Category — Innovation

Six years ago, a printmaker and a web developer teamed up to enable anyone with a story to capture it in a 32-page sketchbook, reports Liz Robbins in the New York Times (5/13/12). What Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker started then in Atlanta is today a collection of some “12,500 sketchbooks from more than 130 countries,” housed at the Brooklyn Art Library. An additional 7,502 sketchbooks “will join the permanent collection when they return from a 14-city tour, currently in Chicago and ending in Melbourne, Australia, in November.”

Anyone can participate: “For $25, any doodler, student, parent, graphic designer, architect … or would-be artist can fill a 32-page sketchbook and add it to the collection.” Located in a storefront, the Brooklyn Art Library “fits neatly on its block, an upscale artistic corridor with an architectural studio across the street from apartment lofts, an art gallery, a bar, a barbershop and a used-book store.” It’s also possible to sign up online — or simply peruse the many sketchbooks by applying for a library card, which entitles you to review two sketchbooks at a time.

“This is personal, this is someone, these are moments,” says Thanassis Petropoulos, a comic-book artist from Athens who recently checked out the collection. “It’s like you’re having coffee with your girlfriend and you’re going to do a sketch of her. When you’re done, this ends up here and someone from around the world can see moments from your life.” Thanassis hasn’t created a sketchbook himself yet, but is thinking about it. “We don’t have these kinds of things in Athens,” he says. “We don’t have a place to hang out with total strangers.” The library also sells “art supplies and vintage goods” as well as “dark chocolate bars, with custom wrappers that match the library cards, for $9.”

Maya Stein is bike riding and typewriting her way from Massachusetts to Milwaukee, reports Liz Leyden in the New York Times (5/12/12). Her inspiration is a typewriter her father kept “in the hallway between bedrooms for the family to use, an exercise in creativity that changed her life.” Her inclination is to ride her bicycle from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “where the design for the first mass-produced typewriter was developed in the 1860s. Along the way, she is delivering a manual typewriter to public spaces and inviting people to take a turn at the keys.”

As Maya explains: “I want to bring that communal hallway back … I want to make a space for collaboration and creativity, to invite people to contribute their voices to the larger story of the community we’re all in.” Her journey, which began on May 5th and coincides with her 40th birthday, is “to ride 40 miles a day, typewriter in tow, for 40 days until she reaches Milwaukee.” Her typewriter of choice is a turquoise Remington Ten Forty.

She funded her project with $16,000 raised on Kickstarter and it “is providing inspiration for her own writing, which she is doing daily at type-rider.com. “I saw a man mowing his lawn and I loved catching that moment,” says Maya. “All that I see in between my stops, that’s a treat. That’s my gift to myself.” Maya sets up in front of shops or cafes, her typewriter alongside a chalkboard that beckons, “Write Yourself Here.” She doesn’t try to sell anyone on taking a turn, but rather just waits to see what happens. Some folks prefer to talk to Maya instead, which is fine with her. “There are moments you cannot capture on paper,” she says.

Orhan Pamuk has "turned one of his novels into a museum, evoking the book and its setting," reports Ron Gluckman in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). Both the book and the museum have the same name: The Museum of Innocence. The novel is set and the museum is located in Istanbul, Turkey. The book is about "ordinary life" in Istanbul, and centers on a love triangle; the museum is a collection of various items that figured into the plot. There’s an earring left behind after a love scene, for instance, and a handbag the book’s protagonist bought for his fiancee at a shop where his other love interest, a teenage girl, works.

"Novels are about preserving the ways we feel, detailing the ways we hold objects, the way in which we smell something," says Orhan, a Nobel Prize-winning author. "Even in a novel of 600 pages, the details of objects fade away, but we never forget the sentiments those objects generate … This museum is more about those sentiments than the story." The novel’s storyline was driven, in part, by things Orhan found in local curio shops, which he would buy after describing them in the novel. "When I finished the book," says Orhan, "the house was full of these objects. I had to do the museum."

This was much easier said than done. Orhan bought the building in which The Museum of Innocence is housed back in 1998, and the museum took so long to complete that his "die-hard fans had wondered whether it would open" (the book, first published in 2008, includes "a map to and ticket for entry to the museum; that ticket is now honored for admission"). Items are "grouped in 83 numbered panels, one for each chapter" of the book. Some see the project as self-indulgent, however Ron Gluckman suggests it is "an inventive bricks and mortar expansion of the story at a time when the internet often seems to simplify literature."

Among other things, the late Vidal Sassoon “transformed hairdressing into fashion street theater,” reports Stephen Miller in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). His “bustling storefronts” featured “big windows” that let passersby witness the fashion revolution happening inside. Until Vidal came along, “women’s hair styles involved perms and sets, processing with bleach, curlers, bulbous dryers and hair spray.” Vidal instead envisioned “short, geometric cuts — quickly realized and set with hand-held dryers.” It was a vision he credited to Bauhaus architecture, according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times obituary (5/10/12).

