Innovation Perspectives - Educating Tomorrow's Workforce

This is the tenth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?'. And to close off the week, here is my perspective on education:

by Braden Kelley


"We need our children to be Masters of Mystery and Einsteins of Insight." - Braden Kelley

When I first saw this topic I wanted to write about education innovation, but I resisted when a couple of the contributing authors chose this topic. I wrote about the publishing industry instead, but then this week I came across a Phil McKinney article and had the opportunity to meet Sir Ken Robinson, and my passions for an education revolution were stirred.

We sit at the nexus of amazing new education technology capabilities, the globalization of work, and an incredible transformation in the needs of employers. The path forward is not the same as the road behind, but our education system is proceeding as if it were.

Instead of pursuing the current education mantra of more, better, faster, we need to instead rethink how we educate our children because we need to prepare them for a different world. A world in which flexibility, adaptibility, creativity, and problem solving will be prized ahead of the deep technical knowledge that is fast becoming a commodity and easily available.

I've said here on Blogging Innovation that the keys to business success are insight and execution. We are ending an era of incredible business focus on execution excellence and are entering an era of an increasing business focus on insight. Excellent execution will always be valued and required, but more and more components of this execution are shifting from the developed world to the lower-wage developing world.

We are currently in a race to the middle when it comes to standard of living as the developing countries like China, India, Brazil and others climb up the pyramid and developed countries like the United States, Italy, Greece and others slide down. Those developing countries wanting to stay near the top of the flattening standard of living pyramid will have to re-tool their education systems to to prepare their populations to grab as big a share as possible of the higher-wage insight-driven jobs.

Here is an interesting chart from a Newsweek-Intel Study reformatted by Phil McKinney:


Looking at the differences in perspectives between the American and Chinese respondents in the research, I came to two possible conclusions:

1. I am Chinese
   
2. The United States (and many other developed countries) are headed in the wrong direction and better change course on education fast

You may think that my views on education are too business-focused, but look even the arts are being globalized (look at Cirque du Soleil).

I believe that we underestimate children's ability to understand the real world and I think that the education system and the business world need each other more than they realize. We need to re-imagine our public-private partnerships and expectations when it comes to education, and we need to start educating today's young kids for tomorrow's world.

The fact is that we are pushing the limits of taking today's understanding of science to improve productivity an standard of living. Going forward we will need to break through currently held physical and natural limits and an expanded understanding of our physical and natural worlds. This will require a new generation of scientists and workers who can synthesize approaches from different cultures and disciplines, that are masters of creative approaches to problem soliving, and that have the entrepreneurial spirit to breakthrough perceived barriers. Are these the kind of students we're eduating?

What kind of students is your country educating?

As an added bonus, if you haven't seen it, I encourage to check out Sir Ken Robinson's video on "Creativity versus Literacy" here:



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Work Can Be Fun

by Kevin Roberts

I don't get a lot of free time, and that's the way I like it. For me it's never been about work-life balance, but always about work-life integration. Finding compelling and compatible work to who I am and who I want to continue being, and devoting everything I have to performing at peak, getting into flow.

In these new straightened economic times, we're all having to work harder, knuckling down to the task at hand, and making sure we're building a future that is sustaining and rewarding. It's not easy. But it's easier if you love what you're doing, and you're doing it all the time. Naysayers will say nay, but its actually easier than ever to devote yourself to what sustains you. All you need is a computer, and the desire to make a difference.

Probably nowhere in the world is this more clear than in my home of New York City, where once again, creativity is biting back and inspiring people to throw everything they have at their situation. I don't know if the people who run the http://www.overthinkingit.com/ blog do anything else with their day, but something tells me everything they do has to be fun. At least they have enough time to bring us the graph above.

Which is fun, and will get you arguing about rock music, Rolling Stone, or crude oil. Their blog is classic pop-culture with a semi-serious spin. It's fun for the readers, but what fun is it for the bloggers themselves? These people have created their world and devoted their time for their own enjoyment. It just so happens we love it too.

Our only way to make the long road ahead through our economic crisis run faster is to enjoy ourselves, to be creative in everything we do, and integrate work and life. Start today with something simple. Eliminate the reasons not to, apply yourself wholeheartedly, make sure you're smiling, and enjoy the (bumpy) ride.

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Create It and They Will Come

by Kevin Roberts

I've been amazed by the global enthusiasm for the iPhone apps that continue to proliferate around the world. Creating an app is as simple as thinking of something useful. It's the modern day inventor's route to riches, and the modern day consumer's lifestyle compressed onto a small device. The creativity just keeps on coming, and it has the consumer at the heart of every decision.

The Urban Spoon app lets you define the parameters of what you want to eat. Anything you'd like to leave to chance, just solve with a shake of the phone. Is That Gluten Free? will tell you what you're eating while you are at the restaurant. The World Factbook '09 can solve discussions over dinner. Then GymGoal can help you work it off. And on it goes.

These apps are the ultimate conversation starter. "Have you got this app?" The power of the idea is transmitted every minute through conversation. Phones have got the world talking, but few guessed it would be in this unique manner.

Where was all this creativity before the iPhone opened a space for it? Are we using the other screens in our Sisomo family with the same creative, open approach? Cinemas, TV's, billboards and bus stops are all waiting for the app magic. The future is wide open, and screens are everywhere. Let's bring the world's creativity to every screen, not just the little ones.


Image Source: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2008/11/28/free-iphone-apps-this-black-friday/

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Building 21st Century Skills

It Doesn't Matter How Long They're in School as Long as They're Learning Skills for the Future

by Kathie Thomas

Yesterday I wrote about the pros and cons of three-year college versus four-year college. That got me thinking about what we need to do to really teach our children to succeed in the future.

As the mother of two elementary-school-aged girls (and stepmother of three young 20-somethings), I believe one of my chief responsibilities is giving them the best possible education I can, one that will teach and prepare them to excel in all stages of life. I believe they need to be taught, at a young age, how to learn and solve new problems, and that known facts can change and learning never stops.

Therefore, it doesn't really matter how long they're in college - for three years, like U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) argued in Newsweek, or four. What matters to me is whether students are learning what they need to be able to cope and adjust in an ever-changing world.

Even Alexander admitted that "the average amount of time students take to complete an undergraduate degree has stretched to six years and seven months." One possible reason for this is that brains are still developing, even into a person's 20's.

In fact, in a 2002 report by ACT for Youth Upstate Center of Excellence (ACT), Dr. Jay Giedd of National Institute of Mental Health said this means that students "may actually be able to control how their own brains are wired and sculpted." And, according to ACT, a collaboration of Cornell University, University of Rochester and the New York State Center for School Safety, "kids who 'exercise' their brains by learning to order their thoughts, understand abstract concepts and control their impulses are laying the neural foundations that will serve them for the rest of their lives."

So why worry about school length when their entire future is at stake?

According to "Learning for the 21st Century" in 2002, American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler once said "the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."

"Learning for the 21st Century" is the first report and mile guide by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), a leading advocacy collaboration "focused on infusing 21st century skills into education," which brings together the "business community, education leaders and policymakers... to ensure every child's success as citizens and workers in the 21st century."

According to the P21 Framework Definitions Document from May 2009, students should master the four following interconnected knowledge, skills and expertise in order to "succeed in work and life in the 21st century:"

• Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes: English, reading, foreign language, math, economics, science, geography, history and government AND global awareness, civic literacy, health literacy, and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy.


• Learning and Innovation Skills: Creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration.


• Information, Media and Technology Skills: Information literacy, media literacy, and information, communications and technology literacy.


• Life and Career Skills: Flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.

To help school districts ensure that every child learns these skills, P21 provides them with self-assessments that allow them to plot where they are on the "spectrum of 21st century skills integration," chart a course for improved integration and better implement a 21st century skills model for learning.

Additionally, P21's Route 21 program provides educators with professional development and resources and curricula they can use to better teach 21st century skills to their students.

These are skills that are quickly becoming increasingly important today. They are essential not only to my children's futures, but to the future of the world. But many of them weren't even taught to 20-somethings when they were in school just a few a years ago - we didn't know we needed to teach them. We need to make sure that our children are being taught social skills, along with compassion for diversity and self-acceptance. They need to become deep learners who are passionate about new ideas and experiences. And they need to be competitive, to be able to stand up for themselves but also be humble.

