From WSJ 5/1/13 By Dennis K Berman

An article that hits the nail on the head--something I have often wondered about: the economic impact of social media and the disproportionate valuations ascribed to companies that lead the charge, such as fb. This article talks more along the lines of economic impact of smartphones in our lives. How do you measure, is it even there?

• THE GAME
• April 30, 2013, 7:51 p.m. ET

Why Aren't Smartphones Making Us More Productive?

• By DENNIS K. BERMAN

Imagine you woke up each morning, strapped a keyboard, monitor, Wi-Fi receiver, desktop computer, camera and stereo to your body, and ventured clumsily out the door.

About 100 million smartphones have been unleashed on America's streets. So why isn't this computing power making us more productive? Dennis Berman joins the News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

Of course, you're already doing it. You're using a smartphone, and today that thin slab has roughly the same computing power as the powerful desktops of 2005.

We regard these hand-held machines as game devices, Web browsers and messaging tools. But at heart they are like all computers before them. They are efficiency engines, a means of saving time, bridging distance, reducing cost.

Yet there's something bizarre going on. Even as an estimated 130 million smartphones roam the U.S. streets, economists can't quite find them.

European Pressphoto Agency

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, one of many smartphone power users.

By that I mean they can't find how these mobile devices are improving worker productivity, which computers have been doing quite ruthlessly for the last 70 years. Productivity is the reason living standards rise. It's why we have more goods and services than our grandparents could imagine.

The official U.S. productivity numbers are low when compared with the stunning 3% yearly gains of the first Web era, roughly 1995 to 2004. In fact, annual productivity growth since 2004 is about 1.5%, below even the long-term average of 2.25%. It's as if a time-wasting flock of Angry Birds has buried productivity like a worm.

Classically defined, an increase in productivity either reduces labor, improves output, or both. And by that measure, argues Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon, the iPhone "has done absolutely nothing" to improve productivity.

So is there something wrong with the government numbers? Or, more intriguing, are we overestimating how these little machines can affect living standards?

The answers are wonky and, inconclusive. For now, we're left in the fallible realm of impressions. Here the relevant question seems to be: Can you find an area of life and business not being affected by the devices?

Let's head to the cockpit of a small jet, which has just landed outside a major U.S. city. A year ago, that jet would have refueled there regardless of cost. Prices for fuel, provided by a patchwork of middlemen, were opaque and jumbled.

Today, its pilots are probably using a little mobile app known as FuelerLinx. It collects and analyzes the cost of jet fuel at airports around the globe, suggesting the best prices.

In 2008, FuelerLinx founder Kevin Moller started gathering prices at 1,800 locations by phone and fax, entering them by hand into a giant Excel spreadsheet on Wednesday mornings. Today the collection is largely automated, and pilots can access it from their cockpits via smartphone.

"Five years ago the processors and Internet speeds and tools weren't there. Now all of it has come together," Mr. Moller says. "People can take on more in their day."

In the realm of global commerce, this is a tiny change to a tiny market. But it's happening across industries, a creative conjoining of mobile-computing brawn, faster wireless speeds and data-crunching in the computing cloud. Author Nicco Mele calls it "radical connectivity." It's the power of that computational engine, finally made mobile and thus ubiquitous.

It's the difference between an artillery piece and a tank.

"If you think about almost any dimension of human activity, it will ultimately be touched by this ability to harness computational power," says Dan Sichel, a Wellesley College professor who argues the official productivity numbers understate technology's impact.

It's happening at eBay Inc., where Chief Executive John Donohoe describes users who are listing three million auction items a week on mobile devices. "They're taking photos and listing in two minutes," Mr. Donahoe says in an interview. "They're far more productive.

For the best example, look no farther than the taxi industry. There, new services are using mobile apps to help drivers and passenger locate each other quickly. The savings in time, fuel and hassle are obvious. Travis Kalanick, CEO of the Uber service, says taxi drivers who use his system take in $10,000 more a year than those who don't. Again, more output for less input.

For econ geeks, the hard part is capturing all these small improvements across the economy, especially among service businesses. Dr. Sichel calls the current productivity rates merely a pause.

There's another reason to pause here. Often technology changes faster than people. And the distribution of its spoils isn't always spread widely. One reason why corporate profits remain high and overall employment remains weak is that technology, not people, is doing more of the work.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen even describes the future as a world of two classes: those who program the machines, and those who are programmed by them.

