“There isn’t anyone that doesn’t need to be a creative problem solver.”
– Brad Anderson, Former CEO of Best Buy
“What do we hope to learn from this effort? When you start from this question, every project becomes a series of questions you hope to answer, and each answer moves you closer to identifying the key market insight and achieving your expected innovation.”
– Braden Kelley
“Problem solving without the creative element is not truly innovative.”
– Ellen Bowman
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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I’m currently reading Creating Innovators and so I thought I would share the classic post from 2009 below.
In the first video, Gever Tulley describes our child safety-obsessed culture and the impact this has on the young minds of our children. He then speaks about the different impact you can have by teaching your kids how to play with dangerous stuff. He highlights five dangerous things to let your kids play with, but is working on a book that will highlight 50 dangerous things. Check out the video:
In the second video, Gever Tulley demonstrates the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School. When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster!
On his blog he lays out the principles of kit-based learning, which are great things for teachers and parents to think about when teaching science to children. Parents have an incredible opportunity to supplement the achievement test-focused learning their kids receive in school, and have fun with their children, if they take on this kind of interactive learning with their kids.
Principles of Kit-based Learning
The goal of any kit must be to teach how to think about the principle concept – the understanding and internalization of the concept comes naturally from the process. Memorizing the gravitational constant is not as useful as grokking the notion of gravity and developing a personal understanding of mass (constant) and weight (varies depending on context).
1. Focus on the quality of the experience first
like a story arc, plan for successes and setbacks
all stages of the project should be engaging and driven forward by the participants
2. Allow for personal expression within the experience
design variability into the project
3. Leave something to be discovered
some questions unanswered
some capabilities of the kit unexplained
some implications unstated
4. Support failure, require tinkering to get it right
allow for incorporation of external materials (but don’t require it)
instructions should only get you close to a solution, how close depends on the target audience.
5. Focus on a concept, but connect it to the world and the sciences
relate it to actual things in the world that the participants can identify and recognize
6. The experience should transition smoothly to tangential or subsequent topics
consider the kit as a part of a larger experience
avoid a hard definition of “complete” or “finished”
As we look to work our way out of this current crisis, the countries that foster innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in students alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic will be the counties that earn their place at the top of the economic pyramid. Those that don’t will continue to slide downwards.
“Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we’ve had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you’re really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.”
– Steve Ballmer
“The key is to pursue your innovation efforts as a discrete set of experiments designed to learn certain things, and instrumenting each project phase in such a way that the desired learning is achieved.”
– Braden Kelley
“Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.”
– Rosabeth Moss Kanter
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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“It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.”
– Katharine Hepburn
“But when it comes to innovation, it is not as important whether you fail fast or fail slow or whether you fail at all, but how fast you learn. And make no mistake, you don’t have to fail to innovate (although there are always some obstacles along the way). With the right approach to innovation you can learn quickly from failures AND successes.”
– Braden Kelley
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”
– William Pollard
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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It was a very exciting day in the Kelley household. The sample cards arrived today from the printers for the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool. The cards and the group exercises that go with them are designed to be a group diagnostic tool that teams and organizations can use to self-diagnose why innovation efforts are failing and how the odds of innovation success could be improved – or by me in a customized Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop.
I received ten decks of 54 cards each, for a total of 540 cards for me to bring next week to hand out to the 650 attendees at the Front End of Innovation conference in Orlando, FL (May 15-17, 2012). You can save 20% on the conference with discount code FEI12BRADEN. To let people see the sample cards I recorded a couple of videos that I would love to get your thoughts on (and some feedback on the cards in them too).
A fun one:
And an unboxing video:
I would be interested to hear in the comments below which video you think I should make the featured video on the product page and on http://9roles.com.
Also, please feel free to let me know what you think at first glance of the Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Tool sample cards in the comments as well.
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“Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.”
– Ludwig von Mises
“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).”
– Braden Kelley
“Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone’s imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don’t have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it’s impossible to do what they imagine.”
– Ron Johnson
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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Much has been written about ‘crowdsourcing’ and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ over the past several years, including “Crowdsourcing” by Jeff Howe – a contributing editor at Wired magazine, and “Wisdom of the Crowd” by James Surowiecki – a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Crowdsourcing – “The act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” – Jeff Howe
‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ – “Refers to the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question.” – Wikipedia
For those of you not familiar with crowdsourcing, here is a good video from Jeff Howe:
So, what will happen to ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘wisdom of the crowd’ as more and more companies start to employ these techniques.
Will the crowd remain wise or lose its predictive powers?
One thing is certain. Organizations will continue to use ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘wisdom of the crowd’ together to help them find ideas that will resonate with their targets.
Organizations will, however, have to work harder to market their initiatives as the competition increases for people’s time, if they are to maximize the value they accrue from the effort.
What do you think?