It is my hope that these skills will help them find solutions that will make our world sustainable, not just from an environmental perspective, but from a social justice perspective. But I don't want the world to just survive, I want it to thrive. According to the Brookings Institute, education in any country has a powerful impact on safety, health and wealth. Education dramatically helps "reduce the risk of instability and lay(s) the groundwork for more stable, democratic political systems to emerge." If all children receive primary education, "as many as 700,000 cases of HIV" could be prevented each year. And, "every one percent increase in the level of women's education generates 0.3 percent in additional economic growth."

We already know that we live in a rapidly changing world. It is for that reason that our children need to learn to how to change with the world. As the original "Did You Know" video taught us, students today are being trained for jobs that don't even exist yet. And technology will have changed drastically by the time college freshmen become college seniors. It is crucial to our survival that we teach our children these skills.

Are your children learning these skills?

How are you helping them prepare for the 21st century?

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Kathie Thomas is the Director of Innovation and a senior partner at Fleishman-Hillard. The global Innovation practice group Kathie leads offers proven tools and approaches for helping organizations and teams inject a new level of innovation and productivity into their strategic planning and program development.

Importance of Enterprise 2.0 Connections to Innovation ROI

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post on the Spigit blog, Study - Collaborative Networks Produce Better Ideas, I described the research of Professor Ronald Burt. He found that employees who are better connected across the organization generate higher quality ideas than those with limited connections. Wider access to the ideas, knowledge, experiences and judgment of colleagues makes employees stronger in innovation.

I posted this write-up in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn. One person made this observation:


"Need to keep in mind that collaborative networks have little to do with technology. There are certain personality types that keep the organization connected. The proportions of those people in an organization is related to the specific corporate culture."


There's a good alternative perspective. That really, the same people that connect via collaborative networks are those that would be doing it in an offline world as well. The rest of the employee population likely continues to work in a more insular world.

I see it differently though. First, I agree that there are people with natural connector personalities. They would span the different parts of the organization no matter what. Anyone think David Armano wouldn't be one of those types?

But not everyone need be an uber connector to see benefits from plugging into a more connected network. My personal experience on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed tells me that everyone benefits from these online social networks. We may not all be uber connectors, but we do increase our degree of connectedness.

The graph below is my concept for how this effect manifests:



Assume a population of employees: 25 in this hypothetical example. The blue line is the level of connectedness for employees working the way they have for decades. Your connections tend to be local and departmental, with some tenure you gain a larger informal network. In Professor Burt's terms, most workers are relatively insular in terms of who they access for information and ideas. But some broker connections across different corporate 'tribes'.

The red line represents the level of corporate connectedness for employees including the ability to find others online. To me, this is a no-brainer. Of course people are going to connect with others they wouldn't have otherwise. The number, diversity and depth of connections increase.

The gray zone between the red and blue lines represent that improvement. Some people won't get too much increase. They really are in-person types of connectors. But others thrive in the online environment. They have more specific interests, and didn't know who else in the organization held them. Through the social software, they find more people with interests similar to theirs. Or at least with experience relevant to their interests.

Don't need to be an uber connector there. Just need to be able to make connections.

Next..the ROI math.


The Natural Logarithm Method

Take a look at the graph below. It shows the scatter plot of how ideas were rated for different employees (Y axis). The X axis represents the degree of connectedness for employees, based on actual social network analysis conducted by Professor Burt in his study:



The scatter plots show that employees who have a high diversity of connections across the organization provided higher quality ideas. The converse holds true as well.

Regression shows the equation that represents the observations:


Value of Idea = 5.51 - 0.91 * ln(Level of Network Constraint)


The equation shows that, on average, every increase in a person's level of connectedness with different parts of the organization produces higher quality ideas. Note the natural log curve. The effect increases as connectedness improves. What I like about that is that the benefits increase, even if the work of increasing employees' network diversity gets more difficult as you try to connect those last holdout groups.

Extrapolate the effect out to the organization at large. Raising the overall level of workforce connectedness will have a salutary effect on the average quality of ideas generated. In an era of ever higher levels of market volatility, improving the organizational 'innovation IQ' is a critical aspect of surviving and thriving.

One thought on the accelerating benefit - increased idea quality - as connectedness improves. In a large population, would this have any correlation to network effects?

It's not perfect, but Professor Burt's analysis demonstrates a strong ROI basis for leveraging social software to increase the diversity of connections.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Does Integrated Creativity Exist Today?

Where does it exist? D-Schools Or B-Schools?

by Idris Mootee

Someone asked me who the design head is in our company. I am not sure. My answer would be everyone. Everyone is a strategist and everyone is a designer (or design thinker) in our company. We understood long ago that strategy doesn't necessarily come from a strategist, and that a design idea doesn't necessarily come from a designer. Design wants to change the world and often ends up over-thinking and under-doing. Strategy wants to change the world but often is stuck in an old paradigm of management. Strategy, management and design are not what they used to be.

Strategy is distancing itself from competition and innovation is distancing itself from invention. Strategy now needs design and design needs strategy in order to have impact. I met John Maeda today and his idea of the difference between art and design is that design should be 'relevant' and art should be 'free', and design is 'producable' where art is 'imaginable'. Those are good observations.

Let's come back to business strategy for a moment, if strategy is predictable then innovation is unknown. Business schools are not very good at teaching people to see, imagine, conceptualize, and visualize the future. Design schools are very good at training people to imagine and ask questions, but terrible at understanding from a system view how the world works.

Strategys ultimate goal is to create power and exercise it to your benefit. Design's ultimate goal is to come up with solutions to a predefined problem. Art's goal is to ask questions and reflect on some of our paradoxes and express deeper concepts that sometimes words fail to do. If strategy is ultimately about effectively exercising power, the answers to these questions may convey a good deal about how we think strategically. There is ample ground to conclude that our ability simply to cope with, much less shape, a future of pronounced complexity, uncertainty, and turbulence will depend in large measure on the prevalence of strategic thinkers in our midst. Ideas and the ability to generate them seems increasingly likely, in fact, to be more important than capital and weapons.

We need thinkers that have the intellect to dissect the status quo, grasp the big picture, discern important relationships among events, understand causation and events, generate imaginative possibilities to inspire, and operate easily in the conceptual realm as well as understand execution and change. However, this kind of integrated creativity simply does not exist today.

As Maeda puts it, "Right now, our nation sees left-brain thinking, focused on logic and reasoning, as critical to future economic development. You can see this in the emphasis on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects. What's missing from STEM is right brain thinking -- embodied by what I call the key "IDEA" (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art) subjects. We need both both halves of the brain to work together and channel brilliance through our hands, and to propagate ideas throughout our world." That's what we meant by the power of D-schools + B-schools.

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Mumbai's Innovation Hub

by Vyoma Kapur

Innovation in the developing world, as many people may tend to think, comes from either large conglomerates or small entrepreneurial communities which have had the good fortune of venture backing. Especially in a free market economy, such as India's, innovation is often thought of as the mandate of thriving businesses equipped with the know-how.

In Mumbai, India's economic powerhouse, the real social innovation is coming from the grassroots. These are people, who despite having little, are the answer to Mumbai's mounting waste management problem.

The dwellers of the Dharavi slum, the largest in Asia, have created a massive recycling industry. Invaluable for the social impact it has created, the slum's existence is supported by high-strung officials and ordinary civilians alike. Using simple machines in their home factories, these dwellers are recycling anything from plastic bottles and metal cans to paper and cotton, saving the city from the wrath of its own garbage. Over 80% of the plastic waste of Mumbai is recycled in the Dharavi slum.

As the consumerism of Mumbai's upper and middle classes disposes of thousands of tons of waste material everyday, energetic young men of Dharavi sift through piles of trash to gather anything with the potential of being recycled. Different types of junk is given a new life and then sold for a bargain. With support from non-profit organizations such as ACORN International, rag-pickers are taught how to manage solid dry waste.

With an increasing number of micro-entrepreneurs entering the recycling business, this industry has seen an astonishing level of organic growth. The slum produces a jaw-dropping $1.3 billion worth of recycled output every year. There are approximately 400 recycling units, and the number is increasing every month.