In all, we are now veering toward the world that computer theorist J.C.R Licklider foresaw back in 1960: "In not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly," he wrote, and "the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

All this is really happening now, and fast.

You don't need numbers to understand that if you create friction in today's system, these forces will eventually hunt you down and they will eliminate you.

Write to Dennis K. Berman at dennis.berman@wsj.com or follow on Twitter: @dkberman

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Aren't Smartphones Making Us More Productive?.

The Silver Lining to Failing

All of us make mistakes, some big some small, so we should all be able to relate to what comes below. There is an old saying, "There's no success like failure". This sounds counter-intuitive, but is it really?

Let’s go through an example. I would like you all to take the simple test below. Then pause for a bit and listen to your instinct and take a note of it.

The Test

Look at the series of letters below and identify the numbered letter listed in the next column. Try to do as many as you can in 10 seconds.

String	Spot This Numbered Letter	Write Your Answers Here†
NNNNN	3
III1I	3
111II	4
MMMNM	4
NMMNM	4
NNMNN	1
NNNMN	5
MMMMN	4
WWWWV	4
VWWVV	5
MMMMM	1
MMNMM	4
NNMNN	3
VVVVV	5
WWWWW	3

Did you get them all? Now that you’ve done the test, pause and listen to what your instincts are telling you to do—are they asking you to take the test again? Do you want to give yourself one more shot to see if you could do better because you just know that you’ll improve the second time?

Scientist did this same experiment with a group of people who were wearing hats with electrodes on them to measure the brains electro-encephalographs (EEGs) right after completing the test to find out how they’d faired. They uncovered two astounding facts:

·         Almost all individuals had very similar looking EEG’s which showed two distinct activity zones: an almost instantaneous “error-related negativity” (ERN) which occurred after 50msec of realizing the mistake and occurs almost involuntarily. This is the “Oh crud!” signal. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives somewhere between 100 to 500 milliseconds after the failure and it occurs when we pay attention to the error and dwell on the disappointment.

·        

hThe more interesting observation was that subjects that learn much more effectively are ones who’s EEG demonstrated (1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a more potent initial response to the mistake and (2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means they were focusing on the failure and trying to learn from it.

As I pondered this, I asked myself--if we are wired to be reflective as individuals, do we always exhibit this behavior while working in groups, teams and organizations? Have we institutionalized retrospectives as part of every initiative, whether we succeed or fail? If not, in the spirit of this research, shouldn't we learn something from it (i.e. prolong the "Pe" phase) and institutionalize retrospectives across the board?

I am also cognizant of the pushback which would suggest that we can't always be driving looking at the rearview mirror, but don’t we agree that taking some time to evaluate why a product launch was delayed, a release botched, a customer account lost, or a competitive threat ignored--by making introspection a habit, will make us better professionals. As George Santayana aptly says “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In fact every time, when the outcome doesn’t meet the anticipated, we should be doing a quick look back to understand the underlying reasons. Even at organizations that seem to be extremely successful and seem to be hitting one home run after another (such as our neighbor in Cupertino) there is an internal culture of failing fast or failing often. The conventional wisdom says that only large corporations with deep pockets can afford the "luxury" of failing fast or failing often, but I have seen many counterpoints to that wisdom as well. Recently, I came across a small gaming company of 12 based in Finland that seemed to have produced two wildly successful games, both of which reached the top of the iTunes charts within record time. This small group is making $500K per week selling just 2 games. In an interview in front of audience at an international gaming conference the CEO revealed a secret: the company had nixed a few dozen projects before these two games were released. He went on to say that he'd allow anyone with a compelling idea to virtually create an autonomous team within the company that had the full decision making authority on what the game would be and when and how it'll be released. The only time a higher level decision body intervened was when the prototype was readied. Clearly, failing fast is a "strategy" even at small start-ups. 

And this brings me back to Bob Dylan's lyrics, "There is no success like failure". If we believe that now, then in the words of another famed luminary who co-founded the tenants on 1 Infinity Loop, let us "stay foolish and stay hungry". 

Have a great weekend! 

Are You Tuned-In?

John is being interviewed for a position that he is well qualified for. However, before the interviewer has finished the question there is an answer. This is followed by another answer followed by a question ‘Did I answer your question?’ Considering that the question was never finished, it makes me wonder, hmm?

Carole received an email from her supervisor on delivery date of her program. She responded copying Jim, George, Bob and Sue on where they were with their schedules and why they had not delivered some items to her; answering a question by spamming others with three other questions. Does this sound familiar?

