Not true. Companies in old-line industries — little brand names like Goodyear, which reaped $21 billion in net sales last year;  Brown Brothers Harriman, the country’s oldest and largest private bank; Whirlpool, the appliance conglomerate behind the Whirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air and Maytag brands; and the Mayo Clinic, the 150-year-old hospital to the stars – know a little something about innovation too. Or they probably wouldn’t still be around.

Executives at those companies tasked with keeping them stocked with new ideas for products and services were on hand in Boston Tuesday at an Imaginatik-sponsored event to talk about how they do what they do. Here were six things I learned.

1: Make innovation a priority and put someone in charge of it.

No, you don’t have to dub this person a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), but you’ve got to give him or her access to the top and the authority to be heard across all business units. A couple speakers invoked the name of Louis Gerstner, the former IBM CEO credited with turning that company around.

When Gerstner came into IBM at the height of the dot.com boom, he wondered why IBM hadn’t come up with web servers or search engines. “When they looked inside IBM labs, it turns out it had but [those ideas] hadn’t been surfaced,” said James Euchner, VP of Global Innovation for Goodyear, Akron, Ohio.

And given the ratio of failures to successes in any business, innovators should be allowed to try things and fail, said Whirlpool’s Global Director of Innovation Moises Norena. Lessons learned from failures, after all, can be invaluable.

2: Think outside the box

Who could have predicted that a freezer manufacturer should also be in the garage organizer business? But that’s what Whirlpool figured out.

“If you want to sell appliances that go in the garage, you probably need to help [people] clean that garage out first,” said Moises Norena, global director of innovation for Whirlpool, Benton Harbor, Mich. And thus,  Whirlpool’s Gladiator Garageworks line of storage organizers was born.

New York-based Brown Brothers Harriman has done well in banking, where lending money has worked pretty much the same way for the last thousand years. “We don’t need to reinvent that wheel, but we always want new services for our clients,” said Philip Swisher, SVP of innovation for the 200-year-old private bank, which has $3 trillion in assets under custody.

Sure, $3 trillion is a lot, but BBH competitor State Street Bank is ten times bigger; so Swisher’s always on the lookout for new services.

He encourages all of the company’s 5,000 employees to pitch ideas and use Intuit’s Brainstorm cloud platform for global collaboration. “All employees have access — it has no permissions by design,” he said.

3: Research, research, research

When most people go to the doctor, they want to see the doctor — or that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. But in most cases, they don’t really need to see a doctor, said Lorna Ross, design manager and creative lead for the Mayo Clinic’s Center of Innovation in Rochester, Minn.

The center gathered a whole primary care team — nurses, pharmacists, a resident — to review patients every day and determine the best course of action for each. It turns out, that only 6 percent of those patients really needed a doctor. That’s admittedly a “controversial” finding for an organization that sees itself a patient care provider.  GigaOM’s Ki Mae Heussner recently detailed another medical practice with a similar holistic approach.

But, if you think about it, most people go to the doctor about a problem and if that problem can be addressed by a nurse, physician’s assistant, pharmacist, most patients are happy. Better evaluation of the patient up front can ease the primary care bottleneck and cut costs, Ross said.

4: Know how to deal with people, not just technology

It may sound creepy but successful innovators need to be social engineers. “You have to know your corporate culture to affect change,” said  BBH’s Swisher. “You can’t ‘train’ an executive, but you can ‘brief’ one. I wear a suit every day because if I showed up in jeans and spiky hair no one would take me seriously and I don’t want to provoke the immune response.”

BBH has remained private and has been remarkably stable since Brown Brothers merged with Harriman Brothers in 1931 — “we have an 80-year track record of no M&A,” Swisher said proudly. Initiating change in a way that doesn’t capsize that stable boat is his goal.

5: But technology is important too

Trends like the internet of Things (IoT) and the maker movement are of keen interest to both Whirlpool and Goodyear, for example. While Norena said he doesn’t see huge demand from customers wanting program their washing machines from their iPads, he does see other opportunities — Whirlpool already has a smartgrid effort, for example. But he is intrigued by the notion of forging a connection between the food you’re cooking and the device you use to cook it.

“What if you have a branded product you put in the microwave which reads the instructions — maybe it scans a code on the popcorn bag so it knows the size and type of corn and pops it optimally?” he asked.

Euchner said companies have to sort out business models associated with the information generated in the IoT scenario, not just on creating more data. “There needs to be enough value for everyone in the ecosystem,” he said.  For example, while tire sensors may be great for monitoring tire pressure and issuing alerts when the tires wear out. but who gets those alerts? The driver?  The car dealer? The manufacturer? If the alert goes to the auto dealership, the car may end up with non-Goodyear tires. Maybe not an earth shaker for the driver, but certainly not good for Goodyear.

