One of things shown in the slideshow is using empty glass bottles as a building material. In the same vein, check out the miniWIZ (what a name, eh? sounds like names kids get in the fifth grade locker room . . .) POLLI-Brick. This is a water bottle made with an interlocking shape so that you can build things with the discarded empty bottles. That’s very clever and surely will turn heads regardless of whether it ends up as a commercial success.

Interlocking water bottles provide an easy means to make a wall or form a structure.

This brings up an interesting challenge — this is clearly a good idea, but it’s not clear at all that there is a market for it. Assuming that the production cost is similar to comparable plastic bottles, how would you market this idea? Who would be your first target audience? Are the consumers of the beverage contained in the bottle the same people who might use the bottles for constructing things? If not, how do you get the discarded bottles in the hands of likely users?

There’s a nice write up about Ocarina and iPhone apps here in the New York Times. An iPhone app would have been a good Crash and Burn idea, eh?

If you imagine it’s the latter, where do you get your material for your idea-quilt? Here’s a cool article in the NYT about a social scientist who postulates that some of the most successful idea collectors are people who “live at the intersection of social worlds.”

There are a lot of social worlds on a college campus (especially one the size of Penn State), but often students live within only one. Extend your reach this semester: go tour some new social worlds and try to bring home souvenirs.

"Development" -- a quilt by Leah Evans

WimpIt is interesting because it’s so simple.  But, its simplicity is somewhat limiting — if a person finds a phone, how is he/she reminded or compelled to check WimpIT (or whatever you’re going to call it)?  Maybe you have to make some cool sticker to put on the phone or branded phone case — but that’s less simple.  A reward system would be a compelling reason, but that also is less simple.  Software that would allow you to log into a website and see where your location-enabled phone is would be really good, but not at all simple (privacy, functionality, etc).

Get it?  The balance between simplicity and functionality is hard to find.  Some smartass once said “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  Simple, right?

A cell phone concept that has a shell with a useful life on the order of the device.

Why do we make the bottles that we use to transport shampoo from the store to our bathroom out of a material that has a usable lifetime of centuries when the amount of shampoo they contain only lasts a few months? These bottles are way over-designed and cost us money to transport and store in a landfill. You can probably think of many items you buy that are heavily over-packaged. I bet you can also think of some solutions to this problem. Some of those solutions might even be the foundation of a business.

Amazon.com is making an attempt to get away from the clamshell packaging found on a lot of items including kids’ toys. Check out the video and customer “horror” stories about clamshell packaging. There are many reasons to improve the packaging of things : Amazon is spending money on this to improve customer satisfaction and create a reason for a person to buy a product from them rather than the myriad other retailers, both online and off. What other reasons might exist to improve packaging?

If you have some good idea about packaging, how do little old you make a business out of providing that solution? In other words, who is your customer? Manufacturers of stuff or end-consumers? Who/what is your competition — traditional plastic bottles/clamshells/shrinkwrap and the people who provide traditional packaging solutions to manufacturers (e.g. shampoo makers) , or someone else?