Archive for January, 2011
Who Makes Education?
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect on 31 January 2011
Too often people think about things happening to them, rather than thinking about how they make things happen. Agency is important, and we must never forget that we have the capacity to act. You can see the results people can have in the current events in Tunisia and Egypt.
Agency is a critical part of citizenship – a point that Lewis Hyde makes in his excellent new book Common as Air. After discussing how the concept of property includes both rights of action and exclusion, and that the former is often forgotten, he says:
What might be called he active-verb part of property will be especially marked in those areas of social life where participation is essential. In a viable self-governing nation, for example, citizens can only know themselves by way of their civic agency. True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers. The same may be said of a viable culture.
It struck me as I read this that the same can be said of education. Try this out:
True students are not the audience of their education, nor its consumers, they are its makers.
In order to learn, you have to participate, you have to take action, and you have to connect ideas. We’ve known this at least going back to the foundation of the Socratic method.
What does education look like when you think of it in this way? I think it ends up looking a lot like the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course put together by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Here is part of how they describe it:
CCK11 is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.
In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web. We will provide some facilities. But we expect your activities to take place all over the internet. We will ask you to visit other people’s web pages, and even to create some of your own.
It’s easy for educators to just tell people a bunch of stuff and expect them to remember it. It’s more challenging to create a situation that facilitates agency and learning – but that’s what innovative educators do.
In the same way, it’s easy to be a student when all you have to do is memorize and regurgitate. It’s a lot harder to create your own course.
But creating your own course, and your own assessment is what true students do. They exercise their right to action in their education.
Can Your Friends Make You More Innovative?
Social influence is important to innovation. One of the critical steps in innovating is getting our great new ideas to spread – and this is often an issue of social influence. Here is an excellent short talk from network researcher Sinan Aral about how to measure social influence:
Sinan Aral: Social Contagion from PopTech on Vimeo.
Here are some of the key ideas that arise from the talk:
- The economy is a network: in order to understand how innovations diffuse, and how ideas spread, we have to think about the economy as a network. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum – decisions are a social action (see the collected work of Mark Earls on this topic).
- Your network is also important for idea generation: Jorge Barba recently asked whether innovation is primarily an individual or a group activity. It’s a group effort – just as decisions are social actions, so is idea generation.
- If your friends are making you fat, are they also making you innovative?: this is the key issue – if idea generation is a social act, and you want to be more innovative, then you need to spend more time with people and groups that are more innovative.
If we want to innovate more effectively, we have to gain a better understanding of how social influence works.
In the meantime, it’s probably a good idea to start hanging out with people that seem to have a lot of ideas.
Let me know what you think.
Or even better, tell your friends to come and let me know what they think!
Innovating in an Emergency
Posted by John in innovation on 25 January 2011
It’s now two weeks since the beginning of the flood emergency in Brisbane. Somehow it doesn’t seem like two weeks. The first two days were pretty much a blur with trying to get my family to higher ground and then moving furniture and other stuff upstairs above the predicted flood level.
I was lucky because the water just came to my back fence but others in my neighborhood of Graceville were not so lucky. In my local goverment area of Tennyson, about 30% of homes were damaged by the flood. However, what has really amazed me is the speed of the cleanup operations. A lot of this is due to the goodwill of people in Brisbane donating time and resources but there is also an innovation story here.
Graceville Cleanup
A central part of the cleanup and support operations has been the parents and citizens committee of the local Graceville State School. Within hours of the floodwaters receding, the committee has mobilized to arrange support structures for affected people and to direct resources where they would be most effective. The first community coordination meeting was held on the next day (Friday).
In an interview with ABC News, the P&C president, Wayne Penning, described how rapidly they were able to coordinate a response to the disaster.
Basically through the P&C, which I’m the president of, we’ve mobilised a project team of about 20 core people across procurement, equipment, volunteering deployment, food allocation and also just some street reconnaissance and intel about what the needs were. We had a citizens assembly in our hall at 12.00pm (AEST) on Friday and since then we’ve mobilised probably about 12,000 people we’ve got into about 500 homes. And at 12.00pm (AEST) today (Monday) we just handed over that flood clean-up operation centre to the council
This is an impressive response but the key to it was that the committee usually organizes a large fund-raising fair every year. Instead of trying to do something new they adapted the management and operations of the fair.