Spreading across approximately 174 hectares, this slum is like any other. It lacks food and proper sanitation and is rife with squalor. For a few hours everyday, some areas of the slum are supplied water and electricity. Despite making only a fraction of the salaries earned by their counterparts in more developed areas of Mumbai, many of these dwellers are finally finding their way out of poverty through the huge demand for their services. Needless to say, environmentalists are in full praise of this green industry, a rarity in the hustling cites of India.

Having spent a few years in India, I find this commendable. I have not seen the Dharavi slum, however; I've seen many other slums, just like those depicted in Slumdog Millionaire. That slum dwellers could become social entrepreneurs within their own capacity to fight for survival never crossed my mind.

The Dharavi example made me wonder; do we always need a team of experts and comprehensive research data to innovate? Is it not about solving the problems in front of us and seeking ways to improve what is defined and traditional? To the Dharavi dwellers, the waste piled up around their homes was not a problem, it was an opportunity. They became rag-pickers and set up mini factories with whatever little they had. In time, they turned Dharavi from being Mumbai's biggest headache to one of its greatest assets, setting an example for similar communities around the world.

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A marketing professional turned entrepreneur, Vyoma avidly supports and practices open innovation. Earlier this year, she founded Colspark LLC (www.colspark.com), a crowdsourcing platform to help companies tap into student talent for ideas and solutions.

Creative Capitalism + Social Innovation

New Social Enterprises That Make Money and Change the World

by Idris Mootee

We need more (and more innovative) social enterprises and I really want to see a top tier MBA programs with specialization in Social Enterprises. Call it B-school needs S-school. There are so many problems out there and sometimes we feel we are almost giving up. Our capitalist system is not adjusting well to these shocks. It is almost pointless for these endless debates on how things got to this point and who is to blame. The point remains: We've got to change it - and change it fast - and change it for the better.

The last thing we want to replace these problems with a set of newer problems, I've seen in many case when smart people think they have a solution, but they are simply migrating the problems. There is hope. The good surprise is that business - the same institutions that bear a fair amount of the responsibility for the current situation - is also the most potent force for bringing change. No government alone can make that happen. Businesses are powerful, if we can align the forces. There are hundreds of social enterprises are doing exactly that.

Who invented the social enterprise? Or the better idea is how do we reinvent social enterprises so they can be good business and good citizens. Not good business and bad citizens or bad business good citizens. Peter Drucker argued that in this post-capitalist society (not sure I agree with that tern), managers must learn to negotiate a new environment with a different set of work rules and career expectations. Businesses exist to serve social purposes, they have to function in ways that make sense to the society in which they are situated - and in the case of multinational corporations, they often have to function in ways that make sense across more than one society, at a deep level.

Social enterprises can change the world for the much, much better. If social entrepreneurs can navigate around the challenges and become some of the most popular brands of the world. For now, they need to improve the odds and make sure that they can proof that it works. I am very convinced that the concept works, it is just exceptional challenges that needed to be overcome. Some realities. I don't know the success rate of social enterprises. I don't think it is higher or lower than the average business. Like any business, social enterprises fail - because businesses fail. But how come social enterprise didn't scale - like many other businesses with successful business models?

The way I see it, it is not uncommon that traditional social enterprises did not attract the best and the brightest entrepreneurs, many are into the mission and not interested in the business. The other reason is there is a lack of appetite or aspiration for them to take it global or to a larger scale. And then there is the question of capital availability and time frame to achieve scale. Too many are forced to think survival, rather than innovation and growth. There needs to be series ambitions to make sure the social enterprises is leverage its mission and commitment to changing the world and transform our future. That's a big mission. And it is not mutually exclusive to pursue the mission and not ignoring the competitive dynamics of the industry that you operate in. What's the best example? Here is one.

Rubicon Programs is a $16mm social enterprise in SF focusing on helping with employment. It started initially as a drop-in center in Richmond, California, for very low-income people with severe disabilities. Their first social enterprises were very small programs that were seen more providing with some training than anything else. Today Rubicon has evolved into an organization that today serves low-income, homeless and mentally disabled people in the businesses, housing and services it provides. About one-third of the people currently served have a mental health disability, so its original focus is still a part, but not the largest part, of what Rubicon does. It is a one-stop shop for those trying to escape poverty. It not only helps clients find homes and jobs but also offers career, mental heath, and family counseling, as well as technological training and money-management programs.

Take Rubicom Bakery as an example, they produce a range of delicious cakes and tarts. The high-quality and handcrafted products are baked from "scratch" recipes and use only the best of ingredients including fresh-grated carrots, Maine blueberries, real butter and Dutch chocolate. We use absolutely no preservatives and our products include no transfats. The bakery also serves as a unique training center, preparing people for employment with Rubicon or other employers. Job training, counseling, and peer support provided in a dedicated baking workshop, classroom with audio-visual capacities, and a job search center with computer terminals help participants develop their work and life skills. Everything integrated, almost like the Cornell School of Hotel Management. There is even an online store too.

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Creative Destruction and Newspapers

by Steve McKee

I love reading the newspaper. I like the feel of the broadsheet in my hand, the anticipation of turning each page to see what's next, and the sense I get of being plugged into the world through the rhythm of daily reading. I am a newspaper loyalist, and I'm an endangered species.

That, of course, is not news. Newspapers are shrinking and their circulation shriveling, like a mirror reflecting the Internet's growth and expansion. Politicians and pundits (including many newspaper editors and publishers) who aren't schooled in business don't recognize the absolute and inescapable law of creative destruction. They wring their hands as if what's happening is a tragic thing. I see it simply as the way of the world.

To a news consumer, the Internet offers many advantages over ink and paper, from timeliness to portability, affordability to dialogue. And for a generation of readers spawned in the wake of the Web, getting their news online is not only better than in print, it's more natural. Even old guys like me who love the sound of the thump on the driveway in the morning increasingly turn to our Macs and Blackberrys to keep up with breaking events.

But while the Internet is rapidly replacing ink, paper and newsstands, the Web is to news as an aluminum can is to Coke - a terrific way to deliver the product but not the source of its value. Newspapers are struggling because newspapers are confused - they forgot they were in the business of building an audience and focused instead on selling the audience (to the advertisers who increasingly bore their cost of operating). That was fine as long as they had a monopoly on distribution, but it led them to spend their limited resources on adding more ink colors rather than more color to their ink. Now that advertisers have (ultimately) infinitely more choices, newspapers are stuck.

But the answer isn't so difficult. The key to the future of the newspaper industry lies in its past. There will always be a market for news, and newspapers still have core competencies in gathering, reporting and interpreting what's important to their readers. If they do their job well, they'll continue to be able to provide the exclusive content for which readers will pay, regardless of whether or not it results in ink-stained fingers.

The more the newspaper industry focuses on 'news' rather than 'paper', the better off it (and we) will be. That will enable it to embrace evolving distribution opportunities and find new sources of revenue and competitive advantage. Just like every other industry must do.

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Steve McKee is a BusinessWeek.com columnist, marketing consultant, and author of "When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You're Stuck, and What To Do About It." Learn more about him at www.WhenGrowthStalls.com and at http://twitter.com/whengrowthstall.

Here's to the Passionate Creatives

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Apple ad, "Think Different", 1997




by Hutch Carpenter

Why did Apple's ad resonate so well with you? After all, how much time do we spend disagreeing. Admit how happy it can make you when your manager praises you for executing well on an assignment. I know I feel it. No "think different". More like "think excellence".

But that Apple ad. It was damn good, wasn't it? Seemed to reach inside us to something else beside the praise we get for doing an assigned job well. It was celebrating some thing in each of us.

John Hagel recently wrote A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World. The post is a call to action for work that better fits our human nature. Our desire for creating better ways to address problems, in ways that fit our personality, interests and skills. To reach our full potential. We're not all doing this though.

Hagel terms people whose personalities and drive are based on making situations better than what currently exists as "passionate creatives". There have always been these types, but recent changes in the global economy and shifting market dynamics (e.g. digital technology rewriting one industry after another) are increasing their importance.

Passionate creatives exist within organizations, and as independent entrepreneurs. For those inside firms, Hagel notes:


"They experience deep frustration today with the institutional barriers that have been put in their way as they seek to more effectively achieve their full potential. They want and need platforms that can help them connect with others and drive performance to new levels."


