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Idea 50: Trash, Trash and again Trash

Problem:

Trash – a problem that many cities know. Sometimes, the regular schedule of city cleaners is not congruent to the amount of trash that is produced by the citizens or that trash collectors can hold. The consequence: mountains of trash piling up. Especially in a city that lives of tourism this could be a tremendous setback.

Solution:

Citizens oftentimes care about their city and want to help sustain it. Thus, giving citizens a platform where they can contribute to the “cleaning” process, might offer great value. This platform could come in form of an App that allows people to indicate “mountains of trash” that were accumulated and do not fall into the regular cleaning schedule of the city. The city then could deploy certain cleaning trucks that take care of the problem in “real-time.”

 

Idea 49: Smart Street Lights

Problems:

Advertising space – something that multinational companies as well as political parties pay millions for; especially in metropolitan cities worldwide.

Solution:

Street lights are already being used by, usually individuals but also political parties for their campaigns, as an easy “advertising space.” However, combing this “habit” of using street lights as an advertising space with the technology of  HD curved screens and mobile internet, one could leverage this already existing space to the maximum by including these technologies into the actual street light, thus creating a 2.0 version of the street lights we know today. These screens could also  be touch sensitive as to permit people to interact with the messages they are being shown. These screens could be powered by the same power line that powers the actual street light, and be distributed around the city to obtain maximum coverage of a particular message. Another usage, other than advertising, would be the overall spread of a generally important message, such as earthquake warnings or other things that could harm the population of a city equally.

Idea 47: eBay from another Side

Problem:

Single households oftentimes cannot take advantage of “bulk buying” and thus the advantages of companies that are focusing on economies of scale. Especially when talking about more expensive items, such as solar panels, single households, although understanding the benefits of such products, do not have the purchasing power and capital that is required  to reap the benefits of such technologies.

Solution:

Thinking about the power of technology to bring people together through creating online communities, and combining this power with the advantages of webpages such as eBay, a solution to the previously mentioned problem could focus on the creation of an online platform that offers single households the space to “gather” around a certain product with the goal to create a higher order of single units of that particular product.  In the end, the trick is that this community of consumers would put up their order, lets say 5000 solar panels distributed in Germany, for auction to further reduce the price for a single unit based on transparent competition among the companies that are part of the auction. Payment methods and other aspects need to be taken into consideration and still thought about, but the idea is to give more purchasing power to single households through the benefits of bulk buying and transparent competition among businesses based on an elevated purchases of the same product units.

 

Idea 46: Translation through Comparision

Problem:

Let it be Chinese, Japanese, English, German, Russian or Spanish – translating can be a time-consuming activity, especially when the alphabets are different and one does not have a dictionary at hand.

Solution:

When considering that any word, any sentence or any phrase can be defined as a “symbol,” one might be able to create a system that translates through comparing “symbols” with a given database. For example: the sentence “I like to play tennis” is not “4 english words including a “subject” and “predicate” etc but a symbol/picture  consisting of lines and dots. It would work like “face recognition” but with words and allow instant translation using a smart phone.

Idea 44: Waterfall Turbines

Problem:
Renewable energies open the gateway to clean and sustainable energy production. In some cases already existing kinetic energy is used and turned into electricity, for example in water turbines. A question connected to this example is where this constant flow of water exists and how we can use it.

Solution:
Although water turbines are already used in many different settings, one of the places that might open up room for future innovation focuses on waterfalls. Waterfalls would offer a lifelong stream of energy if we would know how to capture it. Due to its vertical flow, multiple turbines could take advantage of the same water stream at different heights. There are several problems with this idea, but one of them surely is not the number of capable engineers in the world to think about it.

Idea 43: Social Impact Rating

Problem:

With great power comes great responsiblity. However, often times many companies only talk about corporate social responsiblity when the profit and loss statement allows for it or once they have figured out that the CSR wagon is one they have to jump on, as it is the trendy thing to do.

