Expand Your Mind: Inclined to Innovation
by Miki Saxon
Innovation and how to make it happen is the highest priority item on any company agenda—and if it isn’t it should be.
Just how do you make innovation flourish?
Collaboration ranks high on the list of required actions; as Saul Kaplan, founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory, says, “It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to experimentation and change.”
“What if” drives innovation according to Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, who started out thinking that creativity and innovation were hard-wired, but decided after six years of research that they aren’t, “One key characteristic among the visionaries? The tendency to ask questions — a lot of them — and to challenge the status quo — plenty.”
Bruce Nussbaum, who writes about design and innovation for Business Week, talks about Diego Rodriquez, who writes Metacool blog, and has developed his own set of 17 Innovation Principles; he illustrates number 12, cultivating innovation instead of managing it, using a conversation with Porsche’s head of design Michael Mauer, “One of my major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of creativity,” to which Rodriquez says, “This feels very much to me like a “cultivation mindset”. … He is a curator, a director, a cultivator. As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.”
Next, Scott Anthony, Managing Director of Innosight Ventures, talks about what stops innovation. “You can almost always find compelling ideas and well-developed plans. … The hard part is in the doing, in taking the requisite steps to translate an idea that looks great on paper into profits.”
Now two looks at innovation in action at opposite ends of the spectrum.
According to Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft, “Innovation is overused as a word. We are at the juncture of where… it’s time to be thinking about how to accelerate, and accelerate using technology as an enabler not an automater.” This approach seems to involve investing in startups where innovation flourishes and buy the results.
Then there is true innovation, the kind based on real-world experience and need as exemplified by Michael Wielgat, a Chicago Fire Dept. lieutenant with 22 years of experience. He invented the “Hero Pipe” to help firefighters battle high-floor blazes. He’s been working on it since 2005, bootstrapping the effort. “Homeland Security has invited Wielgat to apply for a grant to continue development of his invention. He could use the money. He’s tried to get funding before from other sources, but has been turned down, he says, because they supported only fire departments or nonprofit organizations.”
Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr
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March 24th, 2010 at 11:39 am
You should throw a digg button on here to make it easy for people to digg you
March 24th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
It’s there, just click the ‘Share’ icon at the end. Lovely that you want to do it. Thanks!