Twitter Partners With NASCAR For Live Coverage Of All-Star Races

News updates all day from your Fast Company editors.

Twitter and NASCAR announced a digital partnership Friday that will bring NASCAR enthusiasts the tweet-by-tweet of the Pocono 400 race on the weekend of June 10. Twitter will curate #NASCAR tweets from drivers and commentators, as well as celebrities and fans. Twitter users watching the races on TNT will get in-depth coverage of events on the racetrack and in the garage. Twitter also recently posted a job listing for a Sports Editorial Associate Producer, showing continued interest in ramping up its sports coverage.

Visit our main Fast Feed page during the day to catch up on news like this as it happens.

This Week In Bots: Are You Ready To Be More Machine Than Man And/Or Woman?

All the recent advances in robots that grip onto asteroids, walk like dogs, and replace damaged human limbs. Enjoy!

Bot Vid: JPL’s Asteroid Gripper

There’s all sorts of crazy-wonderful plans about mining asteroids in the news, but we also need to remember plans to defend Earth against rogue asteroid impacts…both technologies require actually grabbing onto one, since we won’t have Bruce Willis with a drilling rig on hand. NASA JPL’s been tackling the task, and has combined earlier research with new thinking to make a spiny-fingered gripper for robots that’s flexible and strong enough to harness the robot to an asteroid in microgravity environments so it can then dig into the surface. This stuff is real, asteroid-mining doubters!

[youtube 0KUdyBm6bcY]

Bot Vid: Italy’s Big Dog, or Grosso Cane

BigDog and AlphaDog aren’t the only robotic quadrupeds roaming the planet: Italy has one too. He’s called HyQ, he’s from Genoa, and he’s an early stage prototype for a general purpose quadruped which can traverse all sorts of terrain to aid in search and rescue and exploration. He’s been in development for a while, and is now sporting a number of upgrades such as an inertial navigation unit and sensors that make it react better to feedback through its systems. But, as the Automaton blog notes, they haven’t given it a kick yet…

[youtube AnwetZpRtFE]

Bot News

Brain-controlled robots. A paper discussed in Nature this week reports an astonishing breakthrough: A patient who suffers tetraplegia after a stroke had electrodes critically implanted in her brain in order to record the neural activity associated with the intention to move. These signals were then processed and used to remotely control a robot limb–in this case a robot arm that she commanded to reach for a drinking cup and bring it to her so she could drink. The Brown University experiment has enormous promise for paralysis or amputation patients in the future.

2,000 people want to build astroid-miner bots. Planetary Resources is the new enterprise that’s planning to shake the world’s perceptions by seeking out and mining asteroids with robot spacecraft inside ten years, and now it’s revealed that in the short window since it went public it’s received 2,000 applicants for robot-designing roles inside the company. This is a far greater number than positions available, and demonstrates exactly how much the firm has captured the public’s imagination.

Canon bringing robots to camera-making. Camera maker Canon has been using semi-automated processes to make its cameras for some time, but has recently noted it will produce some models entirely using robotic production methods. It’s part of a gorwing trend in consumer electronics production as the cost of making sophisticated items rises and robots get more advanced…China’s Foxconn, most famous as manufacturer of the iPhone, has said it will integrate more robots into its lines too.

Bot Futures: How Robot Would You Go?

The advances of the Brown University researchers in the BrainGate2 experiment to restore motor skills via robot arm to a paralysed patient are part of an ongoing sequence of studies to overcome some physical disabilities with technology. As they, and other similar efforts like the Luke Arm advance and become mainstream they’re certain to change lives…but also to challenge our perceptions.

Because they raise an intriguing and complex question: If this technology advances to the point where a thought-controlled robot arm is as funtionally good as a paralysed one, and offers health and lifestyle benefits, why shouldn’t the patient have their “real” arm amputated in preference for a cybernetic unit? You may have previously thought this was a non-serious concept best left to science fiction, but as these experiments point out it really isn’t.

How would you feel about meeting someone with these systems, perhaps even shaking their hand before realizing? What, if any, is the religious position on this matter? Would legal mandates have to but in place to regulate the strength of a cyborg arm? What if an arm malfunctions and harms someone?

Odd as it sounds, this sort of robotic advance really is likely to be part of everyday life soon enough. And there are even stranger plans afoot to replace much more than an arm with a robot unit. A Russian effort is underway to build a lifelike android that’s somewhat like the Geminoid series from Japan:

[youtube _5zDI25E4v8]

It’s in its early stages, as you can see, but the team has a roadmap: By 2020 they want to create a fully-working human-like android. And then by 2050 they want to place a powerful computer inside, and then “transplant” a real human mind into it.