“When I looked at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look, and shape,” he once said. “My sense was that hairdressing definitely needed to be changing … To me, hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure.” His “breakthrough came in 1963 when he cut the long hair of Hong Kong-born actress Nancy Kwan into a bob with sharp face-framing points.” Later, he created “a sensation” when Roman Polanski paid him $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow‘s hair incredibly short, as featured in Rosemary’s Baby. In the film she exclaims, “It’s Vidal Sassoon! It’s very in!”

Vidal went on to create a line of hair-care products that reached $100 million in sales annually, and his ad campaign made famous his tagline, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” He later sold the company to Richardson Vicks and it is now owned by Procter & Gamble. “This was somebody who changed our industry entirely, not just from the point of view of cutting hair but actually turning it into a business,” says John Barrett, who keeps his own salon at Bergdorf Goodman. “He was one of the first who had a product line bought out by a major corporation.” Vidal Sassoon died earlier this week at age 84, in Los Angeles.

The idea for “The Price is Right” came to the late Bob Stewart “while standing in front of a store window in Manhattan in 1955,” reports Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times (5/7/12). His fellow window shoppers were guessing at how much the furniture in the window cost and the idea just “popped into his head.” At least that’s one version of the story. According to Stephen Miller in The Wall Street Journal (5/8/12), Bob “got the idea for ‘The Price is Right’ while watching a storekeeper in New York, who attracted a crowd by selling souvenirs through an auction instead of using set prices.”

Either way, the show became a hit when it aired in 1956 and “is still on the air for an hour each weekday on CBS,” notes Dennis. Contestants try to “guess the price of an item — a boat, a refrigerator, the cost of house cleaning for a year. The contestant who comes closest without exceeding the actual price won.” Bob got the idea for another hit game show, “To Tell The Truth,” after walking into a crowded elevator and wondering about the occupations of his fellow travelers. The resulting game involved “three people, all claiming to be the same person, trying to befuddle a panel of four celebrities.”

Bob’s other big hits included “Password” and “The $10,000 Pyramid,” originally starring Dick Clark. Bob explained that all his shows were essentially about communication. “Once you cause somebody at home to talk to the set aloud, even by himself or herself, then you’ve got a good game show, he once said. “You want them to say, ‘It’s number 2! It’s number 2! It’s number 2!’ before the moment of truth comes out.” Or, as he confided to the Washington Post in 1978: “By the time they find out that what they are watching is crap, they’ve already watched it.” Bob Stewart was 91 when he died last week in Los Angeles.

Numero Group is thriving “despite breaking almost every record-business rule in the book,” reports Duff McDonald in Businessweek (5/7/12). The tiny Chicago-based label starts with an unlikely premise: It specializes in re-issues of “lost musical treasures — primarily in the realms of soul funk and gospel.” Its three founders — Ken Shipley, Rob Sevier and Tom Lunt — share a passion for finding what had been lost and their idea is to make it easier for others to do so, as well. “We wanted to make records that were collectible but also accessible to a normal record buyer,” says Ken. “You didn’t have to have deep pockets or knowledge of some obscure record store. You could create your own library of obscure records through us.”

Numero’s success begins with embracing failure — the label actively looks for acts that never made it. “Success stories are nice, but they’re not as interesting,” says Ken. Rather than selling each album as a one-off, Numero has adopted a subscription model, where, for “$150 a year, ‘super-fans’ receive every Numero album, a release model more akin to a magazine publisher’s than a music label’s.” They avoid internet sales: “Numero’s typical release is now 61% CD, 34% LP and 5% digital. Sales on iTunes account for just 6.2% of sales. Over 10% of Numero’s sales are via mail order.”

Numero also invests heavily in its packaging, and with special attention to liner notes. “They want to talk to the people who made the music, the people in the engineer’s booth that day. They want the full picture: how it’s made, who makes it, where it’s made,” says Oliver Wang, a college professor and music blogger. They also stake out a strong brand identity. “We wanted to be a library,” says Tom Lunt. “All our releases look the same, and because of that they look more important than the other things on your shelf.” And they spend “almost nil” on marketing, relying on word of mouth. Launched in 2003 with just $23,000 in seed money, Numero last year saw profits of $1.1 million.

New York’s latest food-truck court is indoors, scattered among the upper floors of a city skyscraper, reports Glenn Collins in the New York Times (4/30/12). “This is the first indoor vertical food-truck court in the city, and as far as I know, the country,” says David Weber, president of the New York City Food Truck Association. It’s actually only the third food-truck court in total in the city — the other two are located outdoors. The demand for any kind of food-truck court has increased “as truck owners search for places to park without receiving a ticket or being ordered to move by the police.”