For many of us, even if we wouldn't label ourselves "passionate creatives", the point about frustration resonates. How often have you had an idea, but can't attention for it, nor resources, nor figure out who else to work with? I've had jobs like that in the past. You know some things are not working well, and you can see how to improve the product/delivery/business model. But you can't make headway on iterating through new possibilities.

Hagel's manifesto is a great read. I want to hit on two points I take away from it:

• What is the role of "passionate creativity" in daily work?


• The gathering of passionate creatives at the edges and the accelerating rate of change in markets

The Role of Passionate Creativity in Work

Very few of us get to live a life of unfettered passionate creativity. The realities of the mundane trump the thrill of the new. And that's not a fault of the system. If all we did was work on new stuff, there'd be no stability and no scalability. More like mass economic anarchy.

But that's too heavy handed a look at it. We can be quite productive and help our companies, and careers, while working on tasks that hit our passionate creative sweet spot. A good question to ask is, how much of this passionate creativity infuses our work days?



Take a look at those two Venn Diagrams. They're saying different things. The left one says that we all have to execute on tasks assigned by others, or assigned by ourselves for the role we fill. In some of that work, we'll have the opportunity to reach deeper, to deliver creativity on an activity that animates us. But the primary focus is executing on the plans and processes already in place.

The right one indicates a job which is dominated by passionate creativity. Hagel's call-to-action is more aligned here. We work primarily on things which stimulate and energize us regularly. But there is a twist to this notion. It doesn't mean spending one's time on only starry-eyed big picture thinking, producing little of tangible value for your organization. It includes work by those "who are searching for new and creative ways to do the most 'routine' tasks."

Which model of work are we likely to see arise in the next decade or two? Both. Neither. Yes.

Hagel's manifesto is not so much a clear-eyed plan for rearranging organizations. Rather, it's a wake-up call to the corporate world that the nature of work and what employees seek is changing. As he says:


"Why will more and more people evolve into passionate creatives? Because we live in a world that is shifting inexorably from an obsession with efficiency to an obsession with learning. We have come to call this the Big Shift."


In that statement, I draw some conclusions that relate which model above will emerge. First, note that the Big Shift is a shift in "obsessions". From efficiency to learning. That's a shift in attention, and in resources. It's a shift in the dynamics of the supply side of the equation.

What hasn't shifted is the demand side of the equation. Consumers worldwide still depend on the massive efficiencies that Tayloresque methodologies have brought to our economy.

So there's the quandary: if we're all working on things that inflame our passionate creativity, who is minding the massive scalability store?

My sense is that the Venn Diagram on the left is closer to what we'll see. Enlightened companies will follow the examples set by Google and 3M, encouraging employees to pursue initiatives outside their regular routines. This does a couple things:

• It provides an outlet for growing passionate creativity on a wider basis


• Some of those initiatives will turn into full-fledged projects

The second point then lets employees live a life in the right-side Venn Diagram.

Passionate Creatives at the Edges

Another point Hagel makes is that passionate creatives tend to occupy spaces that are "edges":


"Passionate creatives are everywhere among us, but they are not evenly distributed. They tend to gather on the edges where unmet needs intersect with unexploited capabilities. Edges are fertile seedbeds for innovation."


Reading this, I was struck by how well this fits with the observation that Gary Hamel made. The pace of change in markets is faster now than it ever has been in history. What this means is that Hagel's edges - unmet needs intersect with unexploited capabilities - will be more frequently found.

Companies need to get better in pivoting to meet changes in their markets. And this keeps CEOs up at night. IBM surveyed global CEOs in 2008, asking them about their view of changes in their markets. The results are eye-opening:


"Collectively, CEOs set their organization's ability to manage change 22 percentage points lower than their expectations for the level of change they will have to manage - a 'change gap' that is widening."


A wide 'change gap' there, isn't it? If Hamel identifies the problem companies face, Hagel identifies the types of workers who will make a difference in addressing the problem. The passionate creatives.

The edges are places of opportunity and uncertainty. It's hard to know what the demand dynamics are, and existing infrastructure and processes don't address the changing market needs. New alternatives are emerging, it's time for fresh approaches by existing firms.

Companies are best-served by allowing employees who are attracted to these changes to pursue innovative ways to address them. Why? They get energy. They get an experimenter's mentality. They get a happier workforce. Let employees exercise some form of self-organization to accomplish this.

The alternative may be incumbent staffers who have fallen into routines, or have reason to protect the status quo. This does not help companies address rising levels of volatility. Free the passionate creatives!

Passionate Creativity Will Fall on a Spectrum

My sense is that work will evolve, over years and decades, to allow people to shift attention to work that energizes them more fully. It will happen on a spectrum, with daily jobs that fall between those two Venn Diagrams above. Society cannot get away from the requirements of predictability, efficiency and scalability. We're all going to have elements of our jobs that are routine.

I think Hagel's post is right on though. It will be a slow change where companies integrate the existing passionate creatives more effectively, and develop the passionate creativity in all employees. Companies doing it well will need to celebrated and publicized repeatedly for the value to be understood more widely in the market. Over time, we'll see the change.

Note what G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Viton wrote in this recent Business Week article. Passionate creatives like to "follow the challenges":


"Stop and think about the last truly great person who left your organization. First think about what made that employee great. We bet you name such characteristics as action-oriented, driven, passionate, fun, and genuine."


Now think about where that worker went. Chances are, to a position with a perceived promise of putting his or her talents to better use - moving into a role with greater challenges and opportunities to learn and make a difference. It wasn't about money.

It will happen. Here's to the passionate creatives.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Teach Your Children to Innovate

by Drew Boyd

Parents teach their children many things: morals, etiquette, religion, sports, cleanliness, walking, cooking, riding a bicycle, reading, writing, math, discipline, safety, driving a car...the list goes on and on. What if you could give your child the life-long ability to innovate? What a gift indeed. This issue surfaced after a string of emails with one of our blog readers who wants her child to learn innovation (thanks, Trish!). Can children learn a corporate innovation method at such an early age?

I've taught children how to innovate, and it is one of the most rewarding feelings you can have. I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th graders the method called Systematic Inventive Thinking. I was surprised and a bit unnerved how well they did. After teaching the five templates of innovation (over a five weekly sessions), each child completed a "final exam" by innovating a new-to-the-world product using one of the templates in just 30 minutes! I was amazed. The PowerPoint slides I used for this training are in the READING section of the blog if you wish to download them.

Here are some pointers for teaching your children to innovate:


1. Equate innovation to other skills-based activities

• Innovating takes skill just like sports or dancing. Don't let your children think innovation is some special, innate talent that only certain people have. This creates an artificial barrier, one that I see too often in the corporate environment, and it prevents people from trying to be innovative. Innovating is a skill, and it can be learned by anyone, even those who are not creative in the traditional sense.

2. De-emphasize patents

• For some reason, kids are fascinated with patents. They tend to see patents as the ultimate reward of innovation. Patents do not equate to successful innovation; rather, they equate to getting legal status regarding an invention. If a child invents something that has already been invented, this is a success. In fact, it is a huge success because it shows an ability to create novel ideas that have a track record of success. Be sure to reward your child if they invent something that exists. Send the message: if you can invent something that is already shown to be successful, you can definitely be the first to invent something new and useful.

3. Apply innovation across a wide variety of situations

• It is not just for inventing new products. Teach you children to apply innovation methods to things like writing a poem, doing school work, or getting dressed in the morning. Have them invent a new way to clean their room or play with a toy. Help them equate innovation with creating novelty in the everyday things. Make innovation a routine way to tackle new situations.

4. Distinguish between innovation skills and problem solving skills

• Both are useful, but are often confused as the same. They are related, but different. Help them see problem solving as what to use when the problem is very well defined and must be solved. Help them see innovating as the set of tools to use when new approaches are needed for an existing task. Example: Innovate a new way to clean their room, but problem-solve when they want to avoid having to do it.

5. Teach "ambidextrous" innovation

• Help them understand the two directions of innovation: Problem-to-Solution and Solution-to-Problem. Example: if the kitchen toaster burns the bread every morning, and they see a novel way to fix it, that is Problem-to-Solution. Other the other hand, if they imagine the toaster is like a TV that is "on demand," then make the connection that this would help mom get toast ready precisely when everything else is ready, that is Solution-to-Problem innovation.

