When we first started Calidascope our goal was to do our best to find interesting clients, doing interesting things, who wanted to shake up the status quo and get the attention of their market (not matter the size of their budget). Over the last 6 years we’ve had incredible fun on these projects.

FOR EXAMPLE – THE LEGO MOVIE AND LANSER’S ON MAIN

We designed and delivered Lego Mini-figures to Fresh, Gareth Cliff, Banong Matheba, Lee-Roy Right and Caspar Lee for the launch of the Lego Movie on DVD.

We’ve worked with Lanser’s on Main (in Bryanston). We used TripAdvisor as the bench mark when Lanser’s first opened their doors. If you’ve not been, it’s guaranteed to be an experience you’ll remember. In 18 months Lanser’s on Main has gone from 48th on TripAdvisor, all the way to Number 1. Definitely Bryanston’s favourite Bistro

KWANU – WESTVILLE’s FIRST DEDICATED CLICK AND COLLECT SUPERMARKET

And most recently, we’ve been involved in the launch of Kwanu. A dedicated click and collect online supermarket located in Westville, Durban.

Kwanu is doing some interesting things in the world of online grocery shopping:

Located in Westville, as a Click and Collect service, they’re not focussing on national. In the words of Neville Dunn (ex MD of Masscash), “We’re not trying to solve for the National Market. We’re focussing on one community at a time. We think grocery online in South Africa will be most successful when it has a local focus and integration.”

They’re not a ‘buying business’, using local retailers. Says Andrew Mardon (ex National Buyer for Masscash), “Kwanu is focussed on delivering ‘everyday best prices’. We’ve built relationships with key suppliers, ensuring we can offer our customers the best possible prices everyday.”

By offering a click and collect service along with a focussed range, they’re solving the two biggest issues with shopping online for groceries… never substituting products for out of stock and South Africa’s unique challenges with delivery.

Kwanu’s results and customer feedback speak volumes.

Fast and friendly service! The quickest grocery run I have ever done. – Kerri Wolfaardt

WOW !!! Kwanu is just the most incredible way to shop and has the most user friendly website – they have thought of everything to make shopping easier and then to top it all they definitely have the best pricing in town!! Last night I had a total life transforming moment – sitting at my computer in my PJ’S – normally you see everyone you have ever known when you shoot into the shops in your old tracksuit !!! – Abigail de Robillard

Just had my first Kwanu experience. Will Def be back. Friendly guys and so easy. Thanks. – Leigh Bolam

At Kwanu Promotional pricing is great!! But what you have to look at is the pricing of the products that are not on promotion as they still make up a significant part of your shopping basket! Here is where Kwanu wins. Would love for Kwanu to be put up against Checkers, Spar, PnP, on a basket of products across the range. My guess is that Kwanu is significantly cheaper! – Grant Surmon

More than just Grocery Shopping

Kwanu is onto something. Grocery shopping is largely made up of the same basket of items, week in and week out. There isn’t any reason to have to walk the aisles of a store to do 90% of your shopping. Repeat purchases should be fast, easy and convenient. That’s what Kwanu is doing, and they’re doing it really well. We’re proud to be part of the adventure.

LOOKING TO DISRUPT YOUR MARKET?

If your business is looking to disrupt your market, Calidascope has an experienced team to help you execute your idea into the world. Contact Catri Dixon to set up some time to talk.

The post Westville’s First Dedicated Click and Collect Supermarket appeared first on Calidascope.

My fear and avoidance of boredom comes from the multitude of apparently well meaning adults I was surrounded by, while growing up. I don’t think I’m alone in this? I imagine if you paused a little while and reflected on the advice dished out to you as a child, you’ll clearly remember at least this phrase being repeated over and over, at every opportunity boredom may have had to present itself….

An idle mind is the devil’s playground

It must have started early on, because if I’d heard it for the first time as a teenager, I would have rushed in to embrace boredom and stayed for a while. What teenager doesn’t want to dance with the devil a little, and if bored was all you had to be, then you know you were going to go there. By teenagerhood you were already brainwashed. Boredom was something that must be avoided at all costs.

