Ahead of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in January, Threadless recently announced the winner of the Threadless Loves Innovation t-shirt design contest. Deborah Kassoff, a member of the judging panel, explains why the judges chose David Fleck's winning design for Innovation Revolution:

“Innovation Revolution” presented the concept of innovation as a result of the human mind. The complex image immediately conveys that very simple message. At first glance you see the mind-bogglingly comprehensive forest of amazing things humanity has created. Then upon closer inspection you see more – innovation is medicine, communications, music, entertainment, transportation, architecture. Look again and you’ll notice a chronological telling of the story of innovation – a wheel, a sundial and Egyptian pyramids lead the way to a telescope, a sailing ship, a submarine and a hot-air balloon. Now look even closer. A television, a locomotive train, a syringe, a satellite dish, the Concorde and the Empire State Building.

This is a work of art that moved me with a sense of awe of what mankind has been able to create over time. It also makes clear that innovation is what brought us the fascinating, life-altering technologies which are entwined, but perhaps not often thought about, in our everyday lives."

As the grand prize winner, Scotland's David Fleck wins an all-expenses trip to the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas in January 2010. At the end of December, the Innovation Revolution t-shirt will be available for purchase on Threadless.

Two visionaries - billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites - are leading the push for commercial space travel by the year 2011. Last week, the duo unveiled SpaceShipTwo -- the first-ever commercial spaceship for making sub-orbital space flights for everyday citizens. (Well, not exactly "everyday," since the cost of a single flight will likely exceed $200,000 but you get the idea).

Flight testing for SpaceShipTwo could start within the next few months and by the end of 2010, Branson and Rutan hope to unveil a new space port in the New Mexico desert. According to WIRED magazine, already 300 potential passengers have plunked down the advance cash for the chance to make the sub-orbital passenger flight.

The projected dates are likely to change -- think of all the hoopla around the new Boeing Dreamliner and all the concomitant delays over the past two years -- but it's still exciting to think that the next decade may be the decade of private space travel.

[image: Richard Branson and Burt Rutan with SpaceShipTwo via WIRED]

Looking back at pivotal events that took place within the business world in 2009, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are five macro trends that will be shaping a New Way to Work in 2010 and beyond. Together, these five trends point to a New Way To Work in which creativity and innovation are more valued by employers than ever before and the traditional notion of work as merely an economic activity is being supplemented by ideas about happiness and well-being.

Here are the five trends that I feel are creating The New Way To Work and what they mean to me: 

(1) Organizations will embrace Design Thinking. In 2009, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO (arguably one of the most important design consultancies in the world), published Change By Design, which suggested that organizations must go even further in their embrace of right-brain, creative thinking. Design must become more than an aesthetic -- it must become an integral part of the overall process of how companies think about products, services and customers. By extension, "design thinking" must now become part of any worker's toolkit.

As Daniel Pink first suggested five years ago in his bestselling A Whole New Mind, right-brain thinking -- in the form of creativity, innovation and big picture contextual thinking -- is an increasingly important way for workers to demonstrate their value to their employers. Design thinking is, if anything, a stronger form of creativity and innovation that is focused around achieving specific business goals and objectives. As a result, design thinking will continue to play a key role in any organization's business strategy as it attempts to differentiate itself vis-a-vis competitors. The most obvious examples are companies like Apple and Target, which have made breathtakingly-beautiful design part of their core value proposition.

(2) Women will play a more important role in re-defining traditional notions of work. In 2009, Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress published The Shriver Report, which attempted to catalogue the many ways that women are changing the U.S. workplace. In 2009, for the first time ever, women now account for more than 50% of all jobs in America. At the same time, women account for 57% of all bachelor's degrees and 60% of all master's degrees, making them the most important part in any company's talent pipeline. Quite simply, with women now a majority in the U.S. workforce, organizations will need to reassess how well they are responding to the needs of women in the workplace. This ranges from new thinking about customized careers and flexible work arrangements to fundamentally important notions of how to encourage managerial traits such as empathy and compassion.

