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New research over course of 6 years, published in December Harvard Business Review - Insead's Hal Gregersen:
"Studies have shown that creativity is close to 80 percent learned and acquired," he told CNN. "We found that it's like exercising your muscles -- if you engage in the actions you build the skills."

Exactly the argument we make in our Innovation Workshop - and while those "innovation muscles" may be creaky in many adults, it's always interesting to see how creative people can be in our final 10 minute exercise at the end of the day. Typical to have over 150 ideas surfaced in one exercise alone.

More details on the workshop at:
http://www.informationarchitected.com/services/education/one-day-innovation-workshop/

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China is pushing to lure back top Chinese scientists from the United States back to China, using the standard tools of capitalism - funding. Capital and incentivization isn't limited to corporations, but to "organizations" (including countries) of all shapes, sizes and regions.

What are YOU doing to get the best and brightest people in your own organization?

"The goal is to address the biggest roadblock to China's aspirations of becoming an innovation powerhouse: an acute shortage of seasoned research scientists. Accomplished physicists, biologists, and mathematicians—who might produce technological breakthroughs and build key research programs—have long balked at low pay and a university system marred by corruption, cronyism, and lax standards. But now, China's economic boom and surging government investment in research are making mainland university posts more attractive. A decade ago, only 1 in 100 leading Chinese scientists in the U.S. would have considered returning, says Rao Yi, a former Northwestern neuroscience professor who is dean of Peking University's life sciences school. Today, he says, half would. "Now, there is a chance of recruiting the rising stars of Harvard," says Rao. "

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The Bangkok Post Business section picked up on our Innovation Management research, and used a few of the findings to kick off an article on Innovation.

"INNOVATION: ARE YOU TALKING THE WALK OR WALKING THE TALK?

These days, it's impossible to read the business news without finding articles referring to the world of innovation. Companies proclaim they will grow faster than their competitors because they are going to innovate better products.

Self-proclaimed "innovation experts", who in the past sold marketing, benchmarking and Six Sigma as the "one and only way to heaven", have recently jumped on the innovation train. They are now bombarding audiences with shallow articles and low-value talks full of innovation buzzwords, from "out-of-the-box" and "disruptive" to "cutting-edge" and "breakthrough".

Public sector agencies organise conferences and events where the concept of the Creative Economy is rightfully celebrated, but without success lessons being effectively adopted and translated into meaningful policies.

Yes, there's a lot of talk about creativity and innovation. But what about the actual process of innovation itself?

A new global innovation survey conducted by Information Architected Inc, found that 17 out of 20 managers agree that innovation management is critical to their firm's business success. Yet 51% of the companies participating in the survey have no formalised innovation management practice. Half of the participating managers said the lack of a systematic innovation process was the biggest impediment to managing innovation, followed by a lack of innovation resources, leadership and adequate funding. Moreover, 7 out of 10 respondents said the downturn has raised the need to actively manage innovation; but only 24% of firms have done anything specific to manage innovation in the last two years.

So how about your company? Do you still only talk about how important innovation is for your business and how much you are going to innovate soon? Or do you already walk the walk and do what it takes to

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Interesting holistic approach by Vale (NYSE: VALE), a mining company, has partnered with Biopalma da Amazonia S.A. to make a significant (and ultimately, total) switch to biodiesel fuel to power it's own operations. Combined with replanting to equal or exceed their carbon footprint, they are making serious investments and commitments to changing the way their business is powered.

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Open Innovation stories from General Mills - classic tale of needing to get out of your own R&D mindspace, and directly engage a larger audience than "the usual suspects"

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A recent offering from the Cambridge Innovation Center (Cambridge, MA), is that introducion of a coworking office space, at a radically reduced price (for Boston-area at least). A phenomenon that is much more prevalent on the West Coast, this is another sign that innovation and entrepreneurship is alive and well in New England.

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From 2008, but interesting observations.

11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft:
1. RELY ON CRITICS
2. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT
3. MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS
4. GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
5. DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CUSTOMERS
6. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT FAILURES
7. MOVE QUICKLY, IN PIECES
8. STATISTICS BOLSTER EXPERIENCE
9. DEMAND EXCELLENCE OR YOU