Procurement expertise was already in place and instead of teams managing groups of stalls, they managed streets. Facebook was used to agregate information and then send it quickly to those who needed it.
Sometimes when there is an urgency to come up with a solution there is a temptation to design something from scratch. What I have seen in my suburb reminds me that to respond quickly, take a look around, see what’s already working and then adapt it.
4 Roles for Your Innovation Team
Posted by Tim in business models, connect, innovation strategy on 24 January 2011
Here’s a persistent innovation management question: is it better to have a dedicated team responsible for innovation, or should this responsibility be distributed throughout your entire organisation? The best answer depends on your circumstances. But if you set up a dedicated team, it’s important to consider what role you want them to play. There are four different roles that a dedicated innovation team can fill.
One of the organisations that John and I do quite a bit of work with has a new internal group that’s been set up to try to help facilitate the identification and execution of innovations that will have a longer-term impact on performance. Prior to this, they had been responsible for facilitating all innovation throughout the organisation. In this new configuration, a different group is responsible for helping incremental innovations. The longer-term group, which includes all the people that we’ve been working with over the years is supposed to be looking at “emerging opportunities.”
Over the past few months I’ve been working with them to try to figure out what their business model should be. As we talked things through, we realised that there were really four different roles that they could try to fill. This is what they are, in order of increasing levels of resource commitment:
- Information Facilitation: this is essentially the role they used to have before the restructure. When you do information facilitation, you find information about innovation, and distribute this to people that are generating ideas. This will help them figure out how to best execute the new ideas. In this role you can also work on developing processes and infrastructure that support all parts of the innovation process. This type of group is most active in supporting idea generation.
- Opportunity Consultant: a group doing this will do everything that an Information Facilitation team does, but they will take a more active role in selecting ideas. They work to ensure that the ideas that are pursued connect with the organisation’s overall strategy. In this role you work on developing the best possible set of criteria for evaluating ideas, particularly for fit with objectives.
- Opportunity Enabler: this type of group goes one step further – they work to connect ideas with those that have the resources to execute them. Enabling collaboration is a big part of this role – you need a group in this role if you are pursuing an open innovation strategy. This type of team will also work on developing implementation plans, and trying to quantify outcomes and learnings from new initiatives. Opportunity enablers are active in supporting all steps in the innovation process – idea generation, selection, testing and diffusion.
- Execution Delivery: this is the most active role you can have – this is a group that doesn’t just support the innovation process, they actually undertake all the steps. Most R&D groups fall into this category.
It pays to think about this taxonomy for a few important reasons:
- Upper management often thinks that they are setting up an Execution Delivery group, but only puts together a group with sufficient skills and resources to successfully fill one of the less intensive roles. You can’t set up an innovation group, with responsibility for innovating, without also provided the resources that are required to do this. If you have limited resources (or limited commitment), it is better to acknowledge up front that your new team will be Opportunity Consultants or Enablers. Or even Information Facilitators. The more clear you are about the group’s objectives, the more likely it is that they will be successful. And the objectives have to align with the resources.
- The skills that you need to fulfill each role increase substantially as you move up the list. This is one of the issues that the team we’re working with faces – they started out as Information Facilitators, but in their new role will only deliver value to the organisation if they are able to be Opportunity Enablers. This requires a different set of skills. Fortunately, the group is very bright, and quick learners – so they may well be able to build these skills. But again, you have to think about what skills are required up front.
- Because the skill requirements are different, don’t expect one group to fill more than one or at most two of these roles. To some extent the lower-level activities are included as you move up the ladder, but not entirely. If you need to have all four roles filled within your organisation, you probably need to have more than one group working to support innovation. Or you at least need to have responsibility for these different roles clearly assigned to different people within one large team.
Using specialist teams to support innovation is a really good idea. However, in order for them to be successful, you need to be clear at the start about which role you want them to fulfill. Each one requires different skills, and different levels of resourcing. If you want a high-performing Execution Delivery team, you need to resource it appropriately.
If you don’t don’t need a full delivery team, or if you don’t have the resources or commitment to supporting one, then you need to scale back expectations. It’s a question of figuring out which role best supports your overall strategy. That’s how you work through your ball of creative mess.
(the cartoon is from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter – you can subscribe to it here)
Innovation – A New Match Between Need and Solution
Posted by Tim in design, innovation strategy on 21 January 2011
Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr
While revisiting some collected innovation readings, I recognized that it might be important to briefly emphasize again one “fundamental”: the distinction between needs and solutions.