The most successful organizations will be companies like Pepsi, which has made the recruiting, retaining and promoting of women a company-wide priority. At Pepsi, not only is the CEO a woman (Indra Nooyi), but nearly one-third of all executives are women. There's an economic payoff, too, from ensuring that women are members of your Board of Directors and members of your senior management team. Business school researchers at Pepperdine and Maryland have found that companies with women in these roles actually out-perform their rivals.

(3) Small business owners will become the new stars of economic growth. The "credit crunch" of the past 12 months, in which financial institutions systematically withdrew liquidity from the banking system in the hopes of stemming the tides of bad loans and foreclosures, appears to be coming to an end. As liquidity slowly makes its way back into the banking system, the first beneficiaries will be small business owners -- some of whom had their access to funding turned off seemingly overnight. In recognition of this fact, the Obama Administration has made small business the linchpin of many of its economic policies. At the same time, companies like Goldman Sachs -- which recently created a $500 million fund to foster and launch 10,000 small businesses -- and American Express - through its OPEN Forum for small business owners -- are jumping into the fray, in the hopes of galvanizing economic activity at the grassroots.

Small business owners have often been overshadowed as the traditional media focuses on the empire builders (yes, Donald Trump, that's you) and the titans of industry rather than unheralded small business owners. Heading into 2010, though, this trend appears to be reversing. Monocle, for example, published a Small Business Guide for 2010 that is chock-full of examples of how resilient small business owners around the globe are re-inventing their industries. From equity research companies in Stockholm to interior design firms in Tokyo to graphic designers in Munich, these small businesses are inspiring examples of how creative, nimble and risk-taking ventures can bring real economic change to any industry. The women and men who dare to dream big now will be the first to reap the rewards once economic growth returns.

(4) "Happiness" will become a way to measure economic prosperity. In September, Nicolas Sarkozy, the (often controversial) president of France, announced that his country was seriously considering a "happiness index" that would transform factors like "quality of life" and "vacation time" into a broader measure of overall economic well-being. In short, the traditional way to measure national economic activity - Gross National Product (GNP) - would be supplanted by something called Gross National Happiness (GNH). This, of course, is a fundamentally new way to think about work that surely has economists scrambling to find a way to quantify something so unquantifiable as "happiness." Other than France, only the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan has had the pluck and audacity to adopt the concept of Gross National Happiness. In 1972, Bhutan adopted GNH as a way to symbolize its dedication to spiritualist, Buddhist ideals rather than purely materialistic, Capitalistic ideals.

In many ways, this thinking about "happiness" is part of an overall paradigm shift in the world of economics that takes us further away from the purely "rational thinking" paradigm. Behavioral economists, led by Princeton's Daniel Kahneman (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), Yale's Robert Shiller (who famously coined the term "irrational exuberance") and Harvard's Daniel Gilbert (who is typically credited as the founder of the "science of happiness"), are helping us understand that purely rational considerations are not all that matter when it comes to making decisions. (Shiller, in fact, specifically asked prominent New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren to illustrate the book cover of Animal Spirits with his irrational wild things). Within the Obama Administration, ideas from the emergent field of behavioral economics are informing everything from solving for health insurance plans to helping workers save more in their 401(k) plans.

(5) Personal branding will become the buzzword of talented workers around the world. 2009 was the year that Gary Vaynerchuk and Dan Schawbel burst onto the scene with ideas about ways to use the leverage the Web for personal branding. Using everything from blogs to YouTube to Twitter, it's now possible for everyday people to create a personal brand online -- and then use it to launch new businesses based around their personal passions. Gary Vaynerchuk (known to his adoring fans as simply "Gary Vee") showed what's possible when you combine a passion for wine, a deep knowledge of social media, and a YouTube-ready personality. He turned a small family wine business into a national industry leader, becoming a national celebrity in the process.

Gary Vee has tapped into the current economic zeitgeist. Idealistic notions about lifetime employment with a single company are long gone. The only real job security is to create your own personal brand. With U.S. unemployment pushing above 10% in November, starting a new venture has become a very attractive option to millions of workers. Take the self-employment route and do what you love. Do it well, and you might just Crush It.

