Read this: Hot Tub Technology

Hot Tub Technology

This is a gem of an innovation story. Dr Mark Barrett's idea is simple, elegant, understandable and very, very doable. It's based on a novel view of existing infrastructure, there's a clear business case and, cannily, Dr Barrett has left ample room for other people to refine the implementation plan, thereby building an active constituency for the scheme's promotion.

What is it? Well, Dr Barrett wants to switch your immersion heater on when there's excess capacity in the electricity grid. The UK's preinstalled network of 19 million heaters can then act as storage devices for power generated by "bursty" renewables such as wind and wave. And with plans to roll out smart meters across the UK gathering momentum, now's the time to make this innovation.

Read David Strahan's excellent article for the facts and figures.

Innovation threat, innovation fatigue

from: Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, 2004

"Employees must in addition worry about the consequences of the pressure put on companies to introduce new and better products into the market place. For long stretches of history, the life cycles of goods and services were longer than those of the human beings who produced and consumed them. In Japan, the kimono and jinbaori went unchanged for 400 years. In China, people were wearing in the eighteenth century exactly what their ancestors had worn in the sixteenth. Between 1300 and 1600, the design of ploughs did not alter across northern Europe - a stability that must have given artisans and workers a reassuring sense that their businesses would outlive them. But product life cycles have sharply accelerated since the middle of the nineteenth century - destroying workers' confidence in the long-term integrity of their careers.

"Rapid defeats at the hands of new products and services are to be found in almost every area of the economy: canals after the invention of the railway, passenger liners after the introduction of the jet engine, horses after the development of the car, typewriters after the birth of the personal computer.

"The market's passion for change has a propensity to involve companies in product development costs so high that their very survival can depend on the successful launch of a single item. Companies can resemble palpitating gamblers who, instead of being allowed to retreat cautiously after a good run, are continually forced at gunpoint to risk their assets and the livelihoods of their employees on the outcome of a few wagers or even a single bet, as a result either amasssing vast but precarious riches or self-destructing."