6. Set an example

• Parents struggle teaching children anything unless the parents demonstrate those skills themselves. Whether it is table manners, proper grammar, or how to treat other people, parents must "walk the talk." Innovation is no different. Let children see how you and others, especially other children, use innovation methods to do cool things, fun things, important things.

(Pictured are two future innovators, Emerson and Margo, from Cincinnati, Ohio)

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Innovation, Jazz, and Improvisation

by Stephen Shapiro

What do jazz and innovation have in common?

Quite a bit.

Many years ago, in 24/7 Innovation, I wrote...

"Most businesses are run like classical symphonies - long, with elaborate compositions (detailed workflows) that leave little room for interpretation. Employees are expected to follow these compositions rote.

Unfortunately, by the time they learn the score, the music would have to be changed. This organizational symphony no longer works in today's age of change.

Instead we need jazz-like organizations. Innovation is not random. In fact, it emerges best when there is a structure to nurture it, much like jazz in the world of music. Jazz is heavy on innovation ('improvisation' in musical terms). Just as innovation is not random, neither is improvisation. Jazz has a simple structure, like 12-bar, B-flat blues. It has a rhythm, chord progression, and tempo.

Businesses need much the same to succeed: Simple structures that allow innovation to emerge, in the moment, when it is needed most."

A little while ago, I attended a session at Harvard's Kennedy School led by Frank Barrett. The title of his presentation was "Cultivating a Culture of Creativity and Innovation: Learning from Jazz Improvisation."

He focused much more on music and jazz than on practical application to business. Regardless, there were some interesting points. He has seven 'tips' for improvisation:

1. Unlearn habits

• Be suspicious of patterns. He quoted Miles Davis, "If it sounds clean and slick, I've been doing it too long."

2. Say 'yes' to the mess

• No matter what happens, don't go into problem solving mode. There are no do-overs. Appreciate the screw-ups and figure out how to leverage them. He quoted Peter Drucker, "A leader's role is to maximize strengths so that weaknesses become irrelevant."

3. Have minimal structures that maximize autonomy

• See my quote from 24/7 Innovation

4. Embrace errors as a source of learning

• Builds on point #2. He quoted Miles Davis again, "If you aren't making a mistake, it's a mistake." I like that one.

5. Provocative competence

• This is my favorite. I wrote about this last year in an article entitled, "Relearning What You Know." His point is to add just enough 'provocation' to disrupt habits just enough to force creativity. His example was a jazz standard which is always played in the key of F. On stage, in front of a live audience, the leader counted off and said, "Play it in E flat." Although 99% of the song was the same, it was down one note causing band members to pay extra attention. Instead of playing rote, they were fully present.

6. Alternate between soloing and support

• On high performing teams, everyone leads some times, and follows on other occasions. Both are needed.

7. Strike a groove

• This is when the musicians are 'in the zone'.

These are great rules for any form of improvisation whether it be music or improv comedy.

After the presentation, someone asked, "What is the business equivalent of chord progressions?" For jazz to work, musicians need to know which chords to play when. This builds 'trust' that everyone will know what to do and when to do it. But there are few similar, unambiguous structures in business.

In a future blog entry, I will discuss my thoughts on the business equivalent of jazz and chord structures. In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts you might have...

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.

Are You Crushing Creativity?

by Paul Sloane

CEOs have much more power than they realize. They can patiently create a climate of creativity or they can crush it in a series of subtle comments and gestures. Their actions send powerful signals. Their responses to suggestions and ideas are deciphered by staff as encouragement or rejection.

If you want to crush creativity in your organization and eliminate all the unnecessary bother of innovation then here are ten steps that are guaranteed to succeed. On the other hand, if you want innovation to flourish in your organization, then you should avoid or eliminate these counter-productive processes completely:

1. Criticize

• When you hear a new idea criticize it. Show how smart you are by pointing out some of the weaknesses and flaws which will hold it back. The more experienced you are, the easier it is to find fault with other people's ideas. Decca Records turned down the Beatles, IBM rejected the photocopying idea which launched Xerox, DEC turned down the spreadsheet and various major publishers turned down the first Harry Potter novel. The same thing is happening in most organizations today. New ideas tend to be partly-formed so it is easy to reject them as "bad." They diverge from the narrow focus that we have for the business so we discard them. Furthermore, every time somebody comes to you with an idea which you criticize, it discourages the person from wasting your time with more suggestions. It sends a message that new ideas are not welcome and that anyone who volunteers them is risking criticism or ridicule. This is a sure-fire way to crush the creative spirit in your staff.

2. Ban brainstorms

• Treat brainstorming as old-fashioned and passe. All that brainstorms do is throw up lots of new ideas that then have to be rejected. If your organization is not holding frequent brainstorm sessions to find creative solutions then you are not wasting time on new ideas. Instead you are sending a message to staff that their input is not required. If people insist on brainstorm meetings then make them long, rambling and unfocused with lots of criticism of radical ideas.

3. Hoard problems

• The CEO and senior team should shoulder the responsibility for solving all the company's major problems. Strategic issues are too complicated and high-level for the ordinary staff. After all, if people at the grass-roots knew the strategic challenges the organization faces then they would feel insecure and threatened. Don't involve staff in serious issues, don't tell them the big picture and above all don't challenge them to come up with solutions.

4. Focus on efficiency not innovation

• Focus solely on making the current business model work better. If we concentrate on making the current system work better then we will not waste time on looking for different systems. The current business model is the one that you helped develop and it is obviously the best one for the business. After all, if the makers of horse-drawn carriages had improved quality, they could have stopped automobiles from taking their markets. The same principle applied with makers of slide rules, LP records, typewriters and gas lights.

5. Overwork

• Establish a culture of long hours and hard work. Encourage the belief that hard work alone will solve the problem. We do not need to find a different way of solving a problem -- rather we must just work harder at the old way of doing things. Make sure that the working day has no time for learning, fun, lateral thinking, wild ideas or testing of new initiatives.

6. Adhere to the plan

• Plan in great detail and then do not deviate from the plan regardless of circumstances. "We cannot try that idea because it is not in the plan and we have no budget for it." Keep to the vision that was in the plan and ignore fads like market changes and customer fashions -- they will pass.

7. Punish mistakes

• If someone tries an entrepreneurial idea that fails then blame and retribution must follow. Reward success and punish failure. That way we will reinforce the existing way of doing things and discourage dangerous experiments.

8. Don't look outside

• We understand our business better than outsiders. After all we have been working in it for years. Other industries are fundamentally different and just because something works there does not mean it will work here. Consultants generally are over-priced and tell you things you could have figured out anyway. We need to find the solutions inside the business by working harder.

9. Promote people like you from within

• Promoting from within is a good sign. It helps retain people and they can see a reward for loyalty and hard work. It means we don't get polluted with heretical ideas from outside. Also if the CEO promotes people like him then he can achieve consistency and succession. It is best to find managers who agree with the CEO and praise him for his acumen and foresight.

10. Don't waste money on training

• Talent cannot be taught. It is it a rare thing possessed by a handful of gifted individuals. So why waste money trying to turn ducks into swans? Hire good people and let them learn our system. Work them hard and they can emulate the success of the CEO as he leads the company forward into the future.

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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Are You Asking Questions?

by Paul Sloane

Children learn by asking questions. Students learn by asking questions. New recruits learn by asking questions. Innovators understand client needs by asking questions. It is the simplest and most effective way of learning. People who think that they know it all no longer ask questions - why should they? Brilliant thinkers never stop asking questions because they know that this is the best way to gain deeper insights.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said, "We run this company on questions, not answers." He knows that if you keep asking questions you can keep finding better answers.

When Greg Dyke became Director-General of the BBC in 2000 he went to every major location and assembled the staff. They came expecting a long presentation. He simply sat down with them and asked a question, "What is the one thing I should do to make things better for you?" Then he listened. He followed this with another question, "What is the one thing I should do to make things better for our viewers and listeners?" He knew that at that early stage he could learn more from his employees than they could from him. The workers at the BBC had many wonderful ideas that they were keen to share. The fact that the new boss took time to question and then listen earned him enormous respect.

