Category Archives: education

Innovation Requires Diagonal Thinking

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Innovation Requires Diagonal ThinkingThe outcome of a back and forth of a dialog on Twitter with Scramray E. Pinkus generated a lovely quote worth sharing:

“Innovating is like thinking diagonally. A perfect combination of both linear and lateral.”

– Scramray E. Pinkus (@Easelton)

The conversation sprung out of a tweet I posted that postulated that when people use technology (iPads, smartphones, laptops, etc.) and television as child minders, that they are actually promoting linear thinking in their children at the expense of the lateral thinking that our society so desperately needs. We need strong lateral thinking to compliment the dominant linear thinking out there, so that together they can drive the social innovation the world needs to fix this mess we’ve made.

What do you think?

Technology as child minder, positive or negative effects on the innovative capacity of our children?

One of my proof points is this article from The Washington Post.

Any other proof points out there?

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Toronto Innovation Book Event

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Toronto Innovation Book EventOn Tuesday, November 9, 2010 I will be speaking about my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire at a book event at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto as part of their Innovation in Business Experts Speaker Series @ Rotman.

TIME: 7:45 am to 8:45 am – Presentation and Q&A

PLACE: Classroom 127 (ground floor), Rotman School of Management, 105 St. George Street, Toronto

FEE: $49 plus HST per person; $39 plus HST per person for Rotman and U of Toronto alumni (fees include the session, 1 copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire)

TO REGISTER: Click Here

I will be speaking about my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose, answering questions, and signing copies of the book.

If you’re in Toronto I hope you’ll register for the event and I’ll see you there.

If you’d like to organize a Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire book event in your city, please let me know.



Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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Innovation Multiplication

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I came across an interesting video with economist Alex Tabarrok talking about the incredible rate of progress in idea creation in the last 50 years and the prognosis for the next 100 years. His main premise?

“One Idea, One World, One Market”

Check out the video:

The video does a great job of visualizing part of the reason that the rate of technological advance is increasing – there are more people working to create ideas and solutions than ever before. Despite the incredible growth in idea creation over the last 50 years, Alex Tabarrok talks a lot about the need to increase the number of idea creators. Currently, less than 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population are scientists and engineers (1 in 1,000).

Innovation MultiplicationIf you think about the world’s population as one interconnected cloud computer, and follow that analogy through – billions of our processors are offline. If the rest of the world were as wealthy as the United States, there would be five times as many scientists and engineers.

The United States may be losing its idea leadership, but that is a great thing because it means that the number of idea creators is increasing.

For example, in the ten years from 1996-2006, the number of university students in China increased from 1 million to 5 million. Dr. Tabarrok didn’t present the data, but I imagine there was probably a similar increase in India during the same time period.

“We all benefit when other countries get rich”

  • greater demand for ideas

  • increased supply of new ideas

Who will be the idea leader over the next 50 years?

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Creativity versus Literacy

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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)

Twitter in the Classroom

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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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