According to Christian Terwiesch, co-author of “Innovation Tournaments”, innovation is defined as “… a new match between a need and a solution so that value is created.” The novelty can be in the solution, in the need or in the match. In all cases, this new match results in a specific market, leading to a demand for the solution. Customers hire solutions they perceive to serve their particular needs best. Customer perception and buying decision are based on conscious as well as unconscious drivers.
It’s the innovator’s job to come up with solutions capable of meeting those needs. In order to increase likelihood of market success, customers become integrated in the innovation process. However, the meanings of needs and solutions are often blurred while talking about customer requirements. Example: Don Norman asks in an insightful talk which I definitely recommend watching: “Is there a fundamental need for indoor toilets?” Is he actually talking about a customer need or a demand for a specific solution?
Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.
Dev Patnaik highlights the distinction between both in a Business Week article named “Needs + Solutions = Innovation”:
Understanding this distinction can affect how you listen to your customers, how you conceptualize new products and services, even how you analyze existing markets to create new strategic platforms. (…) Without an attention to both needs and solutions, a company can find itself optimizing products for a set of needs that no longer exist.
Lance A. Bettencourt has addressed some related assumptions in an article worth reading. I’d like to reference and comment to two of them here:
Assumption: ‘Customers Can’t Articulate Their Needs’
Bettencourt: “The myth that customers cannot articulate their needs is perpetuated by innovation success stories such as the microwave, the Sony Walkman and (more recently) the Apple iPod and iPhone. The story goes something like this: “If you had asked customers, they couldn’t have told you they needed the iPhone. Therefore, it must be true that customers cannot articulate what they need.” But there’s the rub: However brilliant it may be, the iPhone is not a customer need. The iPhone – like the microwave and Walkman before it – is a solution to a customer need. When companies get solutions and customer needs confused, it confuses the role of the customer and the company in the innovation process. Customers articulate their needs; it is up to the company to create a solution. It is not the role of the customer to provide technology ideas to the company, or even to evaluate the potential for a new technology to satisfy their unmet needs. How would they know? They are not technology experts. Confusing these roles leads to infamous stories, such as those recounted in the Fortune article, in which customers have rejected now-successful innovations. But the truth is that those customers were not guilty of being unable to articulate what they needed; they simply could not evaluate whether a proposed new technology would satisfy their needs – quite a different task. When customer needs are defined in a manner that distinguishes them from solutions, not only can customers articulate their needs, but those needs become the valued foundation of the innovation process requires.”
Point: If customers are involved in the front end to provide information on solutions instead of needs, they will likely tend to stick to solutions they already know and are familiar with – customers usually don’t leave existing regimes they are used to. Their valuation and beliefs are biased by these regimes. This restricts the innovator to come up with a novel solution that would even be better suited to meet the needs. The proper evaluation of needs by means of direct and indirect customer integration bears higher innovation potential than involving customers in the solution development. The more radical an innovation, the more it differs from existing offerings (if at all available). As existing solutions act as ‘benchmark’ for users, their input tends to be limited when it comes to the development of more radical innovation. However, research indicates that some customers are better than others at imaging how concepts address needs.
Assumption: ‘Customers Don’t Know What They Need’
Bettencourt: “Such misguided thinking is especially apparent when product managers speak about new-to-the-world innovations. “If the solution we’re going to propose does not yet exist,” the managers say, “then how can customers possibly know that they need it?” But again, the managers are confusing solutions with needs. (…)
The truth of the matter is that customers “hire” solutions to help them get jobs done. When we define customer needs around the jobs that customers are trying to get done, then we can see that new innovations – even the most radical or disruptive innovations – do not create a customer need. They simply satisfy a customer need in an innovative way. Furthermore, if a company can learn how customers evaluate how well they’re able to get jobs done using today’s solutions, then it can learn precisely where customers have needs that are currently unmet by any solutions – fertile ground for innovation.”
