innovation

Food safety is a growing demand all over the world. All food, and ingredients sold at local supermarkets or exported to EU countries, Canada and US must be traceable, and supply chain companies must be able to rapidly withdraw a batch of products from the market should the need arise.

True, we live in an ever-changing world of mass food production and, in the West at least, billion dollar retailers. Public concerns about food safety and worries about the apparent lack of transparency in the production and processing of food, mean that consumer demands have never been more stringent, according to IDTechEx, a global traceability firm.

This requires local enterprises, individuals and firms in fresh produce supply chain (including transporters, cold room/storage facilities) to maintain more detailed records and exercise greater controls, in other words called traceability in modern trade parlance.

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I have a confession: I listen to lots of music, not out of enjoyment, but for curiosity. Yet, I know very little about how music is made. My only serious involvement with music was when, years ago, I tried to invoke my artistic self and enrolled in a church singing group, but my vocals - let me say my hoarse throat - failed me, and that was it.

Let’s face it, music is definitely about creativity and innovation. The sounds, the voice arrangements, and all. And I have always wondered how the prodigies and those flashy celebs make their music.

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Picture this: you are a  hard working onion and turnips farmer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and you feel that you should be selling your farm produce in the most expedient manner.

However, commodity traders and markets are not giving you the best price, and eventual consumers pay through the roof what you sold so cheaply that you feel cheated. What do you do? Forming a cooperative as part of producer protection is one thing you can do but what else? Here’s how poor farmers in Africa have employed ingenuity and innovation. Read the rest of this entry »

I love to do bread toasting for my family, and my son loves to dip them in tomato soup which he digs with gusto. Breakfast at our family table is never complete, son always reminds me, without toast bread for his beloved soup, and I agree.

But how much electricity do we spend toasting bread? I reckon it could be a lot because Morphy Richards wouldn’t have spent their time or precious dime trying to make us eat greener bread toasts. That is, at least, when it comes to energy efficiency, and the Ecolectric 2 Slice Toaster, we are assured, is able to use 34% less electricity than conventional toasters.

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Sometimes it’s easy to get caught within the bounds of where an accepted solution “should” come from.  We need to look a the tools that we are given,  and get creative not just with the solution, but with the tools themselves.

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen.  The story goes like this: Read the rest of this entry »

A colleague wrote to me today.

I wanted to bounce a premise off you. The Ad Club asked me to lead a workshop in December around a topic. I proposed “Better Brainstorming in Today’s Idea Economy.”

What I like is that brainstorming is something everyone takes for granted and something everyone believes they’re good at. But as we know, there are good sessions and bad sessions. If you had to list the top 3-5 factors in successful brainstorming sessions, what would they be?

I gave my friend my first-thing-in-the-morning, top-of-my-head response. I’ve polished it up a bit and it’s below. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us were taught to share at a very early age. What happened? A big chunk of the world’s population still starves every day, even though we know that when we do share, we all benefit. Especially when it comes to scientific learning.

Sharing among professionals is called collaboration. And as the world gets more complex and our challenges more daunting, services like our own IdeaConnection arise to enable and encourage collaboration among scientific minds around the world.

Likewise, the more we discover and invent, the more critical it becomes that we not only help each other solve problems but that we share what we learn. Recent advances in the highly complex field of genetics illustrate the need for an open-door policy of collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes someone comes up with something that makes everyone else think “Why didn’t I think of that ?”

Have you ever outpaced cars and been honked at? Had a car almost wipe you out while making a turn? Do you ever ride your bike so fast that you wish that everyone else could know how close to the speed of light you were? Or sometimes are you riding your bike, cars honking impatiently behind you, wishing that they knew you were actually going more than 10 mph? Or maybe you just want to show off to your buddies that you left in your dust!

Enter… the speed vest! Read the rest of this entry »

Man borrows a lot from nature in his application of technology, like when the bat provided inspiration for sonar - a system using transmitted and reflected underwater sound waves to detect and locate submerged objects or measure the distance to the floor of a body of water.

Bionic engineers are specialists in translating nature’s solutions into human technology and attempt to answer questions such as why nocturnal animals like bats which are known to be blind can adapt to use echolocation by which they navigate and hunt prey.

Daimler AG, the automotive manufacturer that claims to act responsibly towards society and the environment and to shape the future of safe and sustainable mobility with groundbreaking technologies, too use bionics to design their top-end cars.

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Imagine a class under the shade of an acacia in a sun-scorched village of Africa or Asia? Not a Biology or Natural Science field class for junior high school students in Toronto.

This is a ”normal” class of third graders who probably ran 5 kilometers to school on an empty stomach in the morning and who have no desks to write on. Many kids in poor rural communities in Africa have found themselves in this situation.

Even many more urban slum dwellers are forced to study entirely under trees for lack of adequate schooling resources.

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