Signals of Change

Tapping Textures SoC315

The combination of sensations associated with touch (haptics) and bodily motion (kinesthetics) is playing an increasingly important role in product design, user interfaces, and virtual-reality applications, and Scan™ has followed developments in this arena closely. Now, researchers are increasingly using textures, often in combination with other haptic and kinesthetic factors, to elicit emotions, communicate information, and provide richer consumer experiences.

Building and Funding Social Infrastructures SoC316

Social infrastructures, such as those in health maintenance; maximizing economic, community, or political participation; traffic safety; homeland security; and environmental sustainability are difficult to fund and build. But new technologies are helping.

Harvesting Waste SoC317

People are increasingly finding ways to use both physical and nonmaterial waste items to harvest energy or turn solids back into new products or commodities of value.

Olfactory Technologies SoC318

Novel interfaces, health-care applications, retail environments, product-development processes, branding initiatives, and advertising campaigns all are attempting to leverage the power of smell.

MMOG = Making the Most of Organization Games SoC319

The acronym MMOG may take on a meaning besides Massively Multiplayer Online Games in the corporate world. It may come to mean Making the Most of Organization Games. Companies are beginning to restructure their organizational models to cater to new generations of technology savvy young workers.

Power Out of Nowhere SoC320

Power sources that are independent of the power grid are becoming increasingly important for an emerging portfolio of new technologies that enable a wide range of promising applications. Power requirements can be minute but constant, and long-term access to power is crucial for applications such as those that include distributed sensors, sensor networks, or networks of devices that communicate with each other autonomously and wirelessly.

Insights

Constructing an Innovation Ecology: Navigating Internal and External Resources D08-2576

The highly competitive nature of the drive for new products and services is leading companies to explore sources of innovation beyond their traditional innovation processes and their internal corporate capabilities. Instead of depending entirely on a captive, structured innovation process, companies are looking abroad for ideas, partners, and solutions. The result is the development of innovation ecologies—complex webs of resources and people outside the company who have different interests and experiences and are all active in the innovation process. Innovation results from the interplay of many people and factors rather than from one individual player's being responsible for innovating. Author: Kimberly H. Wiesbrock. 9 pages.

Scan™ Meeting Digest: 18 June 2008 Meeting D08-2577

This document is a digest of the Scan™ abstract clusters that participants in the 18 June 2008 Scan meeting identified. The digest includes a description of the Scan process for people who have never attended a Scan meeting, a list of the clusters that meeting participants identified, and a one-page description of each cluster's premise and supporting abstracts. The document has active links that allow the reader to access the supporting abstracts for each cluster in Scan's online abstract database. The document also has links to previously published Scan documents relating to the particular cluster. Clusters of abstracts for this June meeting included old = good, my private Internet, leveraging the surplus, active media, sharing the world's resource pie, copy cats unite, open-source cars, open science, rethinking resources, and a harbinger of consumption refusal. Compiler: Aster Peng. 39 pages.

Calendar

Scan™ Abstract Meetings

Scan abstract meetings (in which SRIC-BI [now SBI] staff participate in a free-form discussion of current Scan abstracts) are open for client observation/participation on:

• 17 September 2008 at 9:00 am
• 22 October 2008 at 9:00 am
• 21 January 2009 at 9:00 am
• 18 March 2009 at 9:00 am
• 20 May 2009 at 9:00 am
• 22 July 2009 at 9:00 am.

Please contact your SRIC-BI (now SBI) marketing representative to schedule participation in any of the Scan Abstract Meetings.