Operations, Sales, Business Development are finally getting together for a day of discussion and negotiations on key deliverables. Noise is high, cross conversation is rampant followed by silences, shrugs and smiles. Studies have found that a smile of delight is 6.3 seconds longer than a smile of frustration and it even uses different facial muscles. Did we even notice?

In the age of instant gratification and fueled by instant responses made possible by all-connect world of e-devices, we have mastered the art of eye rolling. We give the cursory eye contact and then roll away to our iphone, ipad, blackberry or whatever ‘smarts’ we are carrying around with us. Our average attention span halved in a decade, from 12 minutes to five minutes (in 2008), according to a study commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance. We are continuously flipping stations, not tuning in to anything. We text while we walk, while we talk, while we watch TV, while we drive, while we write emails and the list goes on. What is unique, and we have probably missed that too, is a person who still has the ability to look and keep looking.

The problem has finally grown in magnitude that the need for a course to teach or correct it has come up. Colleges and schools are instituting a ‘wire free’ week. Parents are talking about a ‘no screen’ day per week. Yale's medical program, Wharton's management program are focusing on mandatory courses on enhancing observational skill to diagnose better, to judge business situations better. The goal is to regain what we lost. To master again what we were the masters of. We have become synonymous with that dog walker where the joke is always on who is walking who?

This was a picture shown to medical students at Yale recently as part of their mandatory “Museum Intervention” coursework. Observe this picture and ask yourself this--Is Mrs. Guthrie taking out the flower from the vase or putting it in? Idea is to increase the observational capacity. There is no redness, no apparent pressure, in Mrs. Guthrie's fingers as she holds a flower. The conclusion matters less than the collection of detail. They are trying to slow down the students who have have an urge to come up with a diagnosis immediately to stop, observe, think instead of trying to guess at a quick diagnosis.

Surgeon Richard Selzer, in "Letters to a Young Doctor," wrote: "I have seen sorrow more fully expressed in a buttocks eaten away by bedsores; fear, in the arching of a neck; supplication, in a wrist. Only last week I was informed by a man's kneecaps that he was going to die. Flashing blue lights, they teletyped that he was running out of oxygen and blood." The Yale intervention may not endow students with Dr. Selzer's acute empathy. But a three-year study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, afterward, they are 10% more effective at diagnosis.

"Wait" is a very powerful tool: it’s that extra millisecond the baseball slugger knocks the ball out of the park, or a comedian's ability to "time" the punch line, the innovative company's ability to hang on to creative ideas for months, or years before they pay off.

The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly. Taking some extra time to think about when to take extra time could pay off handsomely.

Oh, in that desert shot of camels above, look carefully, do you actually see the camels? 

It is all about the Nurse

I have talked in my past postings about how innovation does not happen in vacuum and how one of the best ways to sharpen the value proposition of a product/service is to observe the end-user/customers “in the moment”, i.e. what they do just before, during and after they use your product/service. Focusing on observing their use and the problems they encounter during this critical window reveals insights that one would not nominally garner sitting inside conference rooms and doing brain storming sessions on white boards.

Today, our predominant end-user customer is a nurse. Here’s a glimpse of what a day-in-the-life-of-a-nurse looks like:

Nursing is one of the most stretched resources, and nurses are some of the most stressed employees in the hospital. Remember that patients who are in their care are often experiencing the scariest times in their lives and their emotions have an effect on the caregivers. Add to that there’s a country wide nursing shortage estimated at 116,000 this year, likely to increase to 550,000 in 2025. Plus, the aging of the US population has resulted in more people looking for acute care later in their life and it is little wonder why there are increasing rates of depression and stress related disorders among nurses. To top all this, nurses are also being burdened with hospital customer-service policies, privacy (HIPAA) laws which put extraordinary onus on them to complete extensive documentation for the sake of patient security, and you start to see the picture.

Against this backdrop hospital administrators, and quite rightly so, are turning to technology to their rescue—one of the reasons why Vocera has been so well received in this segment. With technology, comes increasing complexities of the hospital IT systems. There is a frenzy created by the promise of Obama Care’s $19B commitment to EMR (Electronics Medical Records) which has contributed to its own layer of chaos around how to best implement interoperability standards amongst various EMR/EHR components. Check out this hilarious spoof on EMR information technology interoperability. While it might take the healthcare IT industry many years to reach the “interoperability nirvana”, nurses who represent a third of all hospital staff have to bear the brunt of having to deal with a plethora of devices, alerts, alarms and book-keeping.

