I came across the infographic that I thought was interesting and thought I would share about the cost of an MBA and whether it is worth it.
As a career switcher, getting an MBA helped me change the direction of my career, but what do you think about whether getting an MBA is worth it or not?
And if you had a $100,000 would you rather use it to start a business or to get an MBA?
Following on the heels of a recent thought leadership webinar (link to recording) on the same topic, this white paper explores the intersection of talent management and open innovation strategies. The paper dives into why having an external talent strategy is becoming increasingly important and how it can help your company accelerate innovation, shows how leading organizations manage their open innovation and crowdsourcing efforts (including case study examples of companies like P&G), and provides proven strategies and steps to take for attracting talent to your organization’s innovation efforts.
These quotes from John Hagel’s article are important because they reinforce the notion that innovation is a social activity. While many people give Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the modern – day equivalent, Dean Kamen, credit for being lone inventors, the fact is that the lone inventor myth is just that — a myth. All these gentlemen had labs full of people who shared their passion for creative pursuits. Innovation requires collaboration, either publicly or privately, and is realized as an outcome of three social activities.
1. Social Inputs
From the very beginning when an organization is seeking to identify key insights to base an innovation strategy or project on, organizations often use ethnographic research, focus groups, or other very social methods to get at the insights. Great innovators also make connections to other industries and other disciplines to help create the great in sights that inspire great solutions.
2. Social Evolution
We usually have innovation teams in organizations, not sole inventors, and so the activity of transforming the seeds of useful invention into a solution valued above every existing alternative is very social. It takes a village of passionate villagers to transform an idea into an innovation in the marketplace. Great innovators make connections inside the organization to the people who can ask the right questions, uncover the most important weaknesses, help solve the most difficult challenges, and help break down internal barriers within the organization — all in support of creating a better solution.
3. Social Execution
The same customer group that you may have spent time with, seeking to understand, now requires education to show them that they really need the solution that all of their actions and behaviors indicated they needed at the beginning of the process. This social execution includes social outputs like trials, beta programs, trade show booths, and more. Great innovators have the patience to allow a new market space to mature, and they know how to grow the demand while also identifying the key shortcomings with customers who are holding the solution back from mass acceptance.
When it comes to insights, these three activities are not completely discrete. Insights do not expose themselves only in the social inputs phase, but can also expose themselves in other phases — if you’re paying attention. Flickr famously started out as a company producing a video game in the social inputs phase, but was astute enough during the social execution phase to recognize that the most used feature was one that allowed people to share photos. Recognizing that there was an unmet market need amongst customers for easy sharing of photos, Flickr reoriented its market solution from video game to photo sharing site and reaped millions of dollars in the process when they ultimately sold their site to Yahoo!. Ultimately, action is more important than intent, and so as an innovator you must always be listening and watching to see what people do and not just what they say. Build your solution on the wrong insight and nobody will be beating a path to your door.
Bringing It All Together
If your organization is struggling to sustain its innovation efforts, then I hope you will do the following things.
Find the purpose and passion that everyone can rally around.
Create the flexibility necessary to deal with the constant change that a focus on innovation requires for both customers and the organization.
Make innovation the social activity it truly must be for you to become successful.
If your organization has lost the courage to move innovation to its center and has gotten stuck in a project-focused, reactive innovation approach, then now is your chance to regain the higher ground and to refocus, not on having an innovation success but on building an innovation capability. Are you up to the challenge?
You can read ahead by getting the book or downloading the sample chapter, or by checking out the other parts here:
Ultimately, successful and sustainable innovation is all about purpose and passion. The people in your organization have to be clear on what the purpose of the organization is. Ideally, that purpose has to be something bigger than the individuals and something that people can get passionate about, because first and foremost, as Jeffrey Phillips has said, “You can’t force a disinterested person to innovate.”
Passion is a prerequisite not just for getting started with innovation; people leading innovation projects must have enough passion to fight through, over, around, or under any obstacles they may encounter in their effort to make a new idea a reality.