Compared to the advanced medical science of the Brown experiments, this is pseudo-scientific sillyness…although the walking, moving, human-like android plan is totally plausible if you consider how advanced an Asimo- or Petman-descendant would be in, say, 20 years. And assuming we make more advances in connecting the human mind to external robotic limbs over the next several decades, there’s the possibility of replacing much more than an arm with a robot subsititute. 

And that raises the biggest question which, while comfortably far off in the future, isn’t beyond the plausible in your lifespan: If you had a medical emergency that damaged too much of your body, how robotic would you go?

[Image: Flickr user gordontarpley]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Tracking Facebook’s IPO Day On Social Media

Zuck’s big day, curated by Fast Company writers and editors.

[View the story "Tracking Social Media Reaction to the Facebook IPO" on Storify]

IKEA Creates A Well Furnished Porta Potty

“Let them experience our product.”

That’s one of the most popular line you will hear from a client [and from an advertising agency]. Anyone working in the advertising industry would tell your that. They know that letting the customers try their product beats the hell out of showing hero shots accompanied with smart taglines. The problem is that it is way easier said than done.

How do you make your customers experience your product through advertising and marketing?

Ikea Proved It Is Simple

They proved that the only way to make your customers experience your products is to literally make them experience your products.

Ikea built a functioning Porta Potty in the swish Tortona zone during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. When you look at it from the outside, it looks like an ordinary porta potty but it is actually a magic door that leads to a well-furnished 20×20 living space. There are sofas to sit on, cabinets, and other pieces of furniture which people can use.

It Seems The Opposite Of The Intention

Companies naturally want to push people to their stores where they actually sell their products. Aside from a poster that encourages people to visit their stores, the campaign seems to give the consumers what they are supposed to experience once they are already in the stores. On the onset, you’d think it goes against their strategy.

Apparently, Ikea believes in their products enough to be certain that once people experience their product, they will go out of their way to visit Ikea the next time they are in need of furniture. They believe that they don’t need to trick their consumers into going to their stores.

Brand Interaction

Ikea also achieved something very few brands get to do, allow their products to actually interact with the customers. They didn’t just ask the customers to watch something “amazing”. They actually made their customers touch, use, and experience something amazing.

For a brand known for unapologetically mass manufacturing their products, Ikea is proving to be one non-traditional brand.

Advertising Agency: 1861united, Milan, Italy
Executive Creative Directors: Pino Rozzi, Roberto Battaglia
Creative Directors: Francesco Poletti, Serena di Bruno
Art Director: Serena di Bruno
Copywriter: Francesco Poletti
Account Director: Silvia Cazzaniga
Account Supervisor: Matilde Dettin
Published: April 2012

Original Post by Xath Cruz
Creative Guerrilla Marketing – The #1 Site For Guerilla Marketing, Ambient Advertising, and Unconventional Marketing Examples.

Derrick Ashong On Going Viral, Again and Again

Whether in the role of front man for world-music band Soulfege, hosting an award-winning TV show, or creating a better business model for independent artists, Derrick Ashong is just trying to communicate.

Derrick Ashong has a knack for being in the right place at the right time—and for seizing the moment. He became a YouTube sensation during the 2008 presidential campaign, as an unusually passionate and articulate “man in the street” supporting Barack Obama. No stranger to a spotlight—Ashong has fronted a touring band since the late 1990s and scored a part in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad—he parlayed the attention into high-profile gigs hosting programs on Oprah Radio on SiriusXM and on the Al Jazeera English TV network. Now, with his group’s Million Download campaign, he is trying to crack the model for monetizing an open-source model of music distribution. Here, he discusses the evolution of social media, guerilla self-marketing, and the importance of embracing the unexpected.

FAST COMPANY: What do you say when people ask what you do?

DERRICK ASHONG: People say, you do all these different things, but what I’m doing is communicating. Everything I do is about leveraging new ways to reach people. I started as an artist, a musician specifically—trying to interpret the world around me and communicate that in a way to get at some kind of truth or beauty—but that’s evolved into what I call “music plus,” where now I’m exploring open-source music and the kind of business models we can build in a new era of music.

The music industry has gone through a massive shake-up over the past decade or so. Has anyone really figured out the new model for making a living as a musician yet?

Lots of people have figured out lots of different things, but no one has figured out an easily replicable model and can comfortably say, “This is the new way of doing things.”
With the Million Download Campaign, we’re trying to get 1 million people all over the world to download Soulfege’s latest album, Afropolitan, free. Partly, this is a promotional tool for the band—in the first four months, we got 50,000 downloads. That’s more than a lot of artists do in four years. We encourage people to take the music, remix it, and share it with people in their own language. We’ve had volunteers translate the Million Download blog into 10 languages so far. That’s one of the benefits of open-source culture—I can’t do that on my own.

