Innovation feeder

The musings of a strategic geek

After an uneventful career in advertising working on various yellow phone directories, tampons and telcos in the mainstream and digital planning space at Clemenger & TBWA as a Disruption Planner, Jen started working freelance for innovation companies doing brand planning, trend research & new product development sort of stuff which she likes very much. Jen has pretty much been working as a social trends / innovation freelancer since 2004. She co-authored a global innovation report with Pophouse & STW and has worked together with a number of innovation companies such as social trend forecasters Pophouse & Whatif The Innovation Company. She also works on stuff with Dr Amantha Imber who is Chief Inventiologist at Inventium but that’s usually just for fun, or in the vain hope that one of their ideas will be an absolute stormer and change their lives forever. They’re still waiting.

Jen [aka Tempadventure Shamroy] ran a street art gallery in Second Life until it became apparent that 10c per virtual canvas was never going to make enough to sustain even a virtual existence, she subsequently left to return to the First Life. She also helped set up a social venture in Surry Hills called Table for 20 with her mate Michael which has just expanded to include a new bar upstairs called Sticky and a monthly communal dinner for local Surry Hills peeps who’ve had a trot of bad luck.

She takes photographs of street art around the world in her travels & sells a lot of it to people who must think she is a real photographer.

Jen’s particularly passionate about innovation because she loves to see a cracker idea get off the ground and onto the shelf, or into the trolley or wherever else good ideas go to be sold. What’s more, she believes anyone can be innovative with the right stimulus, the right habits and the right tools. Although there is no definitive way to innovate successfully (otherwise let’s face it, we’d all be rich & living in the Cayman Islands), there are a bunch of easy ways to become more innovative in your approach.

It makes sense that to be truly innovative, we have to force ourselves to look at the world differently. New perspectives and new interpretations are the enemy of beige . . and let’s face it, a good idea is a good idea irrespective of where it’s from or what it’s for.

So the best way to keep a truly open mind is to look for great ideas anywhere you can find them and stuff your brain like a hungry dog. Confuscious say; creative input needs no reason, it just needs regularity.

Jen also believes genuine business innovation must always be considered within a commercial context. What will this innovation do for your business? How will it make you money? Will it help you liberate cash? Because an idea is only really a good idea if it has a commercial reality, otherwise let’s face it, it’s just an idea and there are no shortage of those around.

She writes Innovation Feeder and posts a few other equally un-read blogs. Jen is also particularly interested in emerging media, new technologies, virtual worlds and spends a significant amount of time at Paramatta library cross tabulating census data. In her spare time she enjoys photography & street art, online gaming, anything from the Helvetica font family and writing in the third person. She dislikes unfiltered social contact, work meetings and people who insist on calculating their portion of a shared bill.

She lives and works from home in Surry Hills Sydney with her husband and their angry puppy.

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n :: jen stumbles

m :: +61 407 866 611

e :: jenstumbles@eftel.net.au

l :: sydney