“Passion-based organizations stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and are able to attract people and resources to their causes. That got me thinking. Over all of my years as an innovation junkie, the common denominator, among the innovators I have connected with and the most successful enterprises I have observed and worked with, is passion. They started with a passion or cause and then organized around it to make it happen. Not the other way around.” — Saul Kaplan
Blogging Innovation as a Case Study in Passion
I started innovating long ago, but I didn’t start Blogging Innovation until 2006. I realized I needed an outlet to express my passion for innovation, and blogging offered the perfect opportunity. I kept reading and writing about innovation despite getting only a couple of hundred people to read my articles each day. Then at the start of 2009 I completed a marketing strategy project for Wunderman and Microsoft Windows Live, and, using some great tools including Website Grader, I discovered that the blog had some technical challenges. After fixing those, traffic to Blogging Innovation finally started to take off. Now instead of averaging more than 200 daily visits, the blog averages nearly 10,000 and the numbers are still growing. Do I spend less time on the blog now than I used to? No!
Most people would consider an increase in traffic of 2,500 percent in one year as being a huge success and a chance to relax, but I don’t see it that way. Back in August 2009 I decided to commit the blog to a mission of making innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good. As a consequence of that mission, I decided to open up the blog to the very best contributing authors on the topic of innovation and other marketing – related subjects that I could find.
Instead of using the blog as an extension of my company, Blogging Innovation exists to help raise the baseline understanding of innovation and marketing so that organizations can become better at satisfying the needs of their customers, the first time they try. After all, the more efficient our organizations are at meeting their customers’ needs, the less waste of human capital and natural resources. That’s what drives me to get up at 5:00 a.m. seven days a week to start letting people know about all the great content our contributing authors have published that day.
We have recently decided to take on a monthly sponsor who wants to be associated with innovation in a tasteful way, but that is not for commercial reasons but because the blog needs additional people power to run it and a new site design to make the content even more accessible. As I go out to look for the assistance I need to take Blogging Innovation to the next level, I’ll be looking for one thing in the people I choose to help make the community stronger — passion.
Note: For the newer readers, Blogging Innovation formed the foundation of Innovation Excellence before I sold it and re-booted Blogging Innovation as Human-Centered Change & Innovation.
Passion versus Obsession
There is a great article “Passion versus Obsession” by John Hagel that explores the differences between passion and obsession. This is an important distinction to understand in order to make sure you are hiring people to power your innovation efforts who are passionate and not obsessive. Here are a few key quotes from the article:
“The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.
It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces.
The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.
Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration . . . . The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them.
It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.”
The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.
It feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).
Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.
The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.
In addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.
A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.
From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.
To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:
Financial
Informational
Educational
Social
Or come from another store of value
You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.
In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:
1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?
2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?
3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.
And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).
This is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.
Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?
Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.
UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.
If You Want Systemic Innovation, You Need Systems to Manage It
If you are really serious about creating sustainable innovation in your organization and engaging more than just a handful of people in the generation of ideas, you not only need to have a group of people to manage the process (either part – time or full – time), but you also need systems to manage the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea development processes. This class of software is commonly referred to as innovation management software and it is often sold in a Software as a Service (SaaS) manner. Organizations with above average privacy or security concerns may choose to run this software locally in their own organization (see Figure 10.1 ).
There are tons of companies selling innovation management software, but the four heavyweights in this area are Brightidea, Hype, Imaginatik, and Spigit, but you also have software like Invention Machine and others that serve similar or adjacent needs (patent searches, etc.). But there is no reason you couldn’t build your own innovation management solution into your enterprise portal or collaboration software platform such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, and others (see Figure 10.2).
It’s not completely accurate to call it innovation management software because it only manages ideas, but having a software platform for managing ideas is crucial to ensure that you are able to do the following five key tasks.
Capture all of the ideas.
Allow employees to collaborate on evolving ideas.
Allow program managers to evaluate them.
Allow program managers to track idea development progress.
Allow program managers to monitor commercial success of ideas.
No matter how you choose to solve the need for an innovation management software solution, make sure that you have a plan for how you are going to address these five tasks, both in the software and in your organization’s policies and processes.
Innovation versus Flexibility
Does your organization focus on identifying only new innovation projects and not on making the organization itself more agile? For innovation to be sustainable, the organization has to become flexible enough to remake itself as its environment changes and succeed at completely new ways of doing business. Think about Nokia going from tires to mobile phones. Could your organization do that?