About Generation Flux
Pioneers of the new (and chaotic) frontier of business

Flagship Fluxers, Photo: Brooke Nipar

In our February 2012 issue Fast Company Editor Robert Safian identified a diverse set of innovators who embrace instability, tolerate–and even enjoy–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. People like author/Onion digital media maverick Baratunde Thurston, Greylock Data Scientist DJ Patil, Microsoft Senior Researcher danah boyd, and GE’s Beth Comstock. This series continues to explore the new values of GenFlux. Find more Fluxers here. And tweet your contributions using #GenFlux.

So how do you start to monetize that?

Everyone knows artists don’t make money on records; record labels do. I want to expose the fact that that’s not where the opportunity is. What artists need to do is leverage present-day technology to enhance and build their brand. Every artist is paid —whether that’s in tickets, T-shirts, or endorsements—in proportion to the perceived value of their brand. Jay-Z is making more from Rocawear than from Roc-A-Fella. An independent artist doesn’t have the engine to do that kind manufacturing, but we do have the technology that makes it easy to share music, to share and build the business. The high cost of entry used to be a big barrier in music. It’s not anymore.

Sounds sort of like the Grateful Dead model of making the music free and making money from playing shows. But what about when you’re older and don’t want to have to play live all the time? How do you make a living then?

I think you take time when you can and build the opportunity around the brand so you can make money in a variety of ways. There are a couple of interesting things artists can do. Companies pay people a ton of money to represent their brands. You can get Lady Gaga, or get someone you’ve never heard of, like the Progressive Insurance woman. I think there’s an opportunity in the middle, where you can have someone who has a relationship with the target audience, who is a known quantity, but not well known. You can start out as a middle-class artist, not a superstar.

As an independent artist you have to think more creatively—no one has a systematized a way of doing that. If I give away a million free downloads, I can start building deep relationships with partners and build different revenue streams. By empowering people to spread the word guerilla-style, we’ve had all kinds of unexpected things happen. Lufthansa wanted to license a song of ours because somebody emailed our link to someone, who emailed someone, who emailed someone at Lufthansa who liked it. We’ve given ourselves two years to identify a funding model that’s viable, and if we can do that, maybe I won’t have to go on tour to pay rent went I’m 50. We’re hoping to get other artists involved, too.

You became sort of a YouTube star during the 2008 Presidential campaign when a clip of you spontaneously talking about your reasons for supporting Obama went viral. Now there are professional marketers now whose job it is to make things go viral on social media—do you think this is still an authentic way of communicating with people?

Now everyone wants a piece of the power of social media. The cool stuff will still go viral, but there’s a lot more out there that is programmed to succeed. Four or five years ago, a higher proportion of content that went viral was organically distributed. Some of the professional stuff is cool and interesting, too, but once professional marketers take over using a certain tool it does gets harder for underground elements. You have to keep finding other tools for getting stuff out there.

You recently finished up about a year hosting The Stream, a new show on Al Jazeera that looked at events like the Arab Spring through a social-media lens. What did you learn from the experience, and why did you move on?

I had a great time doing it. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse—to do something that’s never been done before, at the intersection of broadcast and new media, for millions of viewers worldwide. It was exciting every day to go to work and have to kick ass because you know the world is watching and a lot of people want to see it fail. We won a Webby award, a Royal Television Society award in England for most innovative program. It was arguably on the most critically acclaimed shows on Al Jazeera. When they decided they wanted to move the show to Doha, Qatar, where Al Jazeera’s headquarters are, I thought about it—I grew up in Ghana and know Doha—but I’m not that company man. I believe in this day and age, you really need to build your business. So I decided to focus on that.

Did moving around a lot growing up help make you more adaptable? Did it make you more confident jumping into new challenges in your career so far?

I lived in Ghana till I was almost four, then in Brooklyn, then Cambridge, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and back to New Jersey. I didn’t have the expectations of stability that a lot of people have. There’s a false perception about the world some people have that if you do certain things, you get to go onto this or that. When those expectations aren’t met, it’s like, Oh my god. I don’t see things that way. I used to go to school with a gas mask. I don’t believe the world is operating according to some beneficent order. You have to hustle, be smart, and be honorable. Integrity is something you can control.

If you recognize that change is a constant and you’re keeping your eyes on a higher prize, it’s cool even when stuff shifts and doesn’t go the way you expect. I’m not that brave, but when I’d achieved what I thought I could doing a radio show on Oprah’s satellite station, I wasn’t afraid to leave it and try something else. But people couldn’t believe I’d do that. The Stream was in planning in fall of 2010, long before the Arab Spring—I’m not so wise that I saw that opportunity coming, but I was open enough that I saw a way a show like that could work.

[Image: Flickr user crystaltopmusic]

J. Crew CEO, Apple Board Member Mickey Drexler Reveals Steve Jobs’ iCar Dream, Confirms "Living Room" Plans

J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Mickey Drexler offers an insider’s perspective on Steve Jobs’s vision: “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”

Steve Jobs didn’t just design hit consumer products in the computer and media industries. He reimagined all types of things, from yachts to staircases to the medical equipment he was said to draw in his hospital bed.

