Forgive the title, but I guess I was feeling a bit inspired by the IBM commercials that depict companies deciding they need to innovate more but having really poor ways of going about it. That's a bit how I feel at the moment, likely due to a long day of walking the streets and buildings of Chicago. One way to get inspired for innovation is to look for innovative ideas around you. Here are a couple things I encountered today that I found particularly interesting, perhaps not necessarily innovative.

foodlife - foodlife is a set of restaurants that are gated off from the rest of the stores at Water Tower, a massive shopping center on the Magnificent Mile. They market themselves as "not a food court" and offer a variety of food styles at counters spread around the middle - Chinese, pasta, pizza, Tex-Mex, Thai, and one called "Comfort Food" are among the options. When you are seated, you are given a magnetic swipe card. When you get a food from one of the various counters, you give them your swipe card rather than paying. Once you are done eating, you leave and have your cards read to determine your amount due. This could be potentially innovative if all of the main dishes you could order did not cost as much as a whole serving. They try to inspire you to try all sorts of different foods, but even trying two would likely run you over $15 and get you tons of leftovers. In other words, it's a food court that is marketed to not be a food court. While I give the marketing a good grade, they didn't fool me. The only benefit is for people to avoid having to pay every single food court restaurant individually.

iPod skin kiosk - Since I do not frequent shopping malls more than a few times a year, it is possible I just missed this one before now. While wandering around, we came across a kiosk selling skins for iPods of all sorts - Nanos, Videos, Touches, everything. Not counting the likely high rent costs, this was a pretty good implementation of an impulse purchase offering. The packaging was completely white with the exception of the skin to avoid distracting from the design. I can't imagine the production and packaging costs are very high which means they probably have pretty high margins for capitalizing on the success of another company's product. The most interesting thing though? While paying for my impulse purchases (yes, I couldn't resist giving my iPod a new look), I noticed an IM window that seemed to be a discussion with other iPod skin kiosks at other malls in the Chicago area. There were congratulations being passed back and forth, but I could not tell what they were for. Kiosk work is pretty lonely from the few people I have known who have done it, so making IM available to at least communicate with other locations could be both motivating and a potentially prevent boredom.

In the end though, marketing is really what took these two seemingly obvious ideas and turned them into something immensely popular. Even the glorified food court was extremely busy well after 1:30 in the afternoon. Isn't that what IBM is trying to do with regard to innovation? Instead of talking about how to innovate, the trick is to just do it. Truly innovative ideas come from the people in the trenches whether they know they are being creative or not. One of the best ways I have found to get the process going is to ask a simple question: "What's the biggest headache of your job these days?" A simple question that can lead to a lot of discussion and eventually some creative IT-driven solutions.