Point: Innovation doesn’t create a need. It creates a demand for the innovative solution, depending on how well the solution is able to satisfy functional or emotional needs. In case of radical innovation, the novel solution based on new technology and/or a meaning change, is entirely different to existing ones. This kind of innovation mostly disrupts current or creates new markets by leaving existing regimes. It matches needs of an innovative minority first, rather than being driven by the majority of existing markets, being bound to the existing regimes. An analytical understanding of innovation, such as the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ approach followed by Bettencourt, aims at finding solutions for defined needs and finding needs for defined solutions, respectively. This presumes that customer needs are basically accessible and can be predicted. In case of uncertainty, i.e. if needs are not (yet) well-defined, an interpretive approach seems to be more indicated for innovation. Needs evolve and change often unforeseeable with time due to cultural, technological, economical or environmental reasons. It’s a matter of ‘foresight’ to be able to envisage those evolutions, e.g. through participating in interpreting networks. By combining vision and empathy, anticipated needs can be addressed by innovative solutions. Ideally, a ‘proposal’ becomes adopted by the market, or as Roberto Verganti puts it in his book: “That was outside the spectrum of possibilities of what people knew and did. But it was not outside what they could dream of and love, if only someone could propose it to them.”
Takeaway: The distinction between needs and solutions turns out to be crucial. Innovation is a result of a novel match of need and solution – and requires proper consideration of their different contributions to the process. Offered products and services are being positioned and valued on the basis of the customer’s personal frame of reference. This is constituted by the variety of functional and emotional needs. Given that analysis and interpretation are complementary approaches to innovation, customer orientation comprises
- orientation towards the customer, i.e. translating defined customer needs into innovative solutions, and
- orientation of the customer, i.e. coming up with innovative proposals to ‘mirror’ and shape emergent needs.
One of my favourite articles, “The Innovator’s DNA” outlines required skills an innovative person should possess to be successful. I think there is another one to be added to this list: abstraction. For me, abstracting from solutions to needs seems to be a prerequisite for innovators as well. If innovators focus on solutions, it will limit how they perceive the customers’ actual needs. Appropriate approaches to separate needs and solutions, i.e. solution-neutral and truly empathic front ends of innovation, are indicated.
What do you think?
Is Your ‘Small World’ Network Too Small?
Posted by John in innovation, networks on 20 January 2011
If you are new to this blog, you may not know that Tim and I are business school academics with a particular research interest in networks (person to person) and innovation. We have a few other research interests but this is where we spend most of our time with our doctoral students and industry collaborators. In 2008 we were awarded a substantial research grant from the Australian Research Council on how social network structures affect innovation performance in firms.
Over the past few years we have collected data from a global mining company, engineering companies, high-tech services and local government and we have made some conclusions about a class of network called a ‘small world’. This phrase has entered popular culture and I am sure you have had several small world experience when a new work colleague from another town turns out be a married to a friend from school (or something like that).
As we have said before on this blog, this ‘small world’ experience has also been called ‘six degrees of separation’ and it has been puzzled social scientists for decades. Many years ago, a US sociologist by the name of Stanley Milgram popularized the six-degrees idea by getting people to send a letter to someone they had never met in another US city. The senders had to do this by sending the letter to people they knew who might know the final receiver. The amazing finding was that the average number of steps was a little over 6- hence the six degrees of separation.
The Milgram experiment has been repeated internationally with similar findings and the Kevin Bacon game works on the same principle. The fact that small worlds ‘work’ is a bit harder to explain. We don’t have that many contacts and we mostly prefer to be with people who are culturally or professionally similar to ourselves. This would suggest that the world is organized into distinct clusters of people and yet we have this idea that we are six network steps from anyone on the planet. Surely both clustering and few steps through the network can’t work together? Or can it….
One of the really interesting breakthroughs in network science over the past 10 years is an understanding of why small worlds work – and this has some pretty big implications for managing innovation (which I’ll explain later). Most of what follows here is taken from Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. This is a really interesting account of networks and the six degrees problem and it’s very readable.
Watts introduces small world networks as being in between highly structured networks with organized clusters and networks with completely random links
The ‘regular’ sample network is highly structured with everyone connected to their immediate neighbors but count how many steps it takes to get from one side of the network to the other. On the other hand, the random network has few steps between anyone in the network but has no organization to it. The small world trick is that a few random connections across clusters in the network creates shortcuts and turns an organized (silo) structure into a small world. It turns out that this structure is very common in many social networks and this is a real map of a small world network of project engineers within a large multinational business. I have indicated a person who acts as a ‘connector’ by putting a red circle around them.