This last trend is perhaps the most important of all five mentioned above. The Internet as a distribution channel for a personal brand is unmatched. For freelance workers, the Internet has made it possible to showcase their best work to anyone in the world, at any time. Take photography, for example. Using the photo-sharing service Flickr, professional photographers have had a way to showcase and highlight their work. Starting in mid-2008, Flickr made it possible for anyone to buy royalty-free and rights-managed photos through a unique partnership with Getty Images. If your photography skills and talent are strong enough, you no longer need to give them away for free (the photo accompanying this blog entry was actually purchased via the Flickr collection of Getty Images).

Heading into 2010, I'm looking forward to watching how these five macro trends about The New Way To Work continue to evolve. Sometime in the future, no doubt, today's world of work will look as wonderfully anachronistic as the world of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men appears to us now.

[photo credit: People at Work by BestPics/Flickr Collection/Getty Images]

NOTE: This blog entry is an official submission to the Elance "New Way to Work" competition. Email contact information: basulto [at] gmail.com.

One of the best articles that I've read about innovation this week actually had absolutely nothing at all to do with business innovation -- at least on the surface. Hannah Karp of the Wall Street Journal recently took a closer look at When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges. Faced with the prospect of judges that are not always on top of radical new snowboarding techniques, innovative snowboarders like Shaun White have a choice -- either keep their innovative snowboarding tricks under wraps until major competitions, or step-by-step unveil these innovations to the judges before the actual event.

For example, snowboard champ Shaun White has been working on snowboarding routines in Silverton, Colorado ahead of the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Instead of keeping these snowboard routines hidden from judges until the Olympics, he's actually been showcasing them to judges (and, by extension, to competitors). The reason? If judges see the snowboard tricks in action without knowing more about their technical difficulty, they are more likely to mark them lower:

"The emphasis on innovation this season has snowboarders grappling with whether they can trust the judges to score their new moves fairly at first sight. Many top riders, including Mr. White, are haunted by the prospect of becoming the next Jonny Moseley, the free-spirited American mogul-skiing champion who failed to medal at Salt Lake City in 2002 despite his debut of a revolutionary trick he dubbed the "Dinner Roll." Though he executed it perfectly and the move has since elicited higher marks for difficulty, he received lower scores for his jumps at the time than his competitors got for their tried-and-true twists.

"Tricks can be deceiving," Mr. Moseley says. "I worked twice as hard to be able to perform that in the Olympics than anyone else." Mr. White says he could have saved his surprise moves for Vancouver to increase the "wow" factor and prevent copycats from stealing his thunder, but he decided it was more important "to educate the judges."

So what does this mean for business innovators? Well, if you're going to be innovative and out-of-the-box creative in the workplace, you may need to give your bosses an early preview of your innovation. Otherwise, your managers may not be able to, umm, understand what you're thinking and what you're attempting to do. They mistake your creative free-thinking for a failure to take the business task at hand seriously. Little do they know that you are breaking the existing paradigm and coming up with a new Jonny Moseley "Dinner Roll."

What do you think? Has there ever been a time when your "innovation" was met with a slackjawed non-response because your bosses had no idea what you were doing?

[image: Shaun White at Silverton Mountain via Wall Street Journal]

Brooklyn-based Kickstarter enables people to "crowd-fund" new artistic projects (books, movies, films, etc.) and then follow along the progress of the project through regular updates. In my first-ever Kickstarter project, I helped to crowd-fund a new book from Robin Sloan (a former Current TV exec and aspiring novelist) after reading about it on CNET:

"I'm writing a book: a detective story set halfway between San Francisco and the Internet. And the more people who reserve a copy, the better each one will be! The basic setup is: Imagine a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. All the really good cases are on the internet. And Holmes is a woman, and Watson is an A.I., and San Francisco... oh, poor San Francisco... [...]

Now, the goal of this project is to put a book in your hands. And the cool thing about books is that they enjoy tremendous economies of scale. So here's the opportunity: as more people reserve books, everybody's book gets better, because a bigger print run means everything is cheaper. If I can get 300 backers, the book will be really nice: perfect-bound with a crisp color cover. If I can get 600 backers, suddenly we're talking better materials, more colors... maybe even hardcover? And more than 600...? Why, it'll be made of PURE GOLD."