And, according to J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Mickey Drexler, Jobs even envisioned rethinking the automotive industry. Speaking at Fast Company’s recent Innovation Uncensored conference, Drexler clued the audience in on some insider Apple knowledge.

“Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?” Drexler said. “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”

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“And,” Drexler added with a coy smile, “it would’ve been probably 50% of the market. He never did design it.”

Who knows what Jobs would’ve dreamt up for his iCar? It likely would’ve been as sleek as an Apple Store, as interactive as an iPad, and as polished as Jony Ive’s forehead. But alas, we can only imagine.

On a more practical note, Drexler also seemed to confirm during his talk the endless rumors of a new Apple TV. “You know, Apple has 10 products,” he said. “The living room they’re dealing with at some point in the near future.”

Lastly, Drexler, with his trademark humor, offered up some advice for aspiring CEOs and expressed sympathy for current Apple head-honcho Tim Cook’s unfortunate position.

“The best job to have: Take over a company that’s doing poorly,” Drexler said. “Never take over a company that’s doing great. You know, I love Tim Cook, but I wouldn’t want his job!”

This is just a short clip from Drexler’s inspiring talk at Innovation Uncensored. We’ll have more of his fascinating insights on Jobs and Apple in the coming days.

[Image: Flickr user Eric Rice]

Harvard Business School For The Facebook Age

Innovation and real startup companies are front and center at the newly re-engineered HBS. The venerable institution hopes to prepare budding entrepreneurs–with inspiration from the one that got away.

Harvard Business School is buzzing. In part, it’s because students are working in “hives,” new circular, collaborative workspaces. But also because the hives are part of a radical rethink happening here—of everything from the storied school’s established curriculum, its pedagogy, student profiles, and outcomes, to its brand identity and physical spaces. Inspiration for the hives, for example, comes from a company founded by Harvard’s most famous dropout–they have “the look and feel of Facebook’s offices,” Dean Nitin Nohria (left) tells Fast Company.

An inestimably influential institution and iconic brand, Harvard Business School (HBS) for some has become a symbol for what is wrong with business and education today: stodgy orthodoxy; ivory tower learning; American elitism and entitlement; and bloated Wall Street salaries. HBS’s makeover aims to change all that with a focus on the kind of real-world risk-taking, sweaty hard work and tinkering, and spirited collaboration that lured Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg away from Cambridge to the wild tech innovation happening out west.

Under the leadership of Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust and Nohria (and their predecessors), the school has implemented this year an ambitious creative destruction project. HBS wants to reinvent the MBA and birth a new generation of entrepreneurs, innovation, and startups.

Learning by doing is a central tenet of the new FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development) curriculum which supplements its venerated case method core with a required leadership (FIELD 1), global immersion (FIELD 2) and entrepreneurship “module” (FIELD 3) for all 900 students. HBS has taught courses on entrepreneurship for decades; but now all first year MBAs will do it by building 150 real businesses which are graded by real markets.

“HBS has long been a leader and innovator in business education,” Faust tells Fast Company. “The field of organizational behavior began at Harvard in the late 1920s. The first course in entrepreneurship was taught at Harvard just after World War II, and the case method was developed here just to name a few. I think FIELD and other innovations by HBS faculty will have a similar impact.”

Before FIELD, HBS had a credible innovation story. Decorated professor Clayton M. Christensen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma which “deeply influenced” Steve Jobs and coined the term “disruptive innovation.” It was the first school to dedicate faculty and facilities specifically to entrepreneurship. HBS established a Research Center in Silicon Valley back in 1997 to bring both faculty and students closer to emerging technology business cases. Its star-studded list of alumni who founded or lead successful startups and major global tech companies is hard to match (HBS’s MBA class is about three times the size of Stanford’s).

Despite this pedigree, Nohria says that other business schools are more often top-of-mind in the areas of entrepreneurship and venture capital; he’s working to change that perception, which “lags reality,” he says. Stanford University of course is nearly synonymous, if not incestuous with the Silicon Valley scene. But even in its own Boston backyard, HBS tends to be overshadowed on entrepreneurship by schools like MIT Sloan School of Management and Babson.

Raj Kapoor, Managing Director at Mayfield Fund on Sand Hill Road, is an HBS ’96. In 2005, he sold the company he cofounded, Snapfish, to Hewlett-Packard for $300 million. He says HBS tends to be more famous, or infamous, for minting bankers, consultants, and captains of Fortune 500 companies than entrepreneurs (though it is well known that many of the former become the latter). Kapoor tells Fast Company he’s noticed a change in the HBS culture building; there is a new attitude now with “more students wanting to create new values-based companies versus just manipulating markets.” In the past, entrepreneurship had a stigma at HBS. “This is what people did when they couldn’t get a job,” he says.