Or, think about the Apple iPod, and how Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. Figure 10.3 shows one way to think about the changes that both the organization and the customer had to think about (see the case study at the end of this section for more detail).
Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – Figure 10-3
Innovation is all about change. It’s about finding a new set of solutions that customers value above every existing alternative – including your current products and services. While investing in innovation projects is important, you have to also make sure that your organization is capable of adapting to the changes in the marketplace. What good is coming up with a breakthrough customer insight that drives great innovation ideas and projects if your organization isn’t capable of making the internal changes that are necessary to execute upon the insight and bring the product or service solution successfully to market?
If you live in the United States, you may be familiar with a couple of failed airlines — Ted and Song. United started the ill-fated Ted, and Delta started the equally unsuccessful Song in response to the growing success of low-cost competitors like Southwest and Jet Blue. Given that Ted and Song came along and copied a successful, proven business model, how did they manage to fail so miserably?
The answer is not a simple one, but in addition to the brand confusion they caused among customers, the harsh reality is that neither organization could change fast enough to operate as efficiently or effectively as Southwest Airlines and then create any innovation capable of proving their solution to be valued above every existing alternative.
Quite often it is not the technical aspects of invention that keep established companies from delivering disruptive innovations, but the change that is required either on the part of the customer in order to adopt an innovation, or on the company’s part in order to deliver the innovation to the marketplace (or both). Investing in innovation without also investing in organizational agility is often a fool’s bet.
Viewing innovation as a temporary, extraordinary effort in response to a crisis, or pursuing innovation as a competitive response.
Treating innovation as the domain of only the R & D or Marketing department, or some other subgroup.
Treating innovation as a project-based activity, instead of as an integral organizational capability to be invested in and professionally managed.
Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they’ve already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful — focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don’t get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability.
Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they’ve already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful — focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don’t get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability.
And of course, companies that fail to invest in at least incremental innovation efforts often find themselves getting less and less competitive in the marketplace. Ultimately, the organizations that create sustainable success are those that invest in not only identifying and implementing the change that their customers desire and require, but also the change that is necessary inside the organization to deliver it.
Who Innovates?
Do you have a group of innovation elites in your organization? Maybe these are folks in Marketing or in Research & Development. Or do you make a concerted effort for all of your employees to feel that it is part of their job to innovate? If people feel that innovation is someone else ’ s job, then they ’ re not going to participate, and you are going to miss out on a whole spectrum of interesting innovation ideas. The fact is that markets are too big, too complex, and opportunities for insight lie in too many different reference industries and geographies for any small number of people to be able to successfully sense and ideate. I heard Dr. Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, recently talking about who actually solves most of their challenges, and he said that if you were to classify people across a spectrum of those who you believed would be most likely to solve the challenges on the left and those you believed would be least likely to solve the challenges on the right, most of the solutions come from the right-hand side. So if the best solutions are most likely to come from those you would deem least likely, wouldn’t it make sense to include everyone in your organization in your innovation efforts? And possibly people outside your organization?
Innovating in a Crisis
Companies that only have the courage to innovate when there is a crisis, or a competitive response is needed, will be unable to achieve sustainable innovation. Not only that, but their innovation attempts are likely to lack the vision necessary to leap ahead of the crisis or competition — instead they will merely meet the threat and keep the organization as a reactionary pursuer of innovation instead of becoming a leader. This is the GM approach to innovation — constantly trying to catch up to where Toyota was five years ago — instead of trying to jump the next curve and regaining a leadership position. Innovating in crisis often means that the main motivator is going to be fear. Fear does not serve as an effective motivator for innovation. We know because of the inverse correlation between the fear of failure and the quantity and quality of innovation in organizations. Organizations looking to innovate in a crisis cannot do so over and over, and so they must find a way to transform feelings of fear into a believable, committed challenge mentality. To make an analogy: When the Russians launch Sputnik, you have to commit to an innovation moonshot.