Walk through a typical hospital and you’ll hear a cacophony of alarms, bells, other tones coming from medical equipment and computer terminals. American Medical News recently cited a study showing that 16,934 alarms sounded in a medical unit during an 18-day period—translating to approximately 40 alarms an hour! Alarm fatigue is the term medical professionals often use to describe this malaise. A study of VA hospitals published in WSJ in 2007 states:

Doctors failed to acknowledge receipt of 368 electronically transmitted alerts about abnormal imaging tests, or one third of the total, during the study period. In 4% of the cases, imaging-test results hadn’t been followed up on four weeks after the test was done. Another study, published in March in the American Journal of Medicine, showed only 10.2% of abnormal lab test results were unacknowledged, but timely follow-up was lacking in 6.8% of cases.

We heard also about the recent press release by the Joint Commissions Center for Transforming Healthcare that BZ sent around yesterday which reiterated the same malaise couched in a slightly different statistic

An estimated 80 percent of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers when responsibility for patients is transferred or handed-off.

With as many alerts/alarms and stress as a nurse is subjected to each day, no wonder this profession is so error prone, and lives of our loved ones are at risk as a result.

So how is all this relevant to us at Vocera apart from the fact that there are a lot of companies chasing the limited healthcare IT dollars within the hospital? As we design products, add-on features, or integrate hand-off solutions into our product lines, we must not lose sight of the problems facing our ultimate end-user customer, the nurse. If that means that we create tiered alarm/messaging structure in our products, or improve readability of text messages, or make tweaks to our voice user interface, improve noise immunity for our badges—it must all ultimately help lower the fatigue factor and help them do their jobs better rather than have to get “trained” on yet another new device/system. Our products have the rare privilege of being worn by the nurses and we therefore own a very coveted “real estate”. Let us keep the design principle of “keep it simple stupid” to guide our product decisions going forward because nurses won’t tolerate anything less.

Spend a Day Walking in the Shoes of Your Customer

Every successful business is built on delivering some value (aka set of benefits at a cost) at a cost that is profitable. As long as this equation is sustainable the business thrives. Seems as obvious as day light, right? You will be surprised at how untrue that is. Not all successful businesses consciously choose a set of value propositions, or articulate them clearly to their customers. Business world is littered with “me-too” enterprises which either stumble into a value proposition or do not appreciate how theirs differs substantively from their competitor’s. All too often, corporations end up fighting with the same “weapons”, i.e. cost, to a point where they self destruct by commoditizing their business segment. You need to look no further than the Wintel world of PCs and contrast that with Apple.

As part of self reflection, businesses owe it to their stakeholders a very clear definition of what value they are in the business of delivering and not delivering, to defined customer segment(s). A very good way of articulating the value proposition is to spend a day in the life of your customer – a theme that I had alluded to in my last blog.

Paying attention to the customer is certainly not a new idea. If one thinks of value delivery as a chain of links, most companies focus on their immediate customers. This is a serious mistake. Each link in the chain, all the way down to the end-user, is important. Savvy companies want to add value to the customer’s value proposition, i.e. to provide benefits to their customer’s customer. Let’s reflect on this for a bit - while Vocera’s immediate customers are the hospitals (in the Healthcare vertical), we are quite cognizant of the value our customers (hospitals) are trying to offer their end customers by way of delivering better patient safety, higher patient satisfaction/experience, increased staff empowerment and improved patient flow.

How does an organization determine the value proposition of its products or services? It is certainly not by examining the product features or differentiating them from those of the competition—that is inward focused (internally driven) and rarely translates to the actual end user benefits. Let me explain this with an example. An internally focused airline¹ might decide that their true “value” is on-time departure and arrival, yet exactly because of that, they may have a lousy baggage handling record. Result: the airline protects its on-time performance; the passengers arrive on time, only to have to wait a few aggravated hours for their luggage to arrive.

An extreme opposite of inward focused businesses are those that are customer compelled. Customer compelled organizations can also routinely miss or reject real opportunities. Some of this century’s greatest products or technological advances were confidently rejected in customer surveys: microwaves, computers, cell-phones, voice mails etc., because most often, asking customers about a benefit in vacuum usually does not result in correct choices. Scott Adams was not exaggerating in a Dilbert comic strip in which he makes fun of the historical use of market surveys²:

Airline Survey (1920)

If you had to travel long distance, would you rather:

1. Drive a car

2. Take a train

3. Allow yourself to be strapped into a huge metal container that weighs more than your house and be propelled through space by exploding chemicals while knowing that one of a thousand different human, mechanical or weather problems would cause you to be incinerated a spectacular ball of flame!