Columbo solves his mysteries by asking many questions; as do all the great detectives - in real life as well as fiction. All the great inventors and scientists asked questions. Isaac Newton asked, "Why does an apple fall from a tree?" and, "Why does the moon not fall into the Earth?" Charles Darwin asked, "Why do the Galapagos islands have so many species not found elsewhere?" Albert Einstein asked, "What would the universe look like if I rode through it on a beam of light?" By asking these kinds of fundamental questions they were able to start the process that lead to their tremendous breakthroughs.

The great philosophers spend their whole lives asking deep questions about the meaning of life, morality, truth and so on. We do not have to be quite so contemplative but we should nonetheless ask the deep questions about the situations we face. It is the best way to get the information we need to make informed decisions and for sales people it is the single most important skill they need to succeed.

Why don't we ask questions?

If it is obvious that asking questions is such a powerful way of learning why do we stop asking questions? For some people the reason is that they are lazy. They assume they know all the main things they need to know and they do not bother to ask more. They cling to their beliefs and remain certain in their assumptions - yet they often end up looking foolish.

Other people are afraid that by asking questions they will look weak, ignorant or unsure. They like to give the impression that they are decisive and in command of the relevant issues. They fear that asking questions might introduce uncertainty or show them in a poor light. In fact asking questions is a sign of strength and intelligence - not a sign of weakness or uncertainty. Great leaders constantly ask questions and are well aware that they do not have all the answers.

Finally some people are in such a hurry to get with things that they do not stop to ask questions because it might slow them down. They risk rushing headlong into the wrong actions.

With prospect, with clients, at school, at home, in business, with our friends, family, colleagues or managers we can check assumptions and gain a better appreciation of the issues by first asking questions. Start with very basic, broad questions then move to more specific areas to clarify your understanding. Open questions are excellent - they give the other person or people chance to give broad answers and they open up matters. Examples of open questions are:

• What business are we really in, what is our added value?


• Why do you think this has happened?


• What are all the things that might have caused this problem?


• How can we reduce customer complaints?


• Why do you think he feels that way?


• What other possibilities should we consider?

As we listen carefully to the answers we formulate further questions. When someone gives an answer we can often ask, "Why?" The temptation is to plunge in with our opinions, responses, conclusions or proposals. The better approach is keep asking questions to deepen our comprehension of the issues before making up our mind. Once we have mapped out the main points we can use closed questions to get specific information. Closed questions give the respondent a limited choice of responses - often just yes or no. Examples of closed questions are:

• When did this happen?


• Was he angry?


• Where is the shipment right now?


• Did you authorise the payment?


• Would you like to go to the cinema with me on Saturday evening?

By giving the other person a limited choice of responses we get specific information and deliberately move the conversation forward in a particular direction.

Asking many questions is very effective but it can make you appear to be inquisitorial and intrusive. So it is important to ask questions in a friendly and unthreatening way. Do not ask accusing questions. "What do you think happened?" will probably get a better response than, "Are you responsible for this disaster?" Try to pose each question in an way and ensure that your body language is relaxed and amicable. Do not jab your finger or lean forward as you as put your requests.

Try to practice asking more questions in your everyday conversations. Instead of telling someone something, ask them a question. Intelligent questions stimulate, provoke, inform and inspire. Questions help us to teach as well as to learn.

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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Calling All Media and Energy Innovators

The Economist is holding two innovation competitions to find the most exciting, game-changing innovations that will have a marked impact in two key areas: new media and energy. Twelve finalists will be invited to present their innovations to an audience of top executives in the field at events hosted by The Economist. Finalists will also receive complimentary conference registrations (value of up to $2,495). The winning presenter will receive exclusive bragging rights and a free subscription to The Economist.


1. Media Convergence

Do you have the next thrilling new interface, electronic reader, social media idea, mobile device or other novel way for people to interact with media? If you have a media or marketing innovation that you believe will change the way people behave, then you should enter to win the Media Convergence Innovation Competition, taking place in New York City, October 20-21, 2009.




The deadline for entries is September 8, 2009 in YouTube video format. Complete details and rules area available here or by email.


2. Carbon Economy

Do you have the game changing solution for climate change, the next renewable energy source, human-powered appliance or breakthrough use of nano-technology? If you have created a product or service that will improve energy efficiency or will add to the renewable energy industry, then you should enter to win the Carbon Innovation Competition, taking place in Washington DC, November 17-18, 2009.




The deadline for entries is September 30, 2009 in YouTube video format. Complete details and rules area available here or by email.


Good luck to any readers who decide to participate!

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Real Reason Companies Must Innovate

Ask any group of senior executives why they think innovation has become such an imperative, and the answer is invariably, "Because it drives growth."

This is quite a reasonable and obvious way of thinking. Pushed into a relentless and never-ending race to grow earnings faster than the industry average, companies are increasingly turning to innovation as today's best bet for closing the "growth gap." Trouble is, by thinking of innovation almost solely in terms of growth, many executives are actually missing the bigger picture.

For most companies today, the real issue is not how to grow earnings by a certain percentage from quarter to quarter. It's how to avoid the big and unexpected downside. Because the thing that kills companies today is not whether they are growing by 8% instead of 12%; the thing that kills them is when they miss some turn in the road - some fundamental change in the external environment - that axes the share price by 50% and sends the firm into the toilet. This is what has wrecked so many companies in so many industries.

It might be a disruptive new technology that causes all the trouble, the way digital photography decimated Kodak's traditional film-based business. It might be a fundamental shift in customer preferences, let's say from gas-guzzling SUVs to economical, environmentally-friendly hybrid vehicles. It might be another company's game-changing business model; the equivalent of a Dell in computing, an Amazon.com in books, or an easyJet in air travel. It might be regulatory upheaval in the market, opening up the floodgates to a horde of aggressive new competitors, as we have seen in countless markets and in all manner of industries. Or it could be a lifestyle trend that suddenly turns millions of people off the food, or the drinks, or the clothes, or whatever else it is that you make.

So, yes, of course top line growth is important; nobody would argue with that. Maximizing the upside is all well and good. But the real issue is: how do you minimize the downside?

A lot of people would reply that minimizing the downside is about being careful and conservative; it's about avoiding risks. In fact, it's precisely the opposite. Minimizing the downside is about continually experimenting with new things, recognizing that we are living in a world where the old things can quickly lose their value and become irrelevant.

In this new disruptive age, competitive strategies and business models don't last anywhere near as long as they used to. Therefore, unless a company is innovating deeply and strategically - at the level of the core business itself - economic growth can very quickly turn into economic failure, decay and even death.

Of course, the financial risks of experimentation have to be managed too. But, essentially, in today's turbulent times, the only long-term insurance against the downside is rampant and radical innovation. That's the real reason for the innovation imperative.

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Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation.

Book Review - "The Silver Lining" by Scott Anthony

A couple of weeks ago I received "The Silver Lining" by Scott Anthony in the mail. "The Silver Lining" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read. Scott introduces several different concepts in the book in addition to the main thesis - which seems to be that companies must prune their innovation portfolios, refeature their products to meet ever-changing customer requirements, and re-tool their organizations to better deal with the constant change that is becoming the norm in the world today.

The first concept that Scott introduces is a term to refer to the current economic dis-equilibrium - 'The Great Disruption' - and the rapid change that organizations face. Here is a great quote from the first chapter:

• "The biggest silver lining for innovation is that the scarcity that is sure to result from the current economic climate is actually a good thing for innovation. Abundance is actually the root cause of many corporate struggles with innovation."

Another key focus of the book is detailing the importance of pruning your innovation portfolio. This a great analogy for re-evaluating your innovation investments, as often in cutting back selected branches you make the overall plant or tree healthier and allow it to grow stronger upwards. With innovation portfolios it is the same. Often many organizations allow too many projects to continue consuming resources that should really be 'pruned' so that those project resources can be re-deployed to help the remaining projects become more successful and complete faster.

At the same time, Scott Anthony makes the point that opportunities may exist for organizations to refeature products in ways that both reduces costs and increases sales. Pursuing this strategy can also reduce options available to potential disruptive competitors seeking to enter the market.