This thinking survives today. A quick search of Google Images quickly confirms this view of ‘boredom’ via these and other similar memes …

Boredom is the Beginning of the Beginning

But what if it isn’t so? What if boredom isn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning? What if boredom is a gateway to incredible worlds inside of your imagination? What if boredom, as a gift for embracing nothingness for a while, gives up creativity?

My thanks to Kathleen Davis for placing this thought into my brain while reading her article in Fast Company exploring the impact of Smartphones in our lives. Somewhere in the middle of her writing, she makes a point about the link between boredom and creativity and the fact that Smartphones (to our detriment) have filled up all the empty space we used to have.

Perhaps the most detrimental effect is that we longer know how to be bored. Boredom is a gift to creative ideas; it’s time when your mind can wander and make new connections. But the easy distraction that smartphones offer kills the empty moments that make life what it is.

Journey to Find Boredom

And so I began a journey to find, embrace and explore boredom. It’s early on in the journey, but as I’ve thought about it, all that boredom is, at it’s simplest, is a space in time where you find yourself with nothing to do. No distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. I smile at this because I know many spiritual people who pay good money to visit Monasteries built into mountains in countries like Bhutan, to spend weeks and months in silence, with no distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. When nothingness is called ‘Meditation’, it’s a spiritual pursuit, but as soon as you call it ‘boredom’ it’s an invitation to the devil.

However, this is not a discussion on semantics, it’s an important conversation we must be having. We know that creativity is the application of knowledge. It’s taking thoughts and transforming them into a different state, a physical state if you like. Into something that takes up space in the physical world we inhabit. Be it as a business idea, or a painting, or a dance, or a new sport, or a fresh campaign.

In order to do this we must create a space for our minds to explore, discover, investigate, play, etc. Our minds need to take a multitude of different thoughts and ideas and put them together to see what might happen if you could successfully do so? And for our minds to begin that pursuit they must be emptied of the noise that fills them in our day to day existence of repetitive and structured behaviour.

Boredom is that kick start. Boredom is the act of emptying our minds. It’s why it’s so painful for us to be bored. Boredom scares us, not because it’s an invitation for the devil, boredom scares us because it’s the beginning of creation, and in creation everything is up for grabs. There’s a well known and quoted quote from Marianne Williamson that I’m certain she must have written having recently come out of a very empty space in her world…

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The Alternatives to Creation are too Ghastly to Imagine

You didn’t think that great creativity was going to be easy did you? That you’d be walking down the road and a spark of genius that makes Einstein look positively pedestrian, would suddenly pop into your brain. Creation takes work. Hard work. Long hours. To take thoughts and transform them into something tangible and meaningful in the real world is not for the faint hearted. But we must do it. The alternatives are too ghastly to imagine. A world in which creation dies is a world in which we slip into a repetitive existence of 9-5 (or 8-4), Monday to Friday, doing the same tasks every day, over and over again. We wear the same ‘uniform’, conform to the wishes of untouchable and unknowable bosses and masters. We’ll sit in traffic for hours wondering why nobody spends any time finding a solution for our mundane and almost meaningless lives? We’ll train our children in institutions so that they too will one day live a life like we do, where everything seems the same, day in and day out. They too will live for weekends and 15 working days of leave each year, as together we go on leave with our colleagues and cram together onto beaches in similar places, or share dirt roads in the same Parks and climb mountains together, before returning to do it all over again.

If being bored is the beginning then bored I will be. I will embrace it, learn to love it and live there

By the way, all is not lost. On that same Google Images page I referred to above, with memes of warning, I discovered glimpses of what I have written above. People, who out of their boredom have discovered the beginning of the beginning

Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash

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Chief executives believe that — more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity

From an article in FastCompany back in 2010, here’s the picture of most important qualities from the 2010 IBM study….

By 2012 ‘creativity’ had slipped down to 3rd place on the IBM CEO Global Study

The 2015 IBM Global CEO Study seems to have shifted what it’s looking for from CEO’s. But looking at the quotes that are used in one of the papers to come out of it, from a variety of CEO’s, it seems obvious that creativity must be pretty high up the list of priorities, because I’m not sure how else they’ll get through successfully without a very big dose of it?

SHOULD YOU PAY A PREMIUM FOR CREATIVITY?