Collaboration Network of Engineers
Now, I suspect that many of you are thinking about the possibility of having organization structures together with an efficient way of transferring ideas and expertise. The small world network shows us that this is possible and there is a lot of good evidence that it can support innovation. I won’t go into great detail (and you can read a more technical review from Tim and me here) but my favorite evidence comes from the Broadway Musical industry. Using collaboration networks of score-writers, choreographers and librettists, this study showed that block-buster musicals were more likely to occur in the small-world environment.
So far, so good but can your world become too small and too connected? Another really interesting finding from the Broadway study was that too much small worldedness (e.g more clustered and less connected overall) correlated with decreased musical success. This is interesting and we think that there are two things going on here.
A highly connected cluster of people is like a goldfish bowl. Everyone knows everybody else and knows the same thing. Like a goldfish, talking around the network just makes us see the same things and hearing the same information. There is a very strong chance that group think and rigidity will set in when this network structure occurs. Another way of looking at it is that there is nowhere that different ideas can emerge.
The brokers in ‘hyper’ small worlds can get overloaded. When the clusters get too big and overall connectivity relies on a handfull of people they get overloaded or even use their position to selectively filter information for their own benefit. One study that Tim and I have done shows and engineering collaboration network that looks like a small world but the role of the connectors in that instance was to filter rather than pass on information. This small world network resulted in decreased collaboration performance on the project.
Small worlds can help innovation but look out for signs that groups are getting too inwardly focussed on their own work and watch for the overloading of connectors.
Thanks to Sam Macaulay for help with the network data.
An Innovation Definition: Something That Does Not Work Yet
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, time on 19 January 2011
Those of us that spend a lot of time thinking about innovation tend to view it as something that is good. After all, research shows that organisations that are more innovative are more profitable, have happier employees, grow faster, are more resilient, and have many other positive attributes.
So how can you not love innovation?
And yet, many people don’t love it. Especially managers.
James Gardner and Jeffrey Phillips have both written excellent posts recently about why this is so – you should give both of them a read.
Here is part of what Phillips says:
…innovation is fairly unpredictable. This is increasingly true as the amount of disruption possibility increases. Again, we have executives who have been taught to believe, and their compensation reinforces, that businesses are organizations which produce regular, steady outcomes in the face of any environmental uncertainty or economic chaos.
Kevin Kelly explains why the uncertainty level is so high with innovation in What Technology Wants (and you can see an earlier version of this argument here on his blog):
The advantages of new technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. It is, to repeat Danny Hillis’s definition of technology, “stuff that does not work yet.” A new-fangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can offer only uncertain advantages in exchange for certain trouble. Even after an invention has been perfected elsewhere, when it is first introduced into a new zone or culture it requires the retraining of old habits…. The first version is almost always only marginally better than what it hopes to displace. That is why only a few eager pioneers are inclined to adopt an innovation at first, because the new primarily promises headaches and the unknown. As an innovation is perfected, its benefits and education are sorted out and illuminated, it becomes less uncertain, and the technology spreads. That diffusion is neither instantaneous nor even.
Here is the heart of the matter: new ideas “can offer only uncertain advantages in exchange for certain trouble.”
This is probably the biggest problem that needs to be overcome in order to become more innovative. And I’m not sure how to best address.
To innovate, we need to be more comfortable with uncertainty, and uncertainty avoidance seems to be pretty well hardwired into most people. Uncertainty reduction plays an important role in creating nearly every one of the ten tensions in innovation that I outlined previously.
Unfortunately, making people more comfortable with uncertainty is really hard. That’s why there is often a strong emphasis on tools and process when organisations try to improve innovation. Unfortunately, these solutions often just mask uncertainty.
Instead of ignoring uncertainty, we need to actually come to grips with it. Learning some complexity theory can help, and so can acknowledging the issue up front.
If anyone has any further ideas about how to best confront this problem, I’d love to hear them!
How to Innovate Ancient Technologies
Posted by Tim in business models, innovation strategy, networks, time on 18 January 2011
People were using charcoal for art about 30,000 years ago. And we’ve been consciously manufacturing charcoal for at least 5000 years. Because charcoal burns hot and clean, it was the primary fuel source for making iron for quite a while, before it made its recent shift to cooking steaks on barbeques.
