Monthly Archives: July 2014

Thought of the Day – July 30, 2014

I hope every parent (and person) out there will ponder the following question:

Are you teaching your kids to watch other people do things, OR are they learning to do things other people will find worth watching?

You can apply the same question to yourself, and even extend it a bit in a slightly different direction:

Are you spending your time talking about what other people are doing, or are you doing things that other people find worth talking about?

Bottom line, spend at least part of your free time and find something you (and your kids) are passionate about and learn (or teach) the skills necessary to do it and make the world a better (or more beautiful) place, instead of spending all of your time watching and talking about what other people are doing.

Carpe diem!


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Should the Government Encourage Innovation?

Should the Government Encourage Innovation?“We need to out-innovate, outeducate, and outbuild the rest of the world”

– United States President Barack Obama

In the quote above the American President implies that it is somehow the role of the government to drive innovation? But can they? And should they?

Governments and leaders around the world spend a great deal of time talking about innovation and its importance to their economies, but nearly all political leaders and governments have no idea about how to actually foster innovation.

There is a model for how governments can encourage innovation, and boost the performance of their economy as a result, and it is really quite simple. I call it the ICE Model of Innovation, and it’s focused on three key areas where the government can focus its investments of time and money, and both facilitate and fund efforts to advance the public involvement and education deeper into these three areas of ICE:

  1. Invention
  2. Collaboration
  3. Entrepreneurship

1. Invention

Innovation is Invention Collaboration EntrepreneurshipInnovation in any country, especially in the short term, is not achieved by pumping huge sums of money into government-sponsored research and development efforts. Yes, many successful innovations have resulted from government research investments, but we need to take a more strategic approach to these efforts.

The Internet itself may be one of the most successful government research and development efforts, and it has served as a platform for an enormous amount of other innovations to build upon. This type of platform innovation is where governments should target their investment dollars. We need more of these types of platform innovation investments, not just spending on basic research. Governments need to think strategically and fund those research efforts that could serve as platform innovations to power a whole new wave of innovative business ideas and job-creating companies in their country.

At the same time governments need to take another look at what they are teaching the children in their country. Let’s face facts. Today’s schools are designed to mass-produce trivia experts and basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic (and maybe some history, science, and other important subjects).

But, to succeed in the innovation economy, the next generation is going to need to be proficient in at least these ten things:

  1. Creativity
  2. Lateral Thinking
  3. Problem Solving
  4. Innovation (of course!)
  5. Interpersonal Skills
  6. Collaboration
  7. Negotiation
  8. Partnerships
  9. Entrepreneurship
  10. And much, much more…

And parents can either pray that the government will revise the curriculum and start focusing more energy on teaching some of these things, or band together and create supplemental learning opportunities for their kids. Seth Godin and I spoke about education and other topics in this interview from 2010:

Some of the work that Dean Kamen is doing with FIRST is a great example of how individuals and non-profits can supplement the educational work of the government to give kids the invention skills and inspiration that they’ll need to help invent a better future.

2. Collaboration

Another important component of innovation is collaboration. People learn more when they connect and share, idea fragments have the opportunity to collect and connect into potentially viable innovation ideas, and are made stronger from additional perspectives and new inputs. In every economy the government has a role to play in helping to encourage collaboration.

Every potential innovation always needs additional human and financial resources to thrive. When done well, the government can help to foster collaboration directly or indirectly. One of my favorite examples of this is the work that NESTA does in the United Kingdom (UK). If you’re not familiar with the organization, it is a charity that was funded by the UK government and NESTA stands for National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, and their mission is to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life.

What does Nesta do? Watch the video:

They host a series of innovation, entrepreneurship, science and technology events for citizens of the United Kingdom, produce a collection of complimentary research publications, and are quite active in the social sharing of information (including their own popular blog).

In the United States, the government encourages collaboration through events hosted by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and its public universities around the country to connect scientists, businesspeople and entrepreneurs for collaboration purposes.

And several countries’ efforts to encourage university-business research collaboration is referenced in this report.

3. Entrepreneurship

Everywhere you go cities, states, countries, universities, and private companies are setting up incubators or startup accelerators to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. This is important, but the importance of entrepreneurship is not limited only to the entrepreneur. At the same time, we must not forget the importance of intrapreneurship to the continuing health of our organizations.

In some ways, intrapreneurship is MORE important to the innovation success of a country than entrepreneurship because collaborative, creative intrapreneurship is the flavor of entrepreneurship that keeps a country’s great companies alive (through this innovation intersection of course).

Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are both important and we must consciously try to grow both in a successful society, and while intrapreneurs may not have the same tolerance for risk as an entrepreneur, they also need to understand how to make a business case and other core tenets of entrepreneurship.

There are many government sponsored efforts all around the world to encourage entrepreneurship, including SCORE (Service Corp of Retired Executives), which while technically a charity and not a government entity, received a great deal of support from the SBA in getting started as a national organization and the two entities continue to partner together to encourage, guide, and help entrepreneurs in the United States.

But, the best government programs in the world will still fail to encourage entrepreneurship unless you work to remove the social stigma of failure and examine the penalties for bankruptcy in your country. In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom where bankruptcy penalties are much lower, the level of entrepreneurship is higher. Coincidence?

Conclusion

I hope by now you see that it is possible (but difficult) for governments to encourage innovation IF they focus on increasing the support and skill bases around – invention, collaboration and entrepreneurship. Which countries will have the courage to completely revamp their educational systems to focus on teaching the skills that drive these behaviors? Which countries will create the policies, organizations, events and connections that accelerate these ICE capabilities?