As I pointed out in my post last week, creativity has been on the decline since at least 1984 in some countries. That means that people entering the workplace from around the end of the 90’s are less creative than their older counterparts. With no sign of a reversal in the ‘creative quotient’ it seems to me that there should be a premium paid for anyone with above average creativity in the workplace?

The world is a complex and unpredictable place to do business in, and rightly, CEO’s globally know that creativity is a critical skill and attribute to have inside of their organisations. There is an enormous need to pay attention to increasing the levels of creativity, from our children in school all the way through to the most senior levels of organisations, companies and government.

The post Is Creativity The Most Important Leadership Skill? appeared first on Calidascope.

From 1990 to 2008 there has been a steady decline in creativity in the US, according to research conducted by Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary. While I couldn’t find any similar South African data, a Newsweek article from 2010 suggests that it may be an America only phenomena:

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority

I’m not sure I buy that view? As Kim points out in a paper in the Creativity Research Journal in 2011,

Countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have modeled their educational systems after the American education system because of America’s previous success in encouraging creativity in children

It seems to me that one could quite easily conclude that creativity growth prospects, around the world, aren’t looking very healthy at all. And for those of you who prefer pictures…

It’s wasn’t the pictures that scared me as much as the conclusions that Kim draws from her research (included analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults)…

Thus, it can be concluded younger children’s ability to produce statistically infrequent, unique, and unusual ideas has significantly decreased after 1990. 

and….

The significant decrease of Strengths scores since 1990 indicates that over the last 20 years, children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle. It could be speculated children are learning to interact in more impersonal ways, as they are more dependent on current technologies to communicate, perhaps because these technologies lack person to person, verbal and other interpersonal communicative signals. Technologies can enhance creativity and are useful tools for the creative process; however, some aspects of technologies may hinder the development of a child’s creative personality. The decrease in Elaboration scores which persists since 1984 indicates that over the last 30 years, 1) people of all ages, kindergartners through adults, have been steadily losing their ability to elaborate upon ideas and detailed and reflective thinking; 2) people are less motivated to be creative; and 3) creativity is less encouraged by home, school, and society overall.

and….

The results indicate younger children are becoming less capable of the critical thinking processes of synthesis and organization and less capable of capturing the essence of problems.

and….

The results indicate younger children are tending to grow up more narrow-minded, less intellectually curious, and less open to new experiences.

I don’t know about you, but it’s at this point I’m hoping like hell that this is just an American problem. My gut, sadly, tells me otherwise. While I don’t have any data, my own anecdotal observations quite easily match some of these conclusions in the world I inhabit. I’d be more than happy to be proved incorrect.

Does It Matter?

Of course it matters. At a macroeconomic level it counts.The health of an economy relies heavily on the creativity and innovation of scientists, engineers, business people, farmers, miners, and any person who contributes towards it, to employ more people, build more things that other countries want to buy, produce more food from the same piece of land, improve our national health, secure our borders, etc, etc. And we have to do it better than before. We can’t just do what we did last year, and the year before. We’ve got to find new and improved ways to do everything, all the time. Cheaper, better, faster and more of it.

On a microeconomic level you can take that thinking and run it through almost every single part of an economy. Provinces want all that, cities want it too, and so do businesses, and sports teams, and farmers and miners, and families and you. Even Mother Nature is hoping we’ll find better ways to treat our planet and everything that lives on it.

At a personal level it matters. Creativity breathes life into an otherwise mundane and boring existence. I don’t know if you’ve ever considered a life in which you had no access to creativity inside of yourself? A life without the skill set of creativity leaves you doing what when you get home from a day in the office where you followed instructions all day? It leaves you doing what on the weekend when you wake up on Saturday morning yearning to do something different? Well actually there’ll be no yearning. Creativity is that yearning to do something different, something unusual, something adventurous.

Here Come The Machines

I’ve always held onto the view that the one thing machines / robots will never do better than humans is ‘creativity’. When it comes to repetitive functional tasks they’re already replacing us and showing they do those jobs far better. But creativity, I don’t think so. That’s our domain. It’s what makes us human. The ability to not only desire to find another way, but to also take disconnected bits and pieces, and thoughts and ideas and put them together in a way that changes the world. I often say to my peer group of parents, don’t let your children study anything a machine might be able to replace, because a machine will replace it. Encourage your children to pick something, anything, that has an element of creativity at it’s centre and they’ll never have to complete with a machine or a robot. Not ever.