6: Be creative but careful

It’s good to improve existing products, but be careful of messing with success.  Norena and I discussed the popular Kitchen-Aid countertop mixer (pictured above left.) I don’t use mine as much as I should be cause it’s big and heavy and dragging it out of the cupboard is a pain even though it does the job better and more uniformly than my dinky hand-held mixer. Norena agreed but said it would be foolhardy to mess with something with so iconic.

Mayo Clinic photo courtesy of  Flickr user -Tripp-

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Tendril, which makes software and devices to connect utilities and consumers via the smart grid, announced a collaboration on Monday morning to work with appliance giant Whirlpool on smart appliances. Tendril says it will provide the back-end communications infrastructure that will connect Whirlpool’s digital appliances — like refrigerators, dishwashers and laundry machines — to utilities.

Tendril says “as many as one million appliances will be smart grid-enabled,” through the collaboration. The partnership is clearly a win for Tendril, however Tendril has made similar announcements with well-known partners like GE (who also made an equity investment in the company) and I haven’t seen many products yet come out of the GE deal (GE ended up launching its own energy management tools).

At the same time, home energy startup Control4 says this morning it has a new deal to provide its home energy gear and service to Nevada utility NV Energy. Control4 says NV Energy will provide at least 20,000 of Control4′s home energy devices and software to its customers this year. In the utility world, 20,000 home energy devices is a sizable deployment, and Control4 called the deal “the first true rollout — not a pilot — of customer-driven demand response using home area network technologies.”

NV Energy will use Control4′s tools to do residential demand response, which is basically asking customers to turn down their energy in various ways when the utility wants to more tightly manage the grid’s power use. In exchange for turning down their energy use, customers who participate in the demand response programs can get rebates and lower power rates.

These two deals represent a maturing of the home energy management market and a way for startups like Tendril and Control4 to make some real headway. Both appliance makers and utilities move at notoriously slow paces, so these markets have taken years to unfold.

At the same time service providers, like telcos, have finally taken notice of the home energy market, too. Verizon launched a pilot program this month — the first of its kind in the U.S. — that offers home automation and energy management services via a company called 4Home, which was bought by Motorola at the end of last year. AT&T also bought a company called Xanboo last year that offers similar home automation services.

Consumer electronics companies are also slowly moving into the market in 2011. Belkin has been at the forefront of the energy-efficient home device movement, launching its Conserve brand and buying a startup called Zensi.

Is the market for home energy management tools on the path to hit Pike Research’s prediction that by 2015, 28 million homeowners around the world will be using some kind of high-tech tool to manage their energy use? Pike also says that the smart appliance market will hit $26.1 billion by 2019, with some 118 million smart devices deployed to make up about 8 percent of the world’s market. 2011 will be a crucial year that will help determine these figures.

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That’s not a huge number, but it’s pretty good compared to no growth at all over the past decade or so of hype about appliances that can measure and control their own energy use and communicate with homeowners and utilities. But today, a confluence of rising electricity prices, massive smart meter deployments and coordination of technology standards for linking utilities and their customers should help make smart appliances an integral part of smart grid deployments in the coming years.

That’s because smart appliances represent one of the simplest, fastest way to curb home energy use, report author Bob Gohn writes. It’s relatively simple to make a refrigerator defrost at night, or ask a clothes dryer to cut down on natural gas heating to shave peak power demands. What’s missing is a clear business strategy to bring them to market — and education of consumers who are expected to buy them.

Right now there are dozens of utility pilots testing out smart appliances. General Electric, a huge player in appliances and smart grid products, is already rolling out a whole-home energy strategy and appliances like smart water heaters, and Whirlpool has promised to bring 1 million smart clothes dryers to market by next year. Panasonic has also set its sights on linking smart appliances to home energy management systems, as has Samsung.

Still, Pike predicts that early market growth will be slow, with only about $2.2 billion in sales by 2013 and $6.3 billion by 2015. That’s compared to a 2009 global appliance market of some $230 billion.

But as utilities, manufacturers and regulators settle on technical standards for linking appliances and the smart grid, those sales will climb quickly through the second half of the decade, the report predicts. That standards work is already underway, and Pike predicts that the clear winners in the field will be ZigBee for wireless communications and HomePlug Green PHY for powerline communications.

Once they’re widely adopted, most appliance makers will begin to embed those technologies in most of their product lines, the report predicts. Pike also notes that many utilities will want full control of smart appliances in the field — but that they will also need to educate consumers on how to interact with, or perhaps override, that utility control.

As for concerns over home energy data security and privacy, Pike predicts that work by smart grid entrants like Cisco, IBM and Oracle will help resolve those concerns. Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, remains a trickier and more complicated task for utilities, regulators and customers to hash out.