The iLab at HBS

But the mantra in the FIELD 3 module is that failure is good learning and expected for most of the 150 startups ultimately judged on May 14, “IPO Day” at HBS. Every first year student is evaluated on the “microbusiness” they jointly conceive, form, and fund (each venture receives $5,000 from HBS in seed money), then launch and commercialize. Unlike the Business Plan Contest, which has been growing at HBS since the 1990s, FIELD 3 business-building is a non-elective. The microbusiness teams are not self-selected (as Business Plan Contest entrants are) but rather chosen by faculty based on factors such as student interests and diversity (more like the real world). The FIELD 3 ventures are graded less on slick PowerPoints and more on market results–actual sales and stock prices from a financial market simulation made up of non-conflicted student shareholders; input from a panel of VCs, entrepreneurs and faculty also factors into the final judging and report cards.

HBS is far from alone among business schools in revamping its curriculum to focus on entrepreneurship and “action-learning.” But the sheer pace (announced 2010, deployed 2011) and scale of implementation, and requirement that all 900 students be immersed globally at 150 established companies (FIELD 2) and then, a few months later, build from scratch 150 businesses and sell their products–is unprecedented, say Nohria and Alan MacCormack, FIELD 3’s co-director who previously ran an entrepreneurship “experiential learning” program at MIT Sloan.

But FIELD 3 does not have an explicit goal of launching successful startups, MacCormack says. In fact, the school encourages those students with the best IP to save those ideas for post-graduation. But several microbusiness teams have already heard from VCs including the winner IvyKids, which is an iPad application that teaches children about everyday experiences. The market reality is that a handful of the 150 startups will become successful businesses, MacCormack says. Long range Nohria expects HBS to produce “more entrepreneurs, more action-oriented, better trained students who put ideas into practice more quickly, versus just analytical thinkers.” By adding FIELD to its case foundation, “the soul of the school,” and the HBS experience, we “continue to put distance between us and others,” Nohria says.

Still, a debate simmers about whether Stanford or Harvard can claim the b-school entrepreneurship mantle; it goes something like this: HBS has more outcomes and dedicated faculty and buildings; Stanford and its students have multi-disciplinary innovation in their DNA and form the fabric of Silicon Valley; name brand alumni entrepreneurs and tech titans are referenced by each. (Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, HBS ’95, is scheduled to address the inaugural FIELD group at HBS’s Class Day on May 23.)

Matthew Prince, HBS ’09, tells Fast Company “all the VCs I know are either Harvard or Stanford MBAs.” He and classmate Michelle Zatlyn came up with the idea behind hot San Francisco-based startup CloudFlare, which won the HBS Business Plan Contest in 2009. Prince thinks HBS’s generalist requirement (classes in marketing, finance, operations, etc.) served to better prepare him to be an entrepreneur than would have Stanford’s “choose you own adventure” approach. He cites a “remarkable list” of companies started by his ‘09 classmates that “have created easily over a billion dollars in value.”

HBS Class Of 2009
9 startups from HBS students have created more than $1 billion in combined value.

Matthew Prince (HBS ’09), co-creator of CloudFlare, lists success stories

CloudFlare–an “intelligent global network” for accelerating websites’ performances.

Rent the Runway–a business that rents high-fashion party frocks.

Tough Mudder–10- to 12-mile hardcore obstacle course events designed by British Special Forces.

ThredUp–a high-quality children’s clothing swap hub.

Viglink–a service providing product links to help blogs and other websites make money.

Signpost–an online ad service for local businesses.

Paddle8–an online destination connecting art collectors with leading galleries, foundations, and art fairs.

GetGoing–a service that develops and implements online travel booking technologies.

Trendyol–a Turkish designer fashion e-commerce site from an HBS student scheduled to graduate in 2010 who dropped out in 2009.

Bob Sutton, a professor of management science and organizational behavior at Stanford’s engineering school who also teaches at Stanford’s Institute of Design (d.school) and business school, welcomes HBS’s new FIELD approach and downplays the Harvard-Stanford competition. “If you blend evidence, experience and vivid cases, you get a more complete understanding and better prepared students. That is what the best of Stanford aims for, and it appears the best of HBS is going that way,” he says. Sutton views FIELD as a supplement and enhancement to the HBS cases, which he uses, not a replacement. He’s not sure how HBS will make up for the loss in revenues as a reduced case focus means less cases sold.

Nohria, who greatly admires Stanford’s cross-university collaboration and teaching involving the d.school, has plans for the “FIELD method, not just the HBS experience” to become a widely imitated, shared, and distributed learning product. “That is our measure of success, the only one really,” he says. The overarching goal is “to improve the education of business leaders, not just at HBS, but wherever they are taught in the world.”