But if we’re going to let our creativity levels slide into the toilet, it’s not going to be a case of machines catching up to our creativity level, we’re just gonna hand it over to them on a plate, as we slide on by, towards a world of grey (no shades, just grey).

The Magic That Is Creativity

We’ve become so fixated on getting smarter in our heads, that we’ve missed the magic that is creativity. Do any Google search on ‘Einstein quotes’ (I’ll make it easy for you) and you’ll see him speaking of imagination and creativity over and over again. Academic genius without creativity and imagination is nothing. It’s a machine. It’s a robot. Robots have that kind of smarts. They know lots of things in one dimension. They can apply those things in that one dimension faster than any human. Creativity and imagination unlock the potential of knowledge, because if you can’t apply knowledge it’s not worth having.

It was at 16, while Einstein was imagining what it would be like to ride next to a beam of light that the first thoughts of what was to become the Theory of Relativity was born. He was imagining long before he had the brainpower to solve the question he was asking.

I can’t say if this slide in creativity is happening here in South Africa or not? I can say, that if it is we need to do more than just pay attention. We need to stop the slide, turn it around and send it on it’s way into space where our children, all of them, have imagination power to think about things like riding next to light beams, and then we can be assured that all this academic information we’re feeding them will be put to great use, and maybe even change the world.

The post Is There A Creativity Decline? Does It Matter? appeared first on Calidascope.

Of course we know what’s happened so far. The internet got loud and vast and busy. And the little guy was crowded out sufficiently for him to give up any attempt at starting (or continuing) that business. Of course I’m simplifying the situation, and there’s more complexity, but for the purpose of this post, I’m ok with the simplification.

One of the large problems with peer to peer online shopping is trust. You’re not sure who you’re buying from, and you don’t know if they’re going to rip you off? (There are a bucket load of horror stories floating around online)  This is enough to put most people off even trying to attempt to buy something from the guy in the next suburb.

Which is why it’s so very clever that in parts of the US there are Online Exchange Zones popping up. Atlas Obscura carries the specifics of what’s going on, but in a nutshell:

In the North Carolina town of Apex, which set aside a parking spot outside its police station as a point of exchange, these safe spaces are generally established in highly visible spots that are monitored by cameras so that no funny business can go unrecorded. In the case of the Denton safe area, it is located across the street from a farmer’s market pavilion, and marked off by a sign post.

It’s an old school (analogue) solution for a modern day (digital) problem. So simple, so obvious, so brilliant.

It’s been sad for me that as I’ve shared this story locally, people’s first response has been, “We couldn’t put them outside our Police Stations”. Their second response has been that it’s a cool idea.

And so the dream of peer to peer commerce is still alive. It’s not anywhere close to where the dream would have it be, but where there’s a will there’s a way, and Online Exchange Safe Zones are a great step in the right direction. I look forward to the first one to be set up in South Africa.

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I belong to a LinkedIn group on The Future of Printing, and came across this 3D Printing Pen last week. Take a look at the video below.

With one of these in your hands, it changes what you can do with a pen dramatically. An entire dimension opens up for you to engage with. Until now we’ve been been constrained to 2 dimensions when we’ve had a pen in our hands. My mind boggles as I think about children and this particular piece of tech.

The post The World’s First 3D Printing Pen appeared first on Calidascope.

When you don’t work in the printing world full time, and you’re asked to give a keynote address at a Printing Conference, to printers, you need to do a lot of research and work in order to be relevant to your audience. So I got to speak to a lot of people, both inside and outside the printing world. And I learned that whether you you’re in or you’re out, most people believe that when it comes to print, the industry is somewhere between lukewarm and cold, between dying and dead.

It’s easy to take that view in today’s world of ubiquitous digital screens. The PR driven by the world of digital screen companies is loud and pervasive, as it should be when you’re building them as quickly as they are, and you’d like everyone to own one otherwise you’re going out of business. The printing world PR is a lot softer, and far less pervasive. But it shouldn’t be, because ‘print’ still has a great story to tell.

Let me give you just one example…..

A few years ago, in Australia, the Coca-Cola company launched the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign (it was rolled out in South Africa around 2 years ago).