Robin's goal was to raise a modest $3500 from other micro-funders in a period of about two months, but he ended up raising nearly $14,000 from 569 backers! Along the way, he provided 16 updates about the status of the book -- including one ingenious update while flying in a plane, and another update about the clever technique he used for the naming of characters in the novella. (Just an aside - Robin gained another 15 minutes of Internet fame this fall when Twitter announced that he was the author of the five-billionth tweet).

Anyway, I'm looking forward to receiving the book in the mail -- as well as funding other interesting artistic projects featured on the Kickstarter site. If you've ever used a site like Kiva to make micro-loans, the overall look and feel of Kickstarter should be familiar. As with Kiva, the actual funding for the project is not disbursed until the entire pledge has been met, so even though I "funded" Robin nearly two months ago, the money wasn't actually debited from my bank account until November 1.

[image: Robin Writes a Book via Kickstarter]

WIRED Magazine recently commissioned Italian design firm Density Design to create a Map of the Future based on the scenarios developed by the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto, California.

The results are stunning -- an eye-pleasing amalgamation of trends from 7000 of the world's top thinkers in areas including politics, infrastructure, the environment, economics, and society (i.e. each of the brown tabs at the top of the image).

Behance Network has done a nice job of deconstructing the entire map into its respective pieces -- just in case you'd like to peer deeper into one of the areas. In the field of economics, for example, get ready for a future of Filters as Brands, Open-Source Development, Solidarity Networks and Alternative Currencies (mobile phone minutes as currency, anyone?).

[image: Map of the Future]

Chances are, you're at least familiar with "the singularity" even if you've never picked up Ray Kurzweil's book or read anything at all about "transhumanism" or "augmented reality" or HET ("human enhancement technology"). Simply stated, the human race appears to be on the cusp of overcoming its current physical and mental limitations through a mix of biological and computational means. The magazine that has become the voice of the singularity is h+ magazine (the name is rather self-effacing, but it stands for "humanity plus") -- and the Fall 2009 issue is one of the most, well, mind-bending magazines that I've read this year. It's like WIRED magazine mixed together with those New Age magazines at the checkout stands at Whole Foods, spiced up with a healthy mix of inscrutable Matrix-style science fiction. The current issue includes:

• Excerpts from a Stephen Hawking lecture, in which he notes that humans "may have entered a new stage of evolution"
• A story by Surfdaddy Orca on how people are using "cognitive enhancers" to improve brain performance
• An article on "psychedelic transhumanism" that references Timothy Leary
• Advertisements for "cryonic suspension"
• Discussion of "nano-persons" and "macro-persons"

Oh, and just to bring it all back to pop culture and make it somewhat accessible to the masses, the magazine features a cover story on Fox TV's The Dollhouse -- the futuristic, sci-fi show starring Eliza Dushku that's about "programmable human dolls" made possible by breakthroughs in neurological technology.

In its first-ever edition of The 27 Brave Thinkers Who are Shaping the Future, The Atlantic magazine takes a closer look at the creative -- and often courageous -- thinkers who are unafraid to take on the Establishment and challenge the conventional wisdom of how things should be done. In other words, think Profiles in Courage mixed with TIME Magazine's Person of the Year, and you'll have a good idea of the type of people that The Atlantic has in mind. There are some obvious picks (is there any feature these days that doesn't include Barack Obama?), as well as some choices that may not be so obvious (the two co-creators of South Park!).

Within the business & technology space, The Atlantic singled out the following individuals for their unique contributions and innovative insights:

(1) Shai Agassi, for his conceptualization of a national electric car infrastructure

(2) Arthur Sulzberger Jr., for his attempts to bring the New York Times kicking and screaming into the Web 2.0 publishing era

(3) Mark Zuckerberg, for continuing to push Facebook in new directions while risking the displeasure of an engaged user base (i.e. for his attempts to turn Facebook into Twitter)

(4) Jeff Zucker, for challenging the conventional wisdom of prime-time programming at NBC Universal

(5) Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, for their groundbreaking creative work at Pixar Animation Studios

With the exception of Agassi, the list reads like a who's-who in the digital media space. Which begs the obvious question: Is it really the case that the only brave thinking is occurring in the world of digital entertainment? Frankly, I was a bit disappointed not to see other corporate thinkers singled out for their unique approaches to problems like healthcare, poverty and global warming.

[image: The Atlantic cover November 2009]