If you answered ‘C’ would you mind if we stomped on your luggage and sent it to another city?

A much better approach, I believe, is to watch customers in the context of their environs, going about doing their daily activities and identify common frustrations or problems faced by them. One of the best techniques to observing your customer is to spend a day “walking in their shoes”, or as some companies do, observing them as if doing a video recording or actually doing one, and then carefully analyze them. Honda designed their car trunks by watching many hours of footage of potential customers buying groceries and watching them load it into the trunks of their car.

“Some consumers are seen struggling to get bags into the trunk as the lids keeps closing, others arrange their bags in the trunk to keep them from tipping over, and still others pause to rest the bag on the edge of the trunk as they search their pockets/purses for the keys”

Honda Engineers came up with innovations such as, keyless automatic trunk opening, removal of the trunk “ledge” and making the rear bumper level with the trunk floor, adding grocery netting etcetera, after watching end customers struggle in those videos. The motorists did not tell Honda their trunks needed the desired benefit. Honda engineers lived a part of their car experience by walking in their shoes for a day.

Successful enterprises also determine early on not only a set of benefits they will provide, but which ones they will choose to deny. As I had mentioned last time, Southwest Airline, the most profitable airline in the history of our country, chose earlier on to provide the following benefits³:

1. Flying takes less total travel time than on competing airlines (office-door to office-door)

2. Interaction with Southwest personnel is a more fun and more sincerely personalized flying experience than typical on other airlines

But they chose to deny following benefits:

1. Assigned seating

2. Meals

3. Interline ticketing and baggage

The company then went about their strategy of delivering these benefits by deciding to not use a city’s main airport, choosing instead to fly out of smaller alternate airports which were usually closer to downtown. They decided to fly out of Dallas Lovefield Airport (instead of Midway), or the Oakland or San Jose Airport (instead of SFO) as part of delivering the benefit of less total door-to-door time. I had mentioned that Southwest chose to only have Boeing 737s in their fleet to help reduce the aircraft’s turnaround time (from the time it touches on the runway, to when the same aircraft takes off) to improve the efficiency of the ground crew and the pilots who did not have to deal with different procedures and checklists because all they ever flew were 737s.

Proctor and Gamble is another remarkable company that is acutely in tune with their value delivery systems. Pringles came up with an innovative packaging for the potato chips by focusing on delivering a value proposition that allowed them to be safely transported large distances without crushing the crunchy contents. Note that they did not highlight the freshness as one of the benefits because it would be highly incredulous to think that symmetric and identically shaped chips could be correlated to freshness by any stretch.

1. Delivering Profitable Value, Michael J. Lanning

2. The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams

3. Creating and Leading Market Focused Company: Surviving In a Deregulated Environment, Rollin W. King, Founder & CEO of Southwest Airline, 1970

Innovation

A word with magical significance—to create something new out of a collection of ideas.

Innovation is the life blood of all start-ups. In this context, there is nothing more fulfilling than creating something that solves a specific problem in the day-in-the-life of a customer (or an end user). Vocera has created not just a product, but an entire product category of wearable instant voice communication system. If you pause and think for a moment, there are very few companies that can claim that moniker. We have carved out a very healthy market and serviced it with a system, and a product category, that did not exist before.

To be a leader is hard; a copycat very easy--Apple’s iPhone versus Google’s Android Nexus-One, or Netflix versus Redbox, eBay versus uBid etc. Vocera has shown the hospitals a better way to solve their workflow problem with our unique value proposition. What we need today more than ever before, is more innovation, at a faster pace. We have opened the doors to all our competitors and exposed the workflow management problem in the healthcare space. Now everyone from Cisco, Avaya to Nuance is gunning for those markets and hoping to up-end us. One only had to be present on the HIMSS floor this year to know the extent to which copycats are out for this space.

So what is the recipe for Innovation, you might ask? I have been brewing this in my pot for a long time and here is my secret recipe:

Observation

There must be a backdrop of a problem or a set of problems that one is trying to solve. Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. One of the best ways to innovate is to suspend any prejudgment about a solution and to immerse oneself in observing the problem. Spend a day in the shoes of the life of your end user/customer or just observe them, as if recording a video, and make mental notes of what they do (or don’t do) and play back the scenarios of what might be possible if they had our solution.