As for which appliances will go “smart” first, Pike predicts they’ll be energy-hungry devices like refrigerators, water heaters, and washers and dryers. Other appliances such as dishwashers and ovens will follow.

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Image courtesy of Bosch Home Appliances via Creative Commons license.

Netflix has posted job listings for Android developers in the past few months, including Android developers and an Android “video playback expert.” Now the company is hiring a Manager for Instant Streaming to mobile devices, which lists experience with Android and/or iOS as a “big plus.”

Of course, it’s no big surprise that Netflix wants to be on every consumer electronics device, and is working to get there. The company’s future is in streaming, and it expects to stream to more than 100 connected devices by the end of the year. But despite being embedded on various TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, TiVo DVRs, Roku broadband set-top boxes and Apple iOS devices, Netflix has yet to build a significant foothold in Android devices.

But it’s becoming tough to ignore Android’s potential due to its massive growth over the past year, with sales of Android devices outpacing Apple iPhone sales. And with a growing number of Android tablets set to be released, it’s even more important for Netflix to tap that user base.

One potential stumbling block for Netflix in approaching the Android marketplace, however, is the extreme fragmentation among carriers and handset makers, which can make it a difficult platform to develop for. Not all Android devices are standardized on the same OS — different CE makers are at various levels of rolling out the most recent version of Android, and different carriers have different rules about capabilities that are available on their networks. All of this means that developers looking to build for Android aren’t just building for one version of the OS, but several.

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Folders in the Bookmarks Bar

While it may be simple to add single bookmarks to the Bookmarks Bar, it may not be obvious that it can handle folders of bookmarks as well. Right-clicking on the bar brings up a tiny context menu containing only one item, New Folder. Choosing this option brings up the same box you get when you add a new bookmark to the bar — with the text box for naming the folder.

Once you’ve typed in the name for your folder, what looks like a regular bookmark is added to the bar, with the addition of a downward-pointing arrow to the right. At the moment, clicking on it brings up a menu with just the word ‘empty’. To add new bookmarks to the folder, all you have to do is drag existing bookmarks on top of the folder name and they’ll automatically be added to the folder. You can also add new bookmarks when you create them by choosing the folder under the dropdown menu.

Bookmark folders aren’t just handy for organizing your web addresses; they can also be used as a convenience tool. Once you have some bookmarks added to your folder, clicking on the folder name opens a menu with the bookmark names listed. At the bottom of this list is the option ‘Open in Tabs’. Clicking this automatically opens up a new tab for each of the bookmarks in the folder and navigates to them for you. This could be useful if you have a list of resources you use regularly for something you’re writing, for example. You can also access this tabs feature by simply ⌘-clicking on the folder name.

The Activity Window

For most, the Activity window (⌥⌘A) will be useless for day to day browsing, but it can be convenient to have at times. For instance, if a page is failing to load, opening up the Activity window will show you a list of resources on the page and highlight the ones which are throwing up errors.

You can also use it for opening up parts of webpages (JavaScript, CSS, QuickTime files, etc.) in their own window. If you were a budding web developer, for example, and you wanted some example of CSS from existing websites, you can use the Activity window to open up the CSS of a page. Just open up the window, and click the fly-out triangle for the site you’re browsing. Scroll through the list until you find the .css file, then double-click to open it up in its own Safari window for inspection. This works for any file on a webpage.

Another way the window comes in handy is as a quick and dirty way to download YouTube videos. While you can get specialized applications for this, the Activity window lets you do it right from Safari. Navigate to a YouTube video page, then open the window. The file you’re looking for contains ‘videoplayback’ in the URL, and is most likely the largest file on the page. You can download the video by selecting this file and ⌥-double-clicking. This proceeds to download the file. It’ll come down as a .flv, but it’s fine to play in QuickTime as long as you have Perian installed. You can then use QuickTime 7 Pro or QuickTime X to export the video in a more suitable format such as MP4.

Dragging in Files

Safari, like many Mac applications, supports dragging in files from the Finder or other applications such as iPhoto. If you just drag a file into a regular browser window, however, all it will do is display the file in a Safari window. The useful part comes when a website is asking for you to upload a file. Instead of clicking ‘Choose File’, you can drag the file you want to use and drop it directly on the button. A small green plus sign will appear next to your cursor, and the file is selected, no matter how deeply nested it is on your hard drive. This is a small thing, but it can save a lot of time if you have a file open in the Finder already before you upload it to a website.

Dragging Tabs and Favicons

While we’re on the subject of drag and drop, let me explain what you can do by dragging a tab or favicon (the small graphic to the left of the URL in the address bar). If you drag a tab by its name and move it to the left or right on the tab bar, the bar is reorganized. Not very exciting. But drag the tab away from the bar, and it changes into a tiny preview of the page it’s currently showing. When you let go, the image expands into a whole new window and removes the page from the tabs of the previous one. You can also do this the opposite way; drag a tab into the tab bar of a different window and it will be added to the second window and removed from the first.

