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October 12, 2007

BIF-3, Day 2: Denise Nemchev, Joseph Coughlin

I missed the morning's storytellers on the second day of the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit at Trinity Rep yesterday. You can read about them at the excellent conference blog.

Here's the Day 1 post: Bloggers swarm the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit

And the Mark Cuban - Walter Mossberg interview: BIF-3: Mark Cuban wants to buy Cubs -- and Verizon, to which I just added a bit of video.

The morning bloggers:

Rachel Clarke: Transcripts from First Session Day 2

Brian Jepson:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Future of Collaboration

Clayton Christensen: Apple vs. Nokia

Adam Darowski: BIF-3: Session 5 (Wladawsky-Berger, Christensen, Lane, Levy)

Erica Driver: Reinvention Requires A Near-Death Experience

Josh Catone: Ellen Levy: Ask the Right Questions

Lois Kelly: Finding the words for new concepts

Afternoon session:

Denise Nemchev with a giant prop of the Hurriquake nail.

Denise Nemchev is President of Stanley Bostitch in East Greenwich, which began as Boston Stitchery Company, hence the name.

Denise, wielding at different times a stapler, staples and a giant staple gun, is a born comedian with an MIT education.

She is here to talk about a nail.

In the wake of Katrina and other natural disasters, houses collapsed and nails came under scrutiny.

What happens when a nail fails? How to innovate to prevent nail failures?

"A nail shears when an earthquake turns your house into a parallelogram. Very difficult to decorate," she quipped.

She said Bostitch worked with FEMA, OSHA, Clemson and Brigham Young universities, the insurance idustry and building code officials to understand how a building fails.

The result was Hurriquake disaster-resistant nails that withstand winds up to 175 mph and twice the shear force of standard building nails. Its fat head is 25 percent larger than most nails.

Popular Science named her nail Innovation of the Year 2006.

When BIF makes available the video that was shot of the entire conference, check this one out. She's one funny lady, delivering a masterful riff about a... nail. And she's president of this venerable company.

Also blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Denise Nemchev

Joseph Coughlin, left, sits for a conversation with WSJ columnist Walter Mossberg.

Joseph F. Coughlin is director of the Age Lab, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Coughlin thinks advertising is not being disruptive and is not changing. Baby boomers are more active and are living longer and are the greatest chunk of the population, but they're not advertising to us.

"None of you admit that you're aging," he said

So the auto industry, even if they want to build an old man's car, couldn't sell it: No one would buy one.

Mossberg, who is 60, interjects, "I just want them to advertise intelligently to me." (At that moment I thought of Dennis Hopper, onetime wildman turned golfer and Bush Republican , who makes me want to throw a shoe at the TV when he comes on to advertise AmeriTrade Ameriprise financial planning.)

Coughlin told a strange story about a product for people called a Personal Advisor: Swipe a bar code and it reads a product's ingredients and tells you to buy something besides the Ritz crackers. It's mounted on shopping carts in Germany.

(I think I found this on the web: it's called the "advisor for nutrition and intelligent shopping," No barcodes, it uses RDID tags and a precoded list of product ingredients. I wouldn't buy this. I don't need my shopping cart nagging me when I reach for the cookies. It also seems to be a stalking horse for shopping cart tech I really don't want, such as ads as I cruise the aisles.)

An interesting statistic: Just 9 percent of retired couples move to Florida. Then they move back "home" when one of them gets sick. This came on the heels of learning that 90 percent of 50-year-olds want to retire, and 95 percent of 55-year-olds. But they actually want to keep working, just at something else.

The best news he had was that they're trying to eliminate the nursing home, keep you in your own house. He sees it as inventing "Longevity 3.0."

Longevity 1.0 was pure luck -- humans who avoided predators and bad water survived.
Longevity 2.0 involved good water and vaccinations.
Longevity 3.0 is the "alignment of workplace and social systems for 30 years of post-retirement living."

I think marketers can predict what Dennis Hopper's old age will be like, and target him. I don't think you can predict mine, though. At least I hope not.

Also blogged by:

Rachel Clarke: BIF and Joseph Coughlin by Walt Mossberg

Overviews:

Euan Semple: Thoughts on the nature of innovation

Steve Hardy: Day 2 at BIF-3.

Lois Kelly:
Take hope: innovators at work on aging, healthcare and education

Keep the business edge: near-death and 12 year-olds

How innovators think: asking new questions

Final storyteller: Mark Cuban

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:32 PM | Permalink