While the speed, size and institutional acceptance of FIELD have been impressive, Prince sees some pitfalls and challenges with the new program. He wonders if the more formalized FIELD faculty-led immersion trips (e.g. to Silicon Valley, Mumbai) will end up stifling innovation long-term with the decline of informal, student-led forays which define spirited, bootstraps-style entrepreneurship. Prince is disappointed that a core course on negotiation was cut to make room for FIELD. He also fears that HBS students will ultimately end up running up debt to pay for the ambitious program–fueled in part by “the arms race” with Stanford–thus limiting their ability to be entrepreneurial.

HBS wants to be a catalyst for the nascent Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem. Stopping short of envisioning a Silicon Yard, Harvard Hub, or Cambridge Corridor that rivals Silicon Valley, both Faust and Nohria see a thriving innovation and tech scene that is born and stays in Boston with Harvard as a “sparkling node.” Nohria points out that in the 1980s, nearby Route 128 (which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation at MIT) and Silicon Valley were roughly on a par for technology innovation. His long view of history says life sciences and biotechnology may be the next big wave of innovation–post-information technology/Internet age; Boston and Harvard are well positioned for that, he says. (perhaps for online education too)

Last November, on the campus of HBS, Faust and Nohria opened Harvard’s gleaming new iLab facility which is designed to spur innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration across the Harvard University campus. iLab is housed in the old WGBH studios building where the innovative Sesame Street ”learning product” was born and first broadcast across the country. HBS’s hives take up the two floors above the iLab.

“The iLab is designed to be an incubator for new ideas where students and faculty from across the University can meet and develop innovative ideas and learn how to translate them into entrepreneurial ventures,” Faust says. “It is also a place where people from the community can receive advice on new ventures.  These two facets make it an important contributor to Boston’s reputation as a hub of innovation.”

One can only imagine the impact that the iLab might have had were it available for Mark Zuckerberg. It’s impossible to ignore the timing of HBS’s overhaul with the record-breaking, landscape-changing $104 billion IPO of Facebook, and it’s hard not to imagine whether its founder and CEO would have stuck it out at Harvard if he had the iLab at his disposal. The iLab’s director, Gordon Jones, tells Fast Company that Zuckerberg was wowed by the facility while attending its opening recently. ”This is really cool,” Jones recalls him saying. “This really is a lot like Facebook.”

[Images: Susan Young]

5 Steps To Choosing The Right Challenges

Challenge is the pathway to engagement and progress in our lives. But not all challenges are created equal. Some challenges make us feel alive, engaged, connected, and fulfilled. Others simply overwhelm us. Knowing the difference as you set bigger and bolder challenges for yourself is critical to your sanity, success, and satisfaction.

How do you choose “good” challenges? It helps to know that the kind of challenges that bring full engagement and fulfillment in our lives have five things in common:  

First, they demand singularity of focus, meaning they are mighty enough activities that they require our full and undivided attention and concentration in the moment. These challenges, then, are not insignificant, nor do they allow multitasking. They absorb us because they engage both our mental and our physical presence. Painting a picture, teaching your kids an activity, designing a website, creating or giving a presentation–all are examples of efforts that require you to focus. To inspire a singularity of focus, a challenge must be important to you and it must be something you feel you should do now in this moment. If it’s trivial or not time-bound, you won’t engage. So in selecting your next challenge in life, choose one that is meaningful and will demand your complete concentration.

Second, great challenges stretch our efforts and capabilities, demanding slightly more than the best of our skills and strengths. They are just over and above our current abilities, so they require us to engage fully and grow. The secret here is to select challenges that extend just beyond your comfort zones. Knowing this secret explains why so many of us have become fascinated with video games. Have you ever played a video game that didn’t have escalating levels of difficulty? Well, life can feel like play, too, when we purposefully engage in activities that demand we test and develop our skills. If you’re a good public speaker who always uses notes, choosing to go without notes in your next presentation will stretch you. If you’re a good racquetball player, playing a competitor who is better than you will demand more of you. If you’re an executive, take on a project that’s slightly over your head. You needn’t decide to skip from level one of difficulty to level 10–that just causes you to feel overwhelmed. Instead, approach your next challenge as an opportunity to go from level one to level two or three, and you’ll meet the criteria for a satisfying challenge.

Third is the ability to score performance. This means that you have the opportunity to know how you’re doing–either to self-assess your progress or to get outside feedback. Running often becomes a more satisfying experience when we can measure how fast and far we’ve gone. Presentations and vocal performances are more fulfilling if we can see the audience’s faces and reactions to our voice. Dieting is more engaging when we can stand on the scales and see how we’re doing. While all this sounds intuitive, the surprising fact is that few people purposely build progress checks into their challenges. They simply get inspired, start out, and then give up when they no longer “feel like” continuing. But a hit of motivation, either in seeing results or in getting redirected, often happens at the checkpoints in any endeavor. So craft your next challenge with the intention of assessing your progress along the way.

