in its best interest. Except that on the 1,001st day, the butcher shows up and there is a surprise. The surprise is for the turkey, not the butcher.

FIGURE 6.2    Expanding “turkey” perspective beyond 1,000 days.

Chapter 7. Seeing the Outlines of the Box: Discovering the Boundaries of a System.

We show how to use the system model for changing perspective systematically, moving between "boxes", thinking outside or inside the box at will. In the example below, we discover a major innovation opportunity by seeing Edison's implementation as an element of a bigger system.

FIGURE 7.1 A diagram of a coal-based energy distribution system, with electrified Manhattan plugged in as an instance of the Tool. (1) Various city blocks “plugged” into the larger system (instances of the Tool). (2) Coal mines (instances of the Source). (3) Railroad routes for coal delivery (an instance of the Distribution). (4a) A coal barge (an instance of the Packaged Payload). (4b) A coal train (an instance of the Packaged Payload). (5) Railroad time table (representing an instance of the Control).

Chapter 8. Inventor’s Luck: A System Perspective.

success = talent + luck 

great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

—Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

[F]or the first fifteen years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.
—Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author of eleven books on marketing␣methods␣

We use the story of Otto Rohwedder, the inventor of the original bread slicing machine, to show how an invention, not necessarily the inventor, can become "lucky."

FIGURE 8.1    The original design of the early GE toaster. (Courtesy www.toaster. org.)

FIGURE 8.2 Contemporary Toastmaster advertisement. (Courtesy www.toaster. org)

FIGURE 8.3    Contemporary advertisement for a commercial Toastmaster. (Courtesy www.toaster.org)

Chapter 9. The Three Magicians: Tools for Flexible Thinking

Below is an example of how we can use the method to understand a diverse range of user scenarios without missing critically important details, while maintaining our flexibility of perspective.

FIGURE 9.1 Whiteboard Divide–Connect sketches during a practice invention session for a novel blood pressure device. Stanford University Continuous Studies Program. Principles of Invention and Innovation (BUS 74), summer 2012. Photo courtesy Silvia Ramos.

FIGURE 9.2    The 9-screen view. The turkey is preoccupied with the day-to-day supply of grain at the lower level. He doesn’t see the bigger picture at the higher level.

FIGURE 9.3    The 9-screen navigation logic. To understand the situation, the turkey needs to follow the top level (blue) arrows and see how the problem develops in space and time.

Chapter 10. Imagination Development: Seeing the World beyond Present-Day Constraints

An example of exponential thinking that lead to the creation of Kiva Systems, a company that develops robotic systems for warehouse automation (bought by Amazon for $775M).

FIGURE 10.1 From zero to in␣nity. Mick Mountz’s TED talk screen shot. (From Mick Mountz: Let the inventory walk and talk).

FIGURE 10.2    A bird’s eye view of a large-scale, distributed robotic warehouse. Each dot represents a mobile runner-robot that can hold and deliver a good to packing stations on the right. To reduce handling time, robots with popular items can stay closer to the packing stations.

An application of 10X thinking to the memristor technology.

FIGURE 10.3    Recon␣gurable multilayer circuit, US Patent Application 20120007038

Another example of exponential change: high-frequency stock trading.

FIGURE 10.4    High-frequency stock trading process. (From Charles Duhigg, Stock traders find speed pays, in milliseconds, New York Times, July 23, 2009, http://www. nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html ).

(To be continued...)

Scalable Innovation: Figures for Section I (pages 3-59).

Today, I continue posting figures from our new book Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals. In my previous post I uploaded and explained figures from the Introduction and Prologue. Now we continue with Section I, where we introduce a system model that explains existing inventions, technologies, and patents. We also show how to use the model for developing new ideas.


Chapter 1. We start with Invention, a great children poem by Shel Silverstein. For copyright reasons the publisher is not allowed to print the poem in our book, but you can find it on the web.

Figure 1.1 illustrates the problem encountered by the inventor.

FIGURE 1.1    “The cord ain’t long enough.”

Chapter 2. In this chapter we show (in 3-D!) how to map our system model on the Invention and discover missing elements.

FIGURE 2.1    Invention as a system concept, mapped onto its physical implementation.

FIGURE 2.2    The system model.

FIGURE 2.3    A working invention with all the system elements present.

To further explain the system model, we follow up with a number of examples, starting with Edison's electricity distribution system. Why Edison? Because many people believe he is the greatest innovator of all time without really understanding what he actually invented.

FIGURE 2.4 The diagram is courtesy the Lemelson–MIT Program. (From Lance Whitney, "Edison tops Jobs as world’s greatest innovator," c|net, January 26, 2012)

We show that Edison's real breakthrough was the new, scalable parallel electric grid, not the light bulb. The picture below shows grid design "before" (a) and "after" (b) Edison.

FIGURE 2.6 Before: (a) In the old electric grid the voltage decreased with distance away from the electricity generator, causing the bulbs to glow less brightly, or requiring the use of thicker (and thus more expensive) wires. After: (b) Edison introduces a compensating line (ground return) that allows the use of high voltages (which reduced the amount of expensive copper wiring needed), and at the same time permits all light bulbs to continue operating, unaffected by any one burning out, for example, and also allowing for additional generators or lamp arrays to be connected more easily.

In our second example we apply the system model to Steve Job's system and show how it goes far beyond the iPhone.

FIGURE 2.8    Mapping Steve Jobs’ system in 3-D

FIGURE 2.9 A 2-D diagram of the implementation layer. Element positions correspond to their system level functionality.

Chapter 3. We use the model analyze and understand patents.

FIGURE 3.1 Guiding Plasmon Signal, US Patent 7,542,633.

FIGURE 3.2. Zooming in on a specific system element. Control subsystem within a system.

Chapter 4. We consider the paradox of system interfaces and how successful solutions enable rapid growth.


In the beginning of the 20th century, GE developed an ingenious brand marketing campaign to promote its light bulbs, positioning Edison as a celebrity inventor (The greatest innovator of all time!).

FIGURE 4.1 Edison’s light bulb: the Sun’s only rival. Pictures courtesy of The Smithsonian Institution. (From Carl Sulzberger, A bright and profitable idea: Four decades of Mazda incandescent lamps, Power & Energy 4, 3 (2006): 78.)

Few people know that Edison's longest lasting invention is the standard screw-in light bulb socket (a system interface between the grid and lighting device).

FIGURE 4.2    Edison screw-in socket, US Patent 438,310.

Another example of a long-lasting system interface:

FIGURE 4.4    The QWERTY keyboard. C. L. Sholes’ typewriter US Patent 207,559.

Chapter 5. Here we introduce the concept of system Control Points.

FIGURE 5.1 A system diagram with Control Points and interfaces.

(To be continued...)