Monthly Archives: June 2009

Innovation Through Design Thinking

Here is another video from Tim Brown of IDEO, this one is “Innovation Through Design Thinking” from a visit to MIT (skip ahead three minutes if you’re pressed for time):

According to IDEO, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation.

This video highlights how companies use design thinking in their businesses, from Motorola thinking about strategy to P&G thinking about moving into new markets to Microsoft thinking about the application of new technology.

I’ve always believed that:

Innovation = Invention + Insights

It was good to see Tim reinforce this core belief when he says “Insights are the fuel for innovation.”

Some of the key things to consider when looking to use design thinking as an approach to innovation:

  1. Analogous situations (example: hospital operating teams versus pit crews)
  2. Insights come from the extreme users (example: working with kids on cooking tool project)
  3. Getting out there to look, listen, try
  4. Building to think – prototyping for thinking and learning not as an outcome of what you’ve done
  5. Using storytelling to develop and express ideas
  6. Design thinking is not just about methodology, it is just as much about culture

Finally I’d like to leave you with one thought from the video:

“Many great ideas fail not because they were not great ideas, but because they could not navigate the politics and processes of the organization.”

What do you think?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

My View on Crowdsourcing Published on BusinessWeek.com

Helen Walters, Business Week’s Editor for Innovation and Design, recently gathered opinions on crowdsourcing, via Twitter.

I replied with a quote via email and Business Week published it recently with a dozen others. Here’s mine:


You can find the whole slide show here.

“The future of crowdsourcing will be as an integrated and required part of the front end of innovation. Its role, however, will be limited in order to protect brand perception and competitive differentiation. Crowdsourcing will serve as an input into the innovation process that must be filtered by internal resources and built upon as necessary. The most forward-thinking organizations will invite the wisest of the crowd to participate in this idea refinement side by side with internal resources.”

What do you think?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Creativity versus Literacy

I came across this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking about how schools kill creativity.

He contends that more emphasis should be placed on teaching creativity in schools, and that teaching creativity should be as important as teaching literacy.

Here are some of his other key thoughts and insights:

The great thing about children is that if they don’t know, at least they’ll have a go – “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Unfortunately, by the time we become adults, most of us lose this capacity.

“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or we are educated out of it.” – Sir Ken Robinson

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Every society has the same heirarchy of educational subjects:

  1. Mathematics and Languages
  2. Humanities
  3. Arts
    • Art and Music
    • Drama and Dance

As children grow up we start to educate them from the waist up, then just their heads, and then we focus slightly to one side. Meaning that the most successful people produced by this system end up being university professors who live in their heads and view their bodies as transport systems for their heads.

The public education system was created during the industrial revolution and primarily serves to educate the workforce and to serve as a protracted process of university entrance.

The consequence is that many brilliant, talented, creative people are left feeling that they are not.

At the same time we are going through a period of academic inflation – the jobs that used to require a bachelor’s degree now require a master’s and those that used to require a master’s now require a PhD.

We need to think about intelligence differently. Intelligence is dynamic, interactive, and inter-disciplinary.

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson has collected a lot of this thinking into a book called The Element.

What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

Definition – What is Innovation?

Innovation has been defined many ways by many different people.

In January 2009, innovation was defined forty different ways in under 140 characters for a Twitter contest (many of which can be found here) .

These of course aren’t the only possible definitions for innovation, but here is a video of my innovation definition (along with an example):

“Innovation transforms useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” – Braden Kelley

What is your innovation definition?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

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Twitter in the Classroom

During Clayton Christensen’s talk at the World Innovation Forum about innovation in education and healthcare, Dr. Christensen made a point about how technology will move more of education out of the classroom and onto the Internet.

He was mostly speaking about augmenting home schooling, but also about school leavers earning their equivalency online, and online advanced placement courses for kids at schools who might not have the resources to provide these courses.

This sparked some humorous debate amongst those in the Bloggers Hub at the World Innovation forum about the possibility of teaching kids 140 characters at a time via Twitter.

Well, teachers are not exactly doing that, but they have been using Twitter in the classroom since at least January 2008.

At the University of Texas at Dallas, History Professor, Monica Rankin has been using hashtags for classroom discussion in the hopes that it would lead to increased student involvement. Here is a video made by film students at the university about the experiment:

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota has been partnering with Roosevelt High School to integrate Twitter and other social media tools into the curriculum to successfully increase student engagement. Here is a video that the University of Minnesota put together about their experiment:

Out here in Seattle, National Public Radio (NPR) recently did a segment on how a local private school is using Twitter to facilitate improved communications between students and parents about what is going on in the classroom. As a parent, this is probably my favorite example of using Twitter in the classroom. You can hear the four minute audio story here (sorry, link broken) and see examples of The Meridian School‘s classroom tweets above.

For teachers considering the use of Twitter in the classroom, you should also check out this blog article on thirteen ways to use Twitter in academia (sorry, link broken).

So, does Twitter have a place in the classroom?

I think so. What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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