Sources:

Transcript and video of the 2011 State of the Union address

Wikipedia entry on SCORE

Happy innovating!


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Things Every Manager Should Know About Innovation

Things Every Manager Should Know About Innovation

“In the 1980s, the [watchword] was quality; today, it’s innovation . . . But the two are not mutually exclusive . . . Now we want superior quality and faster cost reduction, plus innovation—all at once.”

— Harry Burritt , Whirlpool VP of Corporate Planning and Development

It seems like everywhere you turn these days, people are talking about innovation, and that is both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because true innovations deliver more value than the solutions they replace and so hopefully most of us are better off when new innovations are introduced and adopted. It is bad because everyone means something slightly different when they talk about innovation. So what is innovation?

My definition for innovation is:

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

Key points highlighted in my definition are the distinction between invention and innovation, the importance of value, and the requirement that any potential innovation deliver more value than every existing solution (even the “do nothing” solution) in order to become widely adopted. But, this is my definition, and each organization will need to define what innovation means for their organization, and ideally pair this definition with an innovation vision, strategy, and goals that align with their organization’s broader vision, strategy, and goals.

At the same time you hear people talking about innovation, you sometimes hear people say things like “oh, I’m not creative” or “I’ll never get a chance to innovate” or “innovation is not for me” and I have to say that nothing could be further from the truth. Innovation is a team sport, and so nobody should ask whether they are innovative or not, or whether they possess the innovator’s DNA. When it comes to innovation, we all have a role to play.

In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, I detail the Nine Innovation Roles that must be filled at various stages of the innovation process in order for your innovation efforts to be successful. They include the:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Conscript
  3. Artist
  4. Troubleshooter
  5. Magic Maker
  6. Connector
  7. Judge
  8. Customer Champion
  9. Evangelist

I’m of the opinion that all people are innovative, in their own way. This is not to say that all people are innovative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one or more of the Nine Innovation Roles, and that when organizations engage the right people for the right innovation roles, the organization’s innovation speed and capacity will increase.

And as I mentioned earlier, innovation is all about value and so innovation in the organization does not have to be confined to a few people locked away in a research lab or some secret skunk works project in the company, but instead every manager can create innovation in his or her group. How is this possible?

If we refer back to my definition of innovation above, one of the key components is that innovation creates “widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.” There is nothing preventing those solutions from being solutions that provide value inside the organization or solutions that form a component of a larger customer solution. As a result, this puts the opportunity to innovate within reach of every manager in every organization as long as they do three things well:

1. Value Creation

  • You can create new value by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or by creating new psychological or emotional benefits.

2. Value Translation

  • Here you must help people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

3. Value Access (aka Friction Reduction)

  • How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

So, find out what innovation roles your employees excel at, involve them in looking for opportunities in your department to create a leap in value in what you do, seek out new tools to help them stretch their creative problem solving muscles, experiment, learn from your failures, build upon your successes, and most of all, enjoy your chance to help drive innovation in your organization no matter where you sit on the org chart.

Happy innovating!


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How would you create an oil lamp out of an orange?

How would you create an oil lamp out of an orange?Often innovation comes as a result of someone looking at things differently.

And as I’ve laid out in the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework, innovation starts with inspiration. If you missed haven’t seen the framework, click the link in the previous sentence, but here is a quick recap of the eight continuous steps:

1. Inspiration
2. Investigation
3. Ideation
4. Iteration
5. Identification
6. Implementation
7. Illumination
8. Installation

Click here for the English version
Click here for the Spanish version

Speaking of inspiration, I’m always on the look out for things that make me look at things a little bit differently, and recently I found this video that shows how to make an oil lamp out of:

  1. A jar of olive oil
  2. An orange



Videos like this, properly introduced, can be a great way of helping to focus people’s creativity on the innovation challenge that you’re currently attacking.

What videos do you like to use to inspire people’s creativity?


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Why the Maker Movement Matters

Making MakersThe Maker movement is steadily gaining steam and some cities are looking to help it grow and thrive, seeing it as an opportunity to inspire artists and entrepreneurs. One such city is Edmonton, which lies in the Alberta province of Canada, and its program in their public library system to provide maker spaces staffed with library employees and equipped with 3D printers, computers with Apple’s Garage Band and Adobe’s Creative Suite, and more.

Here is a video of Peter Schoenberg of the Edmonton Public Library introducing the EPL MakerSpace:



If you’re not familiar with the Maker movement, then check out these pages:

Maker Faire
Maker Culture – Wikipedia

Or check out these quotes from Time magazine’s article titled “Why the Maker Movement is Important to America’s Future“:

“According to Atmel, a major backer of the Maker movement, there are approximately 135 million U.S. adults who are makers, and the overall market for 3D printing products and various maker services hit $2.2 billion in 2012. That number is expected to reach $6 billion by 2017 and $8.41 billion by 2020. According to USA Today, makers fuel business with some $29 billion poured into the world economy each year.”

“As someone who has seen firsthand what can happen if the right tools, inspiration and opportunity are available to people, I see the Maker Movement and these types of Maker Faires as being important for fostering innovation. The result is that more and more people create products instead of only consuming them, and it’s my view that moving people from being only consumers to creators is critical to America’s future. At the very least, some of these folks will discover life long hobbies, but many of them could eventually use their tools and creativity to start businesses. And it would not surprise me if the next major inventor or tech leader was a product of the Maker Movement.”

So what do you think?

How much of a contribution to the future of innovation will the Maker Movement make?

How important is supporting the maker movement to the future of an economy?

Is this trend sustainable?


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