Most of our charcoal these days comes in two forms. You can get charcoal briquettes, which are primarily made from sawdust and other industrial byproducts. The ecological problem with briquettes is that they use a lot of glue and other chemicals to bind this material together, so they don’t burn very cleanly, and they are very inefficient. Or you can get charcoal made from wood – the performance of this type is much better than that of briquettes. The ecological problem here is that in many cases the timber source for charcoal comes from chopping down forests, which isn’t very sustainable.
So how can you innovate something that has been around so long, particularly since the technology for making commercial charcoal hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years or so?
You change the business model.
In his book 43 Principles of Home, Kevin McCloud tells the story of BioRegional Charcoal Company. BRCC is a loose network of people that have gone back to charcoal-making techniques that are hundreds of years old. Primarily, they are making charcoal out of coppiced timber. This is a sustainable source of wood – coppicing involves chopping the tops off of quick-growing trees such as willows every 7-20 years. With a large enough forest, you can do this forever.
Most of these operations are run by only one or a couple of people. And working at that kind of scale, you can’t make enough charcoal to supply the big grocery store chains in the UK. This is again the problem of diffusing a new idea through existing economic networks – and this is where the business model innovation comes in. Here’s how McCloud describes from a discussion with Pooran Desai, one of the co-founders of BioRegional:
… what it suggested was that the likes of Ben Law, underwoodsmen working by themselves in dank, lonely woodlands across Britain, were getting together and supplying big superstores like Sainsbury’s and B&Q with charcoal.
…
Pooran was able to put me right. Yes, tehy were selling charcoal from small British suppliers. Tehy’d grown in ten years to supply not only the B&Q stores but also Homebase and a couple of supermarkets, and they’d done it not by creating a single production company but by creating a network of small charcoal makers and acting as the coordinating agency for all of them. This was, I thought, a brilliant idea, because if you, as a company, want to supply one of the big supermarkets, who incidentally control 70 per cent of the UK charcoal market, you have to get yourself certified as one of their suppliers (in an age when they are trying to reduce their supplier base), you have to be able to guarantee supply (no easy when you’re representing a bunch of old bac kilowattoood hippies), you have to barcode the product all ready for them to retail (who’s going to do that in the middle of a forest?) and you have to buy and run their electronic purchase software (at an annual cost of about £1,500 – prohibitive for a small charcoal maker). BioRegional was galvanizing the small charcoal makers into stepping up their production and dealing with purchasing, admin and distribution. BioRegional calls this ‘network production’ – a term for a loose affiliation of people and ideas who work flexibly together that Pooran borrowed from his academic background in neuroscience.
The story of BRCC illustrates a few important points about innovation:
- Business model innovation is powerful because it lets you innovate anything – even an industry that has been around for 5000 years like charcoal production. It becomes even more powerful when you build business models that address some of the questions that Umair Haque raises in his recent post, such as: “Does it make people lastingly happier, in a sustainable way?” Thinking about these questions is a good way to start picturing new business models.
- Network production is a great way for small, craft-based firms to compete against large multinationals. As McCloud points out, without banding together there is no way that these small charcoal producers could get into the large chain stores. This is one way to get around the problem of getting your innovative ideas to spread throughout the embedded network economy.
- BRCC is creating value by using an aggregate, filter and connect strategy. They are aggregating all of the small charcoal producers into one large entity. And they are connecting them to each other, and to the technology and processes they need access to be able to act like a large firm. These are critical steps in creating value these days.
I love the story of BRCC. If you can innovate in an ancient industry like charcoal production, then you can innovate anything.
How to Respond to a Bad Idea
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect, innovation strategy on 17 January 2011
The best response to a bad idea is to make it better.
When I work with people from government agencies, and also those from many large corporations, they often talk about their risk-averse culture. One of the problems with risk aversion is that if someone tries out a new idea and it doesn’t work, they are punished. This leads to fewer and fewer people introducing new ideas, because the risk seems too high.
The other affect is that the people that do have good ideas will leave, and go work for organisations that are more open to new ideas.
These are big problems.
The best response to an idea that doesn’t work isn’t to punish whoever came up with it. This stifles change and growth. Here is how Kevin Kelly puts it in his new book What Technology Wants:
However, the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea. Indeed, we should prefer a bad idea to no ideas at all, because a bad idea can at least be reformed, while not thinking offers no hope.
Here’s the question to ask: do our systems encourage people to build on (reform) bad ideas, or do they encourage people to stifle new ideas?