Innovation Is Not a Project
Often when companies attempt to innovate because of a crisis or in response to the competition, they pursue innovation as a project. When you pursue innovation as a project, the organization does not build any kind of innovation capability. Instead a group of people come together to tackle a particular challenge, and when the work is complete everyone goes back to their day jobs. None of the learnings are retained in a meaningful and easy-to-access manner for future projects, and there is no opportunity for policies and processes to be refined for greater efficiency next time. You may be pursuing a portfolio of innovation projects, but innovation itself is not a project. Projects start and stop, but for innovation to be sustainable, it must be continuous. This often means investing in a small core team of people (maybe only allocating part of their time) to serve as innovation shepherds — identifying and cataloging innovation best practices and building the innovation capabilities of the organization so that all innovation projects in the portfolio
may benefit.
In this webinar hosted by Innocentive I explore how organizations can utilize open innovation and crowdsourcing resources as an essential talent management strategy to drive their business.
You can engage me to create a webinar or white paper for your audience here.
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I share my definition of innovation and the role of value in innovation in this clip from one of my many innovation speeches. This clip is from a corporate event to kick off the next phase of innovation efforts at FCS America.
I am the author of the popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons, and advise clients beginning their innovation journey or seeking to enhance the innovation efforts they’ve begun already.
I am an experienced innovation keynote speaker at conferences and private innovation events for corporations, government, and other organizations, and also deliver a two-day Masterclass around the content in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire to organizations around the world.
To book me for your conference or event, please click here.
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A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an innovation speaker at an event, I noticed a large building by the side of the freeway advertising Indoor Sky Diving. The sign peaked my curiosity to investigate what indoor sky diving could possibly mean and so I set up a visit with iFly Seattle co-founder Lysa Adams.
My visit surfaced three key innovation-related concepts I would like to discuss:
Challenging Orthodoxies
Changing Perspectives
Tunnel Vision
1. Challenging Orthodoxies
Rowan and I talk a lot here on Innovation Excellence about how challenging orthodoxies is one way to identify insights to drive innovation efforts, and it made me wonder:
Have they successfully challenged the skydiving orthodoxies that you need the following to experience the thrill of skydiving or ‘flying’?
To jump out of an airplane
To carry and deploy a parachute
To learn several parachuting skills before progressing to sky diving
What if you could experience experience sky diving without the parachute and the airplane and the training?
Well, after my visit it was clear that iFly and SkyVenture have successfully challenged these orthodoxies with the indoor flying centers they’ve built here in Seattle and 22 other locations around the world including Hollywood, Dubai, and Singapore.
The facility itself seemed to be well-designed, recycling the air through two fan-driven intersecting circles of air that are accelerated from about 30mph through the basement up to 100-160 mph through the chamber up and back around again. Integrated into the space around the necessary apparatus are meeting rooms for corporate team-building events and party rooms for private functions. Organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Boeing, and the military have used the facility. It’s a pretty a cool facility and it was even a fair amount of fun just to watch others fly from the integrated viewing area.
So what is indoor skydiving and how can you experience the thrill of skydiving and ‘flying’ without the plane or the parachute? Well here is a video that shows an amateur learning the basic skills in their first session:
In a vertical wind tunnel people are able to fly in any of the four different skydiving positions – stomach, back, sitting, and head down (after mastering the previous one) – supported by wind speeds typically of 100 miles per hour or higher (an indoor hurricane). The vertical wind tunnel at iFly Seattle is state of the art, allowing wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
I had the opportunity to learn how to fly and try it out for a couple of minutes, and I looked pretty much like the novices in the video above. I was flying successfully by my second minute, floating up beyond the reach of the instructor temporarily, and never felt any of the fear I might have felt if I had done my ‘flying’ by jumping out of an airplane. It was an amazing experience, and I could see how it could be very addictive.
So other than challenging orthodoxies, what does any of this have to do with innovation?
2. Changing Perspectives
Innovation often comes from looking at things from a different perspective, or from observing something potentially valuable to your target customers in another context that you can adapt and bring to them as a new solution offering.
This change in perspective can come from using creativity tools like Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or other tools like mind mapping, brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, SIT, or from building and tapping into a Global Sensing Network.