Generally speaking, asking customers a direct question as to what problem(s) they face does not result in the same solution that one would have if one simply observed them going about their daily activities. The idea of focus groups which started in the consumer products space decades ago is quite dated now because customers tend to color their answers with their own bias about the solution. It is best to watch and observe them as they go about doing their day-to-day activities (the concept of a-day-in-the-life-of-a-customer) and then visualize them doing the same thing with your new gadget/solution etc. The outcome between those two exercises is usually quite different.

When Southwest Airline (SWA) wanted to improve their fleet’s turn-around time (time between the plane touching the runway to when the same bird takes off), they methodically observed, then analyzed, all the activities that had to happen during that time period. The solution they uncovered was not something that they would have reached had they not watched and analyzed. They decided to standardize their entire fleet on one single type of aircraft (Boeing 737s) instead of a collection of 5 different fleets. By observing their pilots in-situ they realized that most of the elapsed time was being spent because pilots and the crew had to switch to a different aircraft and to get reoriented to the new cockpit and the safety procedures for that class of jets. Since SWA standardized their fleet, it has bested all national carriers with the quickest turn-around time and is the only airlines since 1971 that has NOT had a losing quarter!

Reshaping the Box

When asked about how ‘The Incredible,’ was created, Oscar winning Pixar Director Brad Bird, who was an outsider and just hired at the company, said in an interview, “Give me the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” Some of the best ideas that Brad saw generated were by members of the team that were mal-content because they saw different ways of doing things but didn’t have opportunities to try their ideas out. Pixar had had 6 straight $150M+ blockbusters prior to ‘The Incredibles’ and arguably, had figured out the secret sauce. Yet, Brad was brought in by Steve Jobs to shake things up because he was paranoid that complacency might set in.

Google harnesses a similar restlessness within their engineers by allowing them to devote a percentage of their time to pursuing ideas that are of no immediate import to the projects they are on. Further, the notion of quick prototyping-and-testing is very prevalent within the Googleplex. The idea being, that especially when it comes to software, it is better to prototype quickly and test the idea with the target base than to design it fully before launching it. A lot of their search engine algorithm improvements get beta tested, in-situ, on production servers with a high dose of diagnostic monitoring and if the feature/change does not bear expected results, it is simply turned off.

Serendipity

Mishaps are the mother of invention. We all know of the story behind Pepsi (which was accidentally created in search for a cure for dyspepsia), Splenda (originally intended to be an insecticide), or two of 3M’s most successful products, the Scotch-Tape and the Post-It Notes which were both serendipitously stumbled upon when the scientists were pursuing other research.

The main point here is that to stumble upon something interesting, one has to be trying ideas in pursuit of something and be in a state of alertness because we’re thinking about solving a problem. So when Spencer Silver, a 3M scientist in search of a super strong adhesive accidentally developed a super weak adhesive, his partner in crime, who was in the singing choir at St. Paul’s North Presbyterian Church and had been looking for easy bookmarks for his song book, immediately connected the dots and thought of creating what are now the Post-It Notes.

Serendipity doesn’t happen to those who are complacent, but has to be brought about by continuing to be restless.

Innovation at Vocera

Vocerans have all the ingredients--a dash of Observation, a measure of restlessness and a healthy dose of Serendipidity, together these have morphed into some unique new approaches to solving unique new problems faced by our customer base:

· Department based inner circle – an idea that was developed by observing the data patterns collected from many customer sites about calling trends.

· B1000A microphone box design - totally serendipitous. When we left the glue to cure overnight, instead of gluing the foam to the cavity, it glued the entire mic-box to the plastic assembly.

· Whistler ANR - leveraging the design control we have on our mechanical and hardware components to optimize the confluence of mechanical, hardware and firmware design.

· TCP Genie - a unique and unconventional twist to the conventional wisdom of only using UDP for audio streaming in VoIP because the TCP latency for Genie interaction was not noteworthy.

· Staff Assignment application created by Dave Shively visiting several hospitals and spending hours observing activities around a Nurse’s station.

There are many “malcontent” Vocerans who continue to work on ideas such as: using our badges to “automagically” generate WiFi coverage heat maps; CAFI to better understand Vocera health metric; VOS (voice metrics) to measure users voice experience; or the new Care Coordination application