You’ll only have innovation if you are able to use bad ideas as building blocks for new, better ideas.
Note: As John noted at the end of his last post, there was substantial flooding in Brisbane last week. We’ve both been very fortunate in the floods, but many people have lost their homes or businesses. If you’re interested in contributing to flood relief in Queensland, the Premier’s Flood Appeal is probably the best bet. And the floods in Brazil are even worse – if you want to support people hit by those, Plan is a good organisation.
Natural Innovation
Posted by John in innovation on 11 January 2011
A couple of weeks before Christmas I noticed something odd in the garden of my house in Brisbane. While I often see ants around the home, there were now large clusters of ants moving upstairs and taking their eggs with them. The folklore is that when this happens it means that we are in for a really wet spell of weather and I am on the record with Tim as making a prediction based on this. I can’t tell you how the ants know when to move but they seem to be a very accurate long-range forecaster of weather. If you haven’t seen the news, this photo shows what has been happening here in the city and the situation in the towns up river has been catastrophic with loss of life.
Brisbane River in Flood
As I said, I haven’t heard of a good explanation for the ant weather forecast but the Australian aborigines collected a great deal of knowledge about animal behaviour and weather patterns. Apart from the ants, they had other signs that were learned over 40,000 years living on the land.
It got me thinking about how many clever tricks exist in the natural world and how many would be useful to us if we could adapt or mass produce them. This is actually a very active area of science called ‘biomimicry’ which usually combines expertise from fields of biology and engineering. A long time ago I was a biochemist and there are many examples of the pharmaceuticals that we use coming from plants and fungus. There are many more really cool examples though.
-Velcro is an everyday item (I’m not sure if my son will ever learn to tie shoelaces!) but the idea was inspired in 1941 when a Swiss engineer looked under a microscope to find out why ‘burr’ seeds stuck so well to the fur of his dog.
Velcro
- Have you noticed how jet engines have a point in the middle to improve airflow?
Ramjet Engine
I’ve been told that the idea for controllinng engine turbulence at high speed came from an ingenious solution from the Peregrine Falcon, which can dive at speeds of around 300 kph. If you look carefully at its nose you will see little baffles that streamline the air intake at high speeds.
Peregrine Falcon
Nature is a valuable source of ideas. On the blog we talk about good innovation management as a process of generating a variety of ideas and selecting the best ones through trials. This is precisely what happens in nature so it’s not surprinsing that there is a wealth of valuable ideas here. Some of them are being engineered and applied for economically valuable purposes. Here are some that I am aware of. You probably know about more.
Permanent Colour
I’ve always been impressed by the iridescent blue and green on the beetles that appear in my backyard before Christmas time and it turns out that these colours are not a pigment in the usual sense of absorbing light from one part of the visible spectrum and reflecting other parts. This is actually ‘nanotecnology’ where structures in the beetle’s shell create colour in the way that a CD will also show colours when held up to the light.
Christmas Beetle
The trouble with paint pigment is that it eventually fades but the beetle’s colour is permanent until the nanostructures are damaged. Engineers are working on way to commercially replicate this permanent colour. Given the size of the paint industry, this could really be a disruptive innovation.
Next Generation Solar Panels
Solar energy is a great idea but a major problem is that the current design of photovoltaic panels means that they will always be expensive due to the price of silicon. The next generation of solar panels will replicate the chemistry that goes on in the leaves of plants. Dyesol is an Australian company that is developing liquid solar panels. Unlike the solid state panels, the main component is a relatively cheap dye called Ruthenium. Another advantage of trying to replicate photosynthesis is that it works in lower light conditions and the transparency of the panels means that every window can potentially be a solar panel, albeit with a slightly pink colour.
Dyesol Panel
Nature is a brilliant inventor but inventions are not innovations. Ideas are everywhere… in our heads, our organizations and all around us. There is a surplus of good ideas and if the focus of our efforts is to generate more ideas then we are wasting our time. Value is generated when we select the best ideas and connect them to the right people and processes to create new goods and services.
Postscript
Since I wrote this post a few hours ago the flood situation has deteriorated. Many thousands of people are being affected. There is an appeal to help these people. If you are able, please donate at http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html
-
You are currently browsing the archives for January, 2011
Metrics
Tim was named #5 in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2011 at Innovation Excellence.
Tim and John were both named in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2010 at Innovation Excellence.
Forex Robot