Or it can come from physically changing your orientation. In the case of sky diving, sometimes sky diving teams have to get down on their bellies on wheelie boards on the concrete to show each other the tricks they plan to do in the air or in the vertical wind tunnel. It’s hard for the brain to imagine in a vertical orientation what is going to take place in a horizontal orientation, and this simple physical shift makes all the difference.
If it doesn’t come natural to our brains to imagine the horizontal from the vertical, imagine the trouble our brains have imagining different business contexts without being immersed in them. We often have to go see the other context for ourselves as a result, but a Global Sensing Network can help avoid this need to some extent. But this requirement to see things for ourselves highlights something very important. Because changing perspectives presents a challenge for our human brains, it presents an opportunity for us to work to achieve competitive separation.
Imagine the competitive advantage your organization could build over the other organizations in your context if you could build up your perception shifting muscles to recognize the relevant challenges and opportunities in other geographies and contexts faster than the competition?
3. Tunnel Vision
Do you remember what is like the first time you learned to drive a car? Do you remember how much you had to focus on every little detail from how hard you were pushing the accelerator to how fast you were moving the steering wheel left or right? But how much attention do you pay to these things now?
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.
When it comes to innovation, most organizations suffer from innovation tunnel vision because as they look to involve more employees in their innovation efforts, they don’t give their employees the opportunity to learn and practice new innovation skills. Instead in many organizations we expect employees to just be innovative.
When it comes to creativity skills that tap into our right brain capacity, it is important to remember that as we master right brain skills they move to the left brain. And, when your left brain is occupied, then the right brain can go into a more creative mode. This is why you have many of your most creative ideas in the shower, or while you are driving, etc.
When the left brain is occupied it is less likely to intervene and criticize the ideas your right brain comes up with while they are embryonic and partially formed and kill them before you develop them further. When the left brain is not jumping in and trying to determine whether the ideas are logical or not, the right brain can focus on pure creativity.
This is why it is so important to create things like a common language of innovation, a shared innovation vision/strategy/goals, and to have a structured innovation process. If these things are all very clearly understood across the organization, then your innovation tunnel vision opens up a bit wider to allow you to identify more relevant insights and come up with better ideas. But you can’t stop there. If you want to engage all employees in innovation in your organization (or even a subset), and you want to open up the innovation tunnel vision in your organization even wider, then you must provide innovation training to every employee in the organization (or your chosen subset).
The faster you can get your employees to a level of comfort with your innovation language, vision/strategy/goals, process, and tools, the sooner they will be driving innovation with their knees, eating a Big Mac, and changing your innovation soundtrack – all with the windows down letting in new stimulus and fresh air into your innovation efforts.
Every organization has innovation tunnel vision, the question is how wide or narrow your field of vision is and how much you’re doing to pry the blinders farther apart.
Conclusion
We all are innovative in our own way, which is why I created the Nine Innovation Roles. But at the same time, we all have a certain level of innovation capacity, and if we develop that capacity we can achieve much more. If you want to get better at innovation as an individual or as an organization, you must learn new skills and you must practice them. Otherwise you will be an innovation belly flier forever. Thanks to Darren (my instructor at iFly Seattle – who used to be involved with Cirque du Soleil) and to Lysa Adams I was able to fly for the first time, but if I want to progress to back flying or sit flying on the way to head down flying and doing tricks, I must practice – in the same way that you must practice innovation in your organization. To conclude, I’ll leave you with this video of one of the instructors showing off and some team flying:
If you ever get the chance to try out indoor skydiving or ‘flying’, I highly recommend it as an amazing, fun experience. The cost runs about $60 for some basic instruction and a couple of instructor monitored flights (without the whole parachute or jumping out of the plane part). Happy innovating (or flying)!
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Click on 
It feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).
In addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.
3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.
This is where 
A while back on the drive home from the Seattle-Tacoma airport (SEA) after a trip where I served as an 
It came to me as I was staring at the vertical wind tunnel and talking with Lysa Adams about the challenges that beginners have when they learn to jump out of a plane and deploy a parachute, that when it comes to the human brain we have tunnel vision while learning a new skill. This tunnel vision, caused by our lack of experience, causes us to focus on a very small subset of parameters in the environment and makes it impossible for us to notice a lot of the other things going on around us or to focus our attention more broadly.