During the NPDS conference I spent some time with Susanna Bill. I met her last year when she was the Head of Innovation at Sony-Ericsson. This year she was giving an inspiring presentation representing a Swedish innovation management company called Googol. What is Googol? This is interesting.

Googol is a Swedish innovation services and corporate venturing firm, commercialising business opportunities. The name is not explained on their website, but the company was founded in 1999, when Google is about 6 months old and just moving out of Susan Wojcicki's garage. Either there was someone in that garage who had connections to Sweden, or then this is pure coincidence. Nevertheless intriguing.

Susanna had two examples  in her presentation that stuck with me. First, Gunde Svan, a Swedish olympic gold metalist in cross-country skiing. He came up with the idea to ski by using only one stick. He claimed it gave him more speed. He dared to think outside of the box, and do things in a whole different - even ridiculous looking - way . He called it "unipole". Perhaps I am so drawn to this example, as Finns invented the Nordic walking which is basically skiing without any skis at all, and looks quite funny.

The other example is more recent: Michael Phelps, the winner of about everything there is to win in swimming and a multi-millionaire is going to step outside of his comfort zone and try running. That's the spirit!

Susanna also mentioned a fantastic idea that I already Tweeted out: if you're planning an organization change in a company, get everyone involved by organizing an architectural competition for the company "house". You may get fantastic surprising ideas for what the new "house" should look like and function. Or, in the worst case, at least you will have involved everyone in the process which is likely to reduce the change resistance.

She also reminded of  the good example in Gary Hamel's The Furure of Management: why does every company in the world have a bureacratic travel policy for approving travels to keep the travel cost down, why don't companies simply post everyone's travel expenditure publicly in the intranet and let peer review do the trick. That's a really good question.