Solution:

An objective rating body that analyzes the CSR focus and doings of a company in a transparent way might be a step into the right direction. Just like universities are rated in accordance to their perceived quality, companies could be rated on their social impact in the world or small communities. Besides the actual process behind rating the companies, reaching critical awareness about these rating among customers of these companies is vital to the perceived importance of the rating by the companies.

 

Idea 18: Positive News

Problem:

Turning on the news becomes more and more depressing. Tabloid journalism, bad reporting, and most of the times stories about what is wrong with this world. If it is a slow news day without deaths, catastrophes, cases of corruption and poverty, one might be confronted with wiener dog races and talking squirrels. Sometimes, it is no wonder why society is run by fear-driven individuals that have distorted perceptions of reality.

Solution:

Similar to what positive psychology tries to implement in the world of medicine, a news organization solely focused on “what is right” with this world might be something that is needed to at least counter balance all this negativity that people are surrounded by on the daily basis. Obviously there are many problems in this world, however only reporting on the negatives merely creates problem focused mindsets, instead of solution based ones.

Like a smile, positivity is contagious. Therefore by reporting goods deeds or positive news, people might also adopt this kind of behavior. It is time for “Positive News” – life is too short to be surrounded only by negativity.

Idea 17: How to write an Email

Problem:

Emails are these days the main and quickest way to get and stay in touch with different stakeholders in a company; especially when talking about multinationals that communicate across time zones, cultures and business etiquettes. However, the problem with emails or “text” in general is that people interpret messages and read between the lines to force the discovery of hidden “tone” and subliminal messages from their own perspectives, a tone they would be able to pick up on when actually talking to a person over the phone or face to face. This is augmented by the fact that people often don’t take much care in composing an email, as usually it is used as a tool to get a message across as the quickest way possible to “solve” the problem of having to communicate with another stakeholder. In the end, what counts more is the action of “sending the email” and not the actual contend. As a result, many people might find themselves in the situation of having read an email and either getting upset after it as they cannot understand “HOW the hell” another stakeholder could have written it that way (“in that tone of voice, how can s/he??”) or entering a vicious circle of misunderstandings as they have “read” the email in a different way than it should have been read (“that´s not what I meant; what I meant was…”).

Solution:

A standard around writing emails should be created, which then later can be taught to all stakeholders of a company to increase efficiency and decrease misunderstandings when communicating across different spheres using emails. The goal would be to create a common way of communication that only serves one purpose: to transmit information from one stakeholder to another, and nothing more. Leave information to emails and opinions and emotions to phone calls and face to face interactions.

Idea 16: Lexicon/One-Stop-Shop for Company Information

Problem:

An argument can be made about the difficulties of actually getting a job vs finding the right job that fits one´s profile and interests. In addition, oftentimes people don’t truly understand the job market and have no idea about all the companies that are actually out there that could possibly be looking for what they have to offer.

However, even if figured out what company one would like to work for, many people still lack the knowledge of what the company is actually about as its requires going through the company’s website, which many people simply don’t do.

Solution:

The job market and all the information within it need to be organized in a similar way as Google organizes the internet; in other words, a one-stop-shop for all “job” related information. People use lexicons to define certain words in a certain alphabetical order. Taking this as a base, an online platform could be developed that gives one all necessary information on for example a particular company. For example, if one looks for McKinsey one would get information on:

• Company history
• What it looks for in a candidate
• Average recruitment requirements
• Current employees working in one´s geographical proximity through using LinkedIn for example
• Events information
• Information on McKinsey interviews and the recruitment process
• Information on career progressions
• Negative reviews about working at McKinsey
• Etc

In addition, the platform could be used to search for companies not only by their name but also by industry (top 10 consulting companies in one´s region focused on marketing for example), and skills (language skills, education, public speaking etc) among other parameters, as many people simply dont know all the companies that exist. For that the user might have to create a certain profile based on the vocabulary provided by the platform to describe oneself to make this possible. But overall, the idea would be to create a one-stop-shop for all job related information regarding companies that facilitates information on what companies exist and what they are about in an easy and accessible way (similar to what investopedia does with finance but for the entire market of all companies).