Smart companies will also use 'The Great Disruption' as an opportunity to re-tool their innovation capabilities and processes while also utilizing their potentially reduced innovation budget to conduct smart strategic experiments that could include exploring open innovation or low end opportunities ('learning to love the low end').

After describing how to love the low end (which is very similar to how companies should approach any disruptive innovation), Scott Anthony concludes the book with his thoughts on personal reinvention and his views on what's next for innovation.

Another favorite quote from the book (which I've heard elsewhere) suggests that you should staff up a disruptive innovation project or a strategic experiment with the best people you can find for each element (not the people that have been successful in the mainline business):

• "Good entrepreneurs don't take risk, they manage risk."

Overall, Scott makes some good points about pruning the innovation portfolio, retooling the organization for better innovation success, and addressing the low end of the market that make the book a worthwhile read.


My interview with "The Silver Lining" author Scott Anthony can be found here.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovate Your Way out of a Recession

How on earth can companies compete in a global economy where staff costs in India are a tenth of those in the West and where Chinese companies are now looking to outsource their operations to cut costs further? We can not continuously improve our way out of the current challenges, rather we must fundamentally change what we do and how we do it - in short we must innovate.

Some people think innovation is the generation of new ideas - but we would refer to this as creativity. Creativity is part of innovation but is not a substitute for it! Being creative and coming up with new ideas is all well and good but if no one puts them into practice then they are worth nothing to a business. For us innovation is the "commercial exploitation of ideas." It needs to be a planned and proactive process.

Innovation is also seen as being synonymous with the development of new products. Whilst this is true to a degree it is only one part of what constitutes innovation. In fact many businessmen and women are put off by the term innovation because they do not fully understand what it means.



There are five generic types of innovation as represented in this Product-Market matrix:

1. Process Innovation - Improving how you do what you currently do. The emphasis here is on making the process more effective and efficient rather than changing the end product or service. The aim could be to improve reliability, reduce costs, improve timing etc.


2. New Product /Service Development - The creation of modified or new products and services to meet a market need. This can be done through re-engineering existing products, licensing existing products, creating differing versions of present products, running incubator generation schemes etc.


3. Market Development - Breaking into extended markets or segmenting an existing market in a new way can often give insights previously overlooked. Market innovation could be as radical as moving into a new geographical market like opening a store in Japan or sub-segmenting your existing market by different age groups.


4. New Business Development - As you become more radical, the extent of innovation will increase, and it will become more and more likely that you will need to build or bring in new capabilities. New business may result from taking modified products or technology into completely new markets, or offering new products to extended markets.


5. Strategic Change (Business Innovation) - Possibly the riskiest approach to innovation - that of moving the business into a different, unrelated market to capitalise on a new product idea or technology. A strategic change might require a new business model, leadership, merger, acquisition or new branding.

Now is the time for businesses to embrace Innovation Management as a core business process. Link innovation to your business goals and overcome the barriers to innovation, and you stand a very good chance of not only surviving the recession but becoming stronger in the process.


Also by Andy Bruce - The Golden Rules of Innovation

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Andy Bruce is widely acclaimed as an authority in 'Innovation Management', the author of "Fast Track to Success - Innovation", and the Director of two specialist innovation companies: SofTools and Project Leaders International.

Building an Innovation Nation

Why do some nations and geographic regions seem to be hotbeds of creative entrepreneurship and economic growth, while others remain innovation laggards? In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Harvard professor David Landis writes, "If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference." National governments the world over are waking up to this truth as they struggle to improve their countries' global competitiveness and economic prosperity.

They now recognize, as The Economist puts it, that innovation is "the single most important ingredient in any modern economy." But how exactly can a country create the cultural and constitutional conditions for innovation to flourish? In short, how do you build an "innovation nation?"

In my travels around the world, I've been asked this question many times, in places as diametrically opposite as Sweden and Saudi Arabia, or Moscow and Madrid. Some nations and regions, of course, are already blessed with a culture that is predisposed to innovation. What we usually find in these countries is a historical openness to ideas from all around the world, a lot of cultural diversity, a high degree of connection and conversation, a deep-seated belief that one can build a better future for oneself and one's family - and ultimately one's community and country - through education and hard work and by seeking entrepreneurial opportunities, and a tendency to encourage or at least tolerate free thinking and contrarian views.

On the other hand, there are national cultures that seem to find innovation much more difficult. I would argue that these tend to be in countries or regions that have an "inward focus", where there is little interest in ideas that come from outside. Generally, they are also cultures that discourage free, independent thinking; where kids are taught at school to "know their place" and not to question anything. What these countries seem to lack is a culture of entrepreneurship, opportunism and innovation at the grass-roots level.

Obviously, culture is something that builds up over a very long time and is incredibly difficult to change. You can't turn just flip a switch and turn a country like Angola - currently occupying last place on INSEAD's Global Innovation Index - into an innovation powerhouse like America (still rather unsurprisingly ranked first). But there are definitely some practical steps governments can take to foster innovation at a national level. John Kao, author of the book Innovation Nation notes that Singapore's transformation over the last four decades, from what he calls "a developing country fishing village" to Asia's poster child of innovation and economic growth, has unquestionably been driven by the city-state's visionary government. Other countries of the world would do well to take a page from Singapore's playbook as they seek to define their own national innovation agendas.

One word of caution, though. There's a tendency in government to think that innovation is almost exclusively synonymous with big science. So if you take any company's ten-year innovation strategy, you invariably read about ambitious plans to build national prowess in certain key technologies. These initiatives are all well and good, but I believe they are somewhat misguided - for two reasons.

First, every industrial economy on earth today is pursuing a dominant position in the same set of brainpower industries - nanotech, biotech, pharmaceuticals and so forth. Some countries have an incredible head start in these fields, which means they are already several technology generations ahead, and they may also be lucky enough to have one or more regional industry clusters right on their doorstep, which gives them easy access to skills and other resources. How can other nations hope to compete when they don't have these kinds of advantages? Not by running the same broad, technological race as everybody else - which I believe will ultimately be a loser's game - but by narrowly focusing on a few niches (technological or otherwise) where the country can lead the world.

Second, the idea that innovation is solely about big science and big R&D budgets is an outdated paradigm. The fact is that many of today's most successful innovations are business model innovations, not technological innovations - they are ways of doing business that break from industry norms by serving unmet or unsatisfied customer groups, providing new or different benefits, or delivering value in an unconventional fashion. These kinds of innovations can potentially come from any entrepreneurial individual in any country on earth.

Take Jim Penman in Adelaide, Australia, who turned a part-time grasscutting job into a global business with 2,600 franchisees. The company, called Jim's Group, does everything from grass cutting and dog walking to car washing, home repairs and pool care - basically all the drudge work you don't want to do, or simply don't have time to do. It's precisely courageous entrepreneurs like Jim Penman who prove that successful innovation can come from the bottom up – and not just top-down through massive government investment programs.

One of the questions governments should therefore be asking is "Are we creating an environment that is truly supportive to grass-roots entrepreneurs? Or does our bureaucracy continually get in the way?" For example, how difficult is it for someone with an interesting business idea to get the funding for a start-up? How difficult is it for the average citizen to register a company? Are we giving potential entrepreneurs financial incentives and making their lives easier, or do they still have to fight their way through miles of red-tape and legislation? And, to my previous point, do we only take innovators seriously if they work in science labs, or are we open to innovators whose big idea is simply an unconventional new business model?



In short, when it comes to bottom-up innovation from entrepreneurs, are we slowing things down or speeding things up?

Let's remember that Silicon Valley grew to be great, not because some politicians in Washington woke up one day and decided that the country's future was hinged on building a scientific industry cluster in California. No, the real fathers of Silicon Valley were tinkerers, risk-takers and opportunists like Hewlett and Packard, Noyce and Moore, Jobs and Wozniak - a legacy that is continued today by heroes like Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. The phenomenon we now call Silicon Valley could only happen because the United States is so nurturing - so supportive - to grass-roots entrepreneurs. This is a critical and often overlooked factor in building an innovation nation.

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Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation.

Crisis or Opportunity?