Fourth, satisfying challenges allow for a sense of completion. People can run a marathon because they know that their challenge has a finish line. Executives who work around the clock, fully engaged in a project, do so because they have a deadline to hit that they believe matters to their overall challenge of contributing fully and rising to the top. These examples illustrate that having a few finish lines in mind and the belief in a payoff are incredibly important in enduring the stretch of any challenge. This concept becomes even more important as we take on bigger and bigger challenges. For example, if you’re going to take on the challenge of ending world poverty, you have to construct the challenge and your expectations in such a way that you feel you are completing significant milestones. If you just toil away all day for 40 years at the challenge but never feel a gratifying sense of completing important and meaningful projects, you will lose your sense of engagement. This is why organizational change agents will always design small wins into a change plan. Such wins give an opportunity to score performance–we’re succeeding!– but also provide moments when people sense they have completed something important–we finished that!

Finally, challenges that enliven you are those that allow a sharing of experience and achievement. Climbing Mount Everest would hit all our previous criteria, and that alone would make it a wonderfully satisfying experience. But climbing Everest with someone else would feel infinitely better. Standing atop a mountain and jumping in place to celebrate feels terrific; getting to do so and then turning to hug someone and recognize the experience and achievement together is indescribably more fulfilling. Not all sharing need be so epic. Attempting to stitch a more complex quilt fits the first four criteria as well. What makes the activity ultimately satisfying, though, is showing the new quilt to your loved ones, who can ooh and aah and celebrate or, ultimately, enjoy your creation. Often, it’s talking about and celebrating how we have faced and triumphed over our challenges that put the icing on the cake. It’s important that you understand how vital this is to your psyche and desire to take on more and more complex challenges. Even if you overcome a tremendous challenge and feel the personal victory, it’s simply not powerful enough. It may activate your left brain, which says, I have achieved, but it will not activate your more social right brain, which desperately desires to say, Look, Ma, I did it!

From The Charge by Brendon Burchard. Copyright © 2012 by The Burchard Group, LLC. Excerpted with permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

[Image: Flickr user Maarten Takens]

Apple Rumor Patrol: Screen Mania, Skinny MacBook Pros, And iCloudy Delights

The iPhone’s 4-Incher

We’ve often suspected that the Wall Street Journal is an “official” leak source used by Apple to seed the media with slightly more directed rumors about its upcoming products. And now the WSJ has chimed in on the four-inch iPhone screen rumor and said yes, that it’s indeed true … Apple’s buying screens in large numbers from suppliers and these are for an “at least” a four-inch display, with the phone going into production in June.

So far, so promising. But Reuters has since chimed in and said its sources have agreed with the WSJ and that a 4-inch iPhone is on its way. Why so much excitement about such a seemingly secondary feature of a smartphone? Because it marks a design departure for Apple and sets the scene for Apple’s rivals–some of whom have already been pressing for bigger and bigger displays as a unique selling point for their Android phones. A bigger screen will also make the iPhone better as an e-reader (threatening Amazon’s market somewhat) and as a glossy display for mobile app magazines…potentially giving a boost to this industry as well.

iMacs, MacBook Pros, and Even Airs To Get Retina Screens

The iPhone 4 brought the “retina” screen to the world’s attention–a display with pixels so dense that you actually can’t resolve the individual pixels with your weak, fleshy human eyeball, thus making displayed text look like printed quality and photos and images even more astonishing. The iPad 3 carries a similarly massive number of pixels and is probably better than every computer screen you’ve ever used. And that’s why Apple’s now said to be bringing retina displays to a revamped line of MacBook Pros, iMacs, and even its svelte MacBook Air, according to 9to5Mac.

The processing power to run these displays fits easily into the bigger chassis of the iMacs and MacBooks, but fitting it into the super-skinny Airs will take a little longer and may require Apple to use its proprietary battery power tech so that the ultra-portable machines still deliver long battery life. For this reason, we might not see them revealed at the same time as the bigger machines and they may not get much of an external design overhaul.

Skinny MacBook Pros

This is now looking like a dead cert: Apple’s prepping its Air-inspired new MacBook Pros for a reveal at the upcoming WWDC event. They’ll be ultra-thin, may come with a bias toward solid-state hard drives, and may not contain a DVD drive inside. They will be powered by Intel’s new chips, Ivy Bridge, and they may also sport ultra-fast USB 3.0 tech alongside the Intel-Apple Thunderbolt port. 

iOS 6 And iCloud

iOS 6 is the next revamp of Apple’s mobile operating system, and it looks like Apple’s in advanced testing phases of the software because it’s starting to show up in online analytics, as Apple’s staff put it through its paces.

iOS 6 may well arrive alongside a revamped iCloud, which will include all sorts of new features like notifications on the website and more sophisticated web apps in general. It’s also now thought that iCloud will get a video streaming feature so video clips can be shared around a household the way photos are in PhotoStream and that Apple will boost its photo-sharing system with the ability to comment and to share photos to other iCloud users. That sounds an awful lot like a photo-centric social network, and could explain why Apple ws rumored to be interested in buying Instagram.