You can do all of this when dragging the favicon of a page, except for creating a new window. If you drop the favicon onto an open tab, the page is replaced with the one you dragged over. You can create a new tab with the page by dropping its favicon on the tab bar, to the right of the already open tabs.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned something from this, and if you know of something handy, post it below in the comments!

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Google, which is leading a summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday focused on consumers and energy information called “Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use,” made the letter public on Sunday night. That event is being co-sponsored by The Climate Group and features speakers like Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, and Charlene Begley, president and CEO of GE Home & Business Solutions. (We’ll be highlighting this theme at our Green:Net conference on April 29 in San Francisco).

The letter has been signed by various groups that have been promoting the idea that consumers should have open access to home energy information, including: consumer electronics manufacturers Best Buy and Whirlpool; broadband service providers AT&T, Verizon and Comcast; energy information vendors eMeter, EnergyHub and Tendril; venture firms Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins; and research groups Environmental Defense Fund and The Climate Group.

Google, which seems to be spearheading the effort, has been particular outspoken about setting energy information free. Google has also been supporting policies in California state that would require the state’s big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. And it’s developed the energy information management tool PowerMeter.

The companies have a vested interest in selling gadgets and services based off of energy information to consumers and utilities, but if more aggressive policies and incentives are implemented the energy savings could be substantial. The letter says:

[I]f all U.S. households saved 15 percent on their energy use by 2020, for example, the greenhouse gas savings would be equivalent to taking 35 million cars off the road and would save consumers $46 billion on their energy bills, or $360 per customer each year.

Google’s official blog post can be found here.

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While we’re not too optimistic that the U.S. will be able to pass climate change legislation before Copenhagen, we’re heartened to hear that technology companies and innovators will be actively working to have their voices heard at the event. As VantagePoint Venture Partners CEO and Managing Partner Alan Salzman put it this summer, the Silicon Valley contingent can help bring “mundane Silicon Valley activities front and center,” and represent the innovation arm within the private energy sector for an international policy audience that doesn’t necessarily think about the business community with the same degree of granularity.

U.S. smart grid companies could also learn something on the trip. Denmark currently generates the equivalent of about 20 percent of its electricity from wind (though the country exports a lot of that) and has built one of the world’s most intelligent grids to be able to manage such a large clean power load.

The country is a lot smaller than the U.S., so has been able to move more quickly and with better national coordination. Denmark is also investing heavily in electric vehicles — for example, the government is working in an alliance with IBM and others to build out smart charging infrastructure for plug-in vehicles, and state-controlled DONG Energy has a partnership with Better Place.

Startups in particular that are developing cutting edge technology could find like minds in the country. A technology that might be too next-gen for some slower-moving U.S. utilities, could find a home at a faster moving utility like DONG Energy. The Smart Grid Green Initiative includes a variety of startups, including Tendril, Ice Energy and eMeter.

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Whirlpool has already pledged to be able to connect all of its appliances to the smart grid by 2015, but this latest production pledge suggests the company is seeking to move even more quickly. As the Wall Street Journal points out, 1 million dryers in 2011 will account for a quarter of Whirlpool’s expected production. GE plans to soon start selling a smart water heater that can reduce energy consumption by half compared to a traditional heat pump.

Like other smart appliances, Whirlpool’s smart dryers will react to a signal from the utility’s smart grid that will tell it to power down during times of peak energy use (right after work when everyone comes home, for example, or during a mid-summer day when air conditioning is on full blast) in exchange for a lower monthly energy bill. Whirlpool says the savings from the smart dryer (if your utility has variable pricing) would be on the order of $20-$40 per year.

With such modest savings, Whirlpool won’t be able to make those dryers too much more expensive than non-smart dryers if it wants to sell a lot of them. The Wall Street Journal notes that smart appliances “aren’t expected to be priced much higher than regular EnergyStar products.”

A company like Whirlpool is interested in smart appliances for a few reasons. First, any excuse to convince consumers to buy new products in this economy is being embraced by appliance makers. Second, adding digital intelligence and using low-cost chips and cheap wireless or powerline connections won’t be that expensive for appliance makers.

But a bigger draw is that the smart grid is finally getting significant attention and funding from the federal government — and smart appliances will play an important role in that buildout. Whirlpool says that the development of smart grid standards for the pricing signal that utilities will send to smart appliances (see our 5 Next Steps for Smart Grid Standards) is playing a major role in its aggressive commercialization timetable. Expect to see more announcements from big manufacturers that are starting to feel more comfortable with this technology as the standards mature.

At the end of the day, most consumers won’t want to play an active role in managing the energy consumption of their appliances, so machines and software that will do the job for them will be a necessity.

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