No one in their right mind would suggest that an economic collapse was just what we needed, but sometimes, tough times do throw up opportunities we don't hear when the bulls are roaring. I remember back in the 1970s, New York was a very different city to the one we know now. It had a gritty edge and the sense that anything could happen if you stepped beyond the lights. As the economy of the city collapsed and bankruptcy loomed, businesses folded or moved on to more congenial locations, leaving behind vast tracts of abandoned buildings and empty store fronts. One by one they were reoccupied, and very often by artists.

Downtown, the Bowery and SoHo exploded in a buzz of creativity. The subway, if you had the nerve to go down there, was a living gallery of graffiti art featuring the poignantly funny chalk drawings of Keith Haring on blacked out notice boards. As each train roared into the station, it was like watching a rainbow rocket past. Above ground, artists like Haring took advantage of empty stores and cheap rents to start their own enterprises. Haring called his the Pop Shop and it gave me the same charge of energy and enthusiasm I had seen and lived with in 1960s London.

I am certain we will see this same spirit blossom in the present crisis. One person's empty space is someone else's chance of a lifetime. This is certainly happening in London, a city that has been savagely hit by the current downturn. A number of artists have grabbed at empty shop fronts to create temporary exhibitions. It's the pop-up store concept in a different guise - opinionated, focused, passionate, committed. It's also an opportunity for local Councils to return some space to creative people to use as studios, sound recording suites, and practice rooms. Good times have the unfortunate effect of squeezing these essential creative resources out of the centre of cities. Let's welcome them back. Our ability to see opportunity rather than threat, and work to our strengths rather than succumb to our weaknesses is the way to get through these tough times. Best of all, it will inspire into the optimism we need to sustain us on the other side that we call the future.

Photo credit: Keith Haring's Pop Shop, New York, circa 1986. Photograph by Charles Golfi Michels.

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Innovation Multiplication

I came across an interesting video with economist Alex Tabarrok talking about the incredible rate of progress in idea creation in the last 50 years and the prognosis for the next 100 years. His main premise?

"One Idea, One World, One Market"


Check out the video:




The video does a great job of visualizing part of the reason that the rate of technological advance is increasing - there are more people working to create ideas and solutions than ever before. Despite the incredible growth in idea creation over the last 50 years, Alex Tabarrok talks a lot about the need to increase the number of idea creators. Currently, less than 1/10 of 1% of the world's population are scientists and engineers (1 in 1,000).

If you think about the world's population as one interconnected cloud computer, and follow that analogy through - billions of our processors are offline. If the rest of the world were as wealthy as the United States, there would be five times as many scientists and engineers.

The United States may be losing its idea leadership, but that is a great thing because it means that the number of idea creators is increasing.

For example, in the ten years from 1996-2006, the number of university students in China increased from 1 million to 5 million. Dr. Tabarrok didn't present the data, but I imagine there was probably a similar increase in India during the same time period.

"We all benefit when other countries get rich"

• greater demand for ideas


• increased supply of new ideas

Who will be the idea leader over the next 50 years?

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Creative Cultures - Making Innovation Work

I found an interesting video of Professor Paddy Miller talking IESE's program Creative Cultures: Making Innovation Work. The video talks about the importance of innovation in our current global economy and the challenges in making innovation permeate the organization.



"Much of the innovation industry talks recycled platitudes: the real secret is that innovation is more about business culture than it is about brainstorming ideas. A culture of innovation is driven by the individual. It's instilled in an organization by small teams working together day to day."

- Paddy Miller, IESE Professor


What do you think?

@innovate

Elizabeth Gilbert Thinks Differently About Creative Genius

Here is an interesting video of Elizabeth Gilbert speaking about the impossible things we expect from geniuses and artists. She also shares the radical idea that all of us "have" a genius. It's well worth the time investment.

Check it out:



What do you think?

@innovate

UTEK Webinar Synopsis: Gary Hamel - "Innovation in Rough Times"

I had the good fortune to attend Gary Hamel's webinar today on "Innovation in Rough Times", and will now share some of the notes, quotes, and key insights I was able to capture.

Please NOTE: Because these are notes, they may be a little rough, but I've done my best to clean them up.

Gary Hamel has been called the world's most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal, and his latest book, The Future of Management, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in October 2007 and was selected by Amazon.com as the best business book of the year. Gary Hamel was a founder of Strategos, which was acquired by UTEK in 2008.

Here are some of Gary Hamel's thoughts:

The tide is running out and the only way for companies to outperform their competition and market expectations is to continue to innovate.

The companies that win will have to create highly differentiated products and services, or build a radically-different cost structure compared to their competition.

In this market, innovation on the cost side is also important.

In the present market, companies face:

• Falling entry barriers (deregulation, digitization, new channels)


• Growing buyer power (more choices, better information, falling transaction costs)


• Hyper-efficient competitors (labor arbitrage, zero legacy costs, new business models)

There is no other area in business where the correlation is weaker between inputs and outputs than in innovation.

So how can you maximize your investment?


Five drivers of innovation efficiency (ratios):

1. No. of Radical Ideas/No. of Ideas (or incremental ideas)


2. No. of Innovators/No. of Employees


3. Ideas from Outside/Ideas from Inside


4. Learning/Investment


5. Commitment/Time

Additional Commentary on Driver #1 (No. of Radical Ideas/No. of Ideas):

• Most new ideas are incremental, but outlier ideas are the only ideas with the capaibility of delivering extraordinary profits


• The need to increase the proportion of radical ideas, doesn't imply taking radically more risk - there is not a direct correlation


• Does it have the power to change customer expectations? (Paypal, online news, etc.)


• Does it have the power to change industry economics? (eBay, IKEA, etc.)


• Does it have the power to change the basis for competition? (does it wrongfoot the competition)

Additional Commentary on Driver #2 (No. of Innovators/No. of Employees):

• Where does innovation come from?


1. Challenging unexamined orthodoxies


2. Exploiting unnoticed trends


3. Leveraging unseen capabilities


4. Meeting unarticulated needs


• Only a certain number of employees are truly innovators


• Key question - How many people have been trained to be business innovators?


• The answer most managers give mystifies me


• Every employee should be trained in the same way that Toyota trained every employee in quality control methodologies


• Toyota received 540,000 suggestions last year for improvement


• What is your company's average number of ideas/employee?


• 5-6 per employee per year should be the minimum but most companies are not anywhere close


• Companies are generally disappointed with their new electronic suggestion boxes (very incremental or flights of fancy)

Advice from Braden Kelley: Companies should not set idea submission goals, but they should train all employees how to be business innovators and have the strategies, policies, process, and systems in place to encourage idea submission and more importantly, the infrastructure to support idea implementation and communication of results

Additional Commentary on Driver #3 (Ideas from Outside/Ideas from Inside):

• View everyone as a potential partner


• Leverage the competencies/assets of other organizations where possible


• Recombination - Nike/Apple example


• Create platforms for 3rd party innovators (Microsoft, Google Maps, Apple AppStore - 50,000 apps)


• Get your customers to innovate (Dell IdeaStorm - 11,000 suggestions)


• Troll the world for good ideas (entrepreneurs in residence around the world, trolling patents, IBM's open-sourcing of its strategy)


• Bid out problems - Innocentive - was mostly technology - but now Chicago Transit Authority and others are putting up business problems

Additional Commentary on Driver #4 (Learning/Investment):

• How many things do you try?


• How quickly do you learn?

Additional Commentary on Driver #5 (Commitment/Time):

• Consistency over time is important, try not to have huge shifts in innovation effort


• Commitment is about persistence and perseverence not how much you spend


• Companies too often lose patience with an idea


• Nespresso took about 20 years for that product to become a significant business for Nestle (lots of evolution in the business model, the product, etc.)


• How engaged are people?


• This varies by country (Companies in Asian countries tend to have highly disengaged employees in comparison with western countries)


• People don't tend to feel engaged - Less than 1 in 5 people feel highly engaged in their work


• Obedience -> Diligence -> Intellect -> Initiative -> Creativity -> Passion


• Those things at the top (initiative, creativity, passion) are gifts from employees


• We are now in the creative economy


• How do I build an organization that elicits these extraordinary gifts that these employees can give?

I hope these notes have given you a good idea of some of what was discussed in Gary Hamel's presentation of "Innovation in Rough Times" and what the key takeaways were. Please also see my blog articles on Tim Jones' and Regina Lewis' portions of the webinar.

Happy innovating!

@innovate