Siri

Alongside the iOS 6 and iCloud update, Apple’s also said to be revamping Siri, its cloud-service voice recognizing personal assistant. Siri has inspired many rivals and comes in for a lot of criticism, despite the fact that Nuance–the firm behind its voice-recognition tech–says it set a new high bar for understanding the human voice. With an update, Apple may lay many criticisms to rest because it’s said to be coming to the iPad too and also, according to Daring Fireball to include an API so that other apps can interact with Siri, and be controlled by it. That means you may be able to get GPS navigation instructions, send a tweet, and maybe even launch and play games or other apps by voice control alone.

[Image: Flickr user bgarciagil ]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Apple Rumor Patrol: Screen Mania, Skinny MacBook Pros, And iCloudy Delights

The iPhone’s 4-Incher

We’ve often suspected that the Wall Street Journal is an “official” leak source used by Apple to seed the media with slightly more directed rumors about its upcoming products. And now the WSJ has chimed in on the four-inch iPhone screen rumor and said yes, that it’s indeed true … Apple’s buying screens in large numbers from suppliers and these are for an “at least” a four-inch display, with the phone going into production in June.

So far, so promising. But Reuters has since chimed in and said its sources have agreed with the WSJ and that a 4-inch iPhone is on its way. Why so much excitement about such a seemingly secondary feature of a smartphone? Because it marks a design departure for Apple and sets the scene for Apple’s rivals–some of whom have already been pressing for bigger and bigger displays as a unique selling point for their Android phones. A bigger screen will also make the iPhone better as an e-reader (threatening Amazon’s market somewhat) and as a glossy display for mobile app magazines…potentially giving a boost to this industry as well.

iMacs, MacBook Pros, and Even Airs To Get Retina Screens

The iPhone 4 brought the “retina” screen to the world’s attention–a display with pixels so dense that you actually can’t resolve the individual pixels with your weak, fleshy human eyeball, thus making displayed text look like printed quality and photos and images even more astonishing. The iPad 3 carries a similarly massive number of pixels and is probably better than every computer screen you’ve ever used. And that’s why Apple’s now said to be bringing retina displays to a revamped line of MacBook Pros, iMacs, and even its svelte MacBook Air, according to 9to5Mac.

The processing power to run these displays fits easily into the bigger chassis of the iMacs and MacBooks, but fitting it into the super-skinny Airs will take a little longer and may require Apple to use its proprietary battery power tech so that the ultra-portable machines still deliver long battery life. For this reason, we might not see them revealed at the same time as the bigger machines and they may not get much of an external design overhaul.

Skinny MacBook Pros

This is now looking like a dead cert: Apple’s prepping its Air-inspired new MacBook Pros for a reveal at the upcoming WWDC event. They’ll be ultra-thin, may come with a bias toward solid-state hard drives, and may not contain a DVD drive inside. They will be powered by Intel’s new chips, Ivy Bridge, and they may also sport ultra-fast USB 3.0 tech alongside the Intel-Apple Thunderbolt port. 

iOS 6 And iCloud

iOS 6 is the next revamp of Apple’s mobile operating system, and it looks like Apple’s in advanced testing phases of the software because it’s starting to show up in online analytics, as Apple’s staff put it through its paces.

iOS 6 may well arrive alongside a revamped iCloud, which will include all sorts of new features like notifications on the website and more sophisticated web apps in general. It’s also now thought that iCloud will get a video streaming feature so video clips can be shared around a household the way photos are in PhotoStream and that Apple will boost its photo-sharing system with the ability to comment and to share photos to other iCloud users. That sounds an awful lot like a photo-centric social network, and could explain why Apple ws rumored to be interested in buying Instagram.

Siri

Alongside the iOS 6 and iCloud update, Apple’s also said to be revamping Siri, its cloud-service voice recognizing personal assistant. Siri has inspired many rivals and comes in for a lot of criticism, despite the fact that Nuance–the firm behind its voice-recognition tech–says it set a new high bar for understanding the human voice. With an update, Apple may lay many criticisms to rest because it’s said to be coming to the iPad too and also, according to Daring Fireball to include an API so that other apps can interact with Siri, and be controlled by it. That means you may be able to get GPS navigation instructions, send a tweet, and maybe even launch and play games or other apps by voice control alone.

[Image: Flickr user bgarciagil ]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.