This latest court, located inside the Starrett-Lehigh Building in New York’s West Chelsea, was established after the building’s owner, RXR Realty, asked the Food Truck Association “to bring in a rotating roster of a dozen food trucks, including Mexicue, Red Hook Lobster Pound Truck and the Gorilla Cheese Truck.” They made the request because of “a paucity of lunchtime choices in the neighborhood.” It’s not the first time that food trucks have made their way into buildings for special events, but it is the first time that multiple trucks have converged into a single location five days a week.

As it happens, the building “was designed to bring supply trucks directly up to congeries of production, storage and repackaging companies, for deliveries and exports. Now, most of the industrial tenants have departed in favor of advertising and design firms, as well as Martha Stewart Living, Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger.” The high-end food trucks are a good match for the 5,000 people who work in the building. “This is a building full of Brooklyn hipsters,” says Denise Rodriguez of RXR Realty. “Now they have a place to eat.”

The corner of North Sixth and Mount Vernon Streets in San Bernardino is the cradle of the fast-food taco, reports Julia Moskin in the New York Times (5/2/12). There sits the Mitla Cafe, which opened in 1937 and still serves “tacos dorados con carne molida, ‘golden’ tortillas fried to order and folded around a spicy compressed wedge of ground beef, blanketed with iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes and shredded Cheddar.” This taco has been on Mitla’s menu as long as anyone can remember and it “very closely resembles the taco served to more than 36 million customers every week at 5,600 Taco Bell locations in the United States.”

This, according to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, is no coincidence. Back in 1950, a fellow named Glen Bell opened a hamburger stand “across the street from Mitla.” Glen apparently was jealous of the success of the McDonald brothers, who opened “the first McDonald’s drive-up hamburger stand” in the same neighborhood ten years earlier. Glen “ate often at Mitla and watched long lines form at its walk-up window.” He persuaded Mitla’s owners “to show him how the tacos were made” and “experimented after hours with a tool that would streamline the process of frying the tortillas.”

Glen started serving tacos at his own restaurant, which he re-named Taco Tia, El Taco, and then utlimately, Taco Bell. The Taco Bell website claims that Glen invented the “fast food crunchy taco,” a claim that Gustavo, “perhaps the greatest (and only) living scholar of Mexican-American fast food, disputes.” His book features other stories of white Americans “who managed to capitalize on Mexican food,” as well as at least one Mexican, Mariano Martinez, inventor of the frozen margarita machine. Overall, Taco USA tells the story of “how a few foods (salsa, tacos, chili, tequila) from the complicated and enormous cuisine of Mexico managed to slip into the mainstream of American taste.”

Clarence Birdseye explored the marvels of frozen food while hanging out in “the frozen recesses of Labrador,” reports Janet Maslin in a New York Times review of Birdseye, by Mark Kurlansky (4/26/12). Birdseye apparently was quite the explorer, having also done time in Montana, “studying ticks to better understand Rocky Mountain spotted fever.” His work proved that animals of any size could carry ticks, which was a medical breakthrough. “If Birdseye had done nothing else, his fieldwork on spotted fever and ticks would have earned him a footnote in history,” Mark writes. Birdseye apparently also had a taste for the critters that he shot and then photographed in the field.

According to Mark, “when Birdseye found something in nature, he always wondered what it would taste like and what would be the best way to cook it.” Apparently, “freshly sliced fried rattlesnake” was a favorite and he also enjoyed “such delicacies as sherry-marinated lynx and the front end of a skunk.” His neighbors reported that Birdseye developed “a string-operated contraption” designed to catch small birds on his lawn. “We always thought he was going to eat them … for some experiment,” a neighbor recalled. “In any case, we knew they were goners.”

Meanwhile, back in Labrador, Birdseye loved to spend “long hours on a dog sled in subzero temperatures …. He also found ample opportunity to study how and why different foods froze at different temperatures.” He went on to figure out the best way to package frozen produce, which in a place like Labrador, “with no access to fruit or vegetables in winter … was a subject of urgent importance.” The book “coaxes readers to re-examine everyday miracles like frozen food, and to imagine where places with no indigenous produce would be without them. It emphasizes the many steps that went into developing such a simple-seeming process.”

"… The competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires," writes David Brooks in the New York Times (4/24/12). David is encapsulating a view expressed by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. Peter is currently teaching a course at Stanford, the premise of which is that "we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value."

His argument is that "we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too." He’s not talking about a monopoly in the traditional sense, though: "He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time."

Unfortunately, our competitive environment undermines this. We compete to get into the best schools instead of the schools that are best for us, where we "have to jump through ever-more demanding, pre-assigned academic hoops" instead of "developing a passion for one subject … Instead of wandering across strange domains" we apportion our time, allocating it most efficiently. We similarly take aim for the top employment opportunities, "regardless of their appropriateness," where the job is "to beat the competition … the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals." Competition trumps value creation and "the competitive arena undermines innovation." But "you don’t have to compete; you can invent."