This campaign couldn’t have been conceived before 2012. The technology needed to execute this campaign wasn’t around until 2012, and that technology wasn’t digital, well, not completely. It was fully industrial, with some digital coolness evolved into it.

Printing with the HP Indigo

This campaign was enabled by a printer. An HP Indigo to be exact. Built by a company founded in Israel and acquired by HP a few years ago. I got to meet the developer of the Indigo in Rome, 2 years ago, and it was wonderful meeting him. The story of the Indigo is the story of a bunch of printers that refused to die, and instead of staying alive through a good defence, went on the offensive to remain relevant in a world moving digital.

The Indigo is a remarkable machine, that for me stands as a symbol of what can be built when people don’t simply roll over and die. During the past 3 years, at the 3 conferences I’ve been fortunate enough to speak at, I’ve met amazing human beings in an industry most wouldn’t go near, who love what they do, are optimistic about their future, and refuse to become irrelevant in a world that will apparently be fully digital in no time at all 🙂

The Printing Industry is far from dead. It’s nowhere close to lukewarm. I know, because I’ve met the people who work in it.

The post The campaign that made Coca-Cola millions, made possible by Printers appeared first on Calidascope.

One of it’s stand out features is the 3D printing (otherwise known as additive manufacturing):

Every Leap engine contains 19 nozzles, each of which has to withstand temperatures up to 1,650 degrees Celsius. And where 20 separate parts were once machined together to construct the nozzle’s interior passageways, there is now only one piece built up by a layering of powdered metals melted and fused together through a direct metal laser melting, or DMLM, process–making each nozzle five times stronger than those made through milling, welding, and other subtractive manufacturing processes.

GE are suggesting that by 2020 they’ll be 3D printing (additive manufacturing) well in excess of 100 000 parts for their aircraft engines. 3D printing has massive advantages over conventional production processes.

Not to mention having the ability to test a design, fail quickly, and re-test a new design quickly. “You can iterate quickly, find out what’s working and not working, change designs, and you can do that many more times than what traditional technologies would allow people to do in the past,” says Morris, who says it took about 50 different iterations to finally have a working Leap engine fuel nozzle design.

I’m not certain we fully appreciate just what an impact 3D printing will have in our world? It’s far more extensive than we currently imagine. The world will be completely reconfigured (re-printed) through this technology during the next few years.

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Thorne Travel is an independent travel agency whose customers benefit from over 40 years experience in providing luxury travel and events. Our well travelled consultants are dedicated to optimising out customer’s holiday experiences whilst ensuring exceptional value for money.

They’re a team of 9 agents, who will do their best to satisfy your travel needs. From holidays, to stag nights, to weddings and day trips. They’re almost just another Travel Agent, except they have recently become fairly well known for having the best worst travel advert of all time 🙂

You can watch it below for yourself. Be sure to pay careful attention to the over-sized suit on the Ship’s Captain, and the stunt-person doing the summersault (they’re my personal faves). The story goes that they spent their entire year’s marketing budget on this advert.

Sometimes Luck Can Turn Bad Into Really Good

I’m not sure we (at Calidascope) would ever be able to create something this bad on purpose? I’m certain we’d never ever recommend that any of our clients put their brand on an advert like this. I know Calidascope would never want our brand attached to an advert like this. And yet…

And yet, this advert has rocketed the 9 agents at Thorne Travel to stardom (of sorts) in many parts of the world. Their ad shot to over a million views on YouTube in no time (sadly it seems they’ve removed the video from their profile – I’m sad about that). According to the Independent in the UK, bookings at Thorne have increased by over 110%. Manager, Shona Thorne, has had to cancel her annual leave to meet the sudden demand, and she’s appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and The Robin Galloway Breakfast Show in Scotland.

Call it what you will, the advert has been a massive success for their business. It’s done what they wanted it to do, and then some. There’s not enough money to purposefully replicate the exposure Thorne just got.

It’s luck. It’s all luck. As a team we’ve even spent some time trying to figure out what the ‘lucky’ elements might have been (if you can work those out, perhaps you can replicate their success)? And while we have some thoughts, there’s no denying that good old fashioned luck was the overwhelming factor of their success.

There are 1000’s of really bad adverts uploaded onto YouTube everyday, but there was only one on this particular day, that luck decided to shine down on 🙂

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