I recently used crowdsourcing to source the design for my upcoming Nine Innovation Roles interactive card game and received several good designs and one awesome one. Now I am using crowdfunding on IndieGoGo to raise the money to make it a reality and will be bringing sample cards with me to the Front End of Innovation 2012 in Orlando next week (Save 20% with discount code FEI12BRADEN).
Oh, and I will also be looking to crowdsource a software application for people to use on their iPad, iPhone, Android, or other mobile device too, so stay tuned!
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“Framing and reframing the right problem is perhaps the most important attribute of success. No pain (problem), no gain (solution).?”
– Sanjiv Karani
“You must find a way to create resource flexibility. Organizations that want to continue to grow and thrive must staff the organization in a way that allows managers to invest a portion of their employees’ time into promising innovation projects.”
– Braden Kelley
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
– Peter Drucker
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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In this economic downturn there is more pressure than ever on executives to find new sources of growth, and as a result leaders are increasingly talking about innovation. In some organizations the leader may say “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to think out of the box” and stop there. While for other organizations it may become part of the year’s goals or even the organization’s mission statement. Only in a small number of cases will there be any kind of sustained effort to enhance, or create, a culture of continuous innovation.
By now everyone has probably heard of six sigma and continuous improvement, and maybe your organization has even managed to embed its principles into its culture, but very few organizations have managed to transform their cultures to support innovation in a sustainable way. For most organizations, innovation tends to be something that is left to the R&D department or that is thought of on a project basis. Some organizations create new innovation teams, but it is rare for an organization to invest in transforming their entire culture. There are many reasons for this:
Support from top leadership is required
Challenge: Most executive teams are focused on short-term results and transforming organizational culture is a long-term investment of financial and leadership resources.
Clear goals and guidance are needed
Challenge: This is a bigger barrier than you might think. Most organizations struggle to understand how to set innovation goals and to provide a vision for employees on how they might get there. Goals to ‘be innovative’ or ‘think outside the box’ are not specific enough to be successful.
Every organization is different
Challenge: The starting place, needs and barriers to creating a culture of continuous innovation are different for every organization – making easy implementation of best practices impossible
Most companies lack a shared vocabulary for innovation
Challenge: People in different parts of the organization use different terminology, methodologies, frameworks, and have different understandings of what innovation is. The lack of a shared vocabulary prevents organizations from achieving shared success.
Change is painful
Challenge: Creating a culture of continuous innovation threatens the power base of a critical few, and disrupts the way people think about their jobs and the organization. Even if change is for the better, people tend to want to avoid change.
Change needs to be managed
Challenge: This means pulling employees off of their day jobs or hiring consultants to commit to the leadership and communications surrounding the change effort. This investment may prove challenging in the current economic climate.
Change takes time
Challenge: Organizations seeking to create a culture of continuous innovation must realize that the transformation will not happen overnight. People can only absorb so much change at once. The transformation will likely have to be broken up into separate phases with discreet goals (don’t try to do it all at once).
Make sure to stop and share the successes of each phase, and also to identify what you’ve learned that can be implemented in the next phase.
Visualize the outcomes of participation
Challenge: Often people withdraw and choose not to participate in organizational transformations because they don’t believe that their participation will positively impact their daily lives. If those who choose to participate don’t see an impact from their early efforts, might choose to disengage as the process continues.
You must celebrate participation and highlight the impact of individual contributors throughout the process.
New systems and processes may be required
Challenge: To innovate continuously, you need to be open to receiving great ideas from anywhere in the company, and must have systems and processes to manage idea gathering, evaluation, and development. Often this requires a financial and personnel investment.
Change efforts require lots of communication and storytelling
Challenge: You have to bring the change to life for employees. This requires involvement of employees early and often in the communications surrounding the goals and outcomes of the cultural transformation
Create a story that is easy and fun to tell – this will make it easier to cascade the change downwards through the organization
This should give you a better idea of why very few organizations embark upon the difficult work to enhance or create a culture of continuous innovation. It may not be an easy or a short journey, but creating a culture of continuous innovation is the only way to increase your chances of avoiding organizational mortality.
Successfully creating a strong culture of continuous innovation also represents a huge opportunity for an organization to attract the best talent, to lower costs, to continuously add new revenue streams, and to better achieve competitive separation.
Is your organization ready to invest the hard work towards achieving the rewards of a culture of continuous innovation?
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“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
– Steve Jobs
“While an innovation vision determines the kinds of innovation that an organization, and an innovation strategy determines what the organization will focus on when it comes to innovation, it is the innovation goals that break things down into tangible objectives that employees can work against.”
– Braden Kelley
“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.”
– John Emmerling
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
In this economic downturn there is more pressure than ever on executives to find new sources of growth, and as a result leaders are increasingly talking about innovation. In some organizations the leader may say “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to think out of the box” and stop there. While for other organizations it may become part of the year’s goals or even the organization’s mission statement. Only in a small number of cases will there be any kind of sustained effort to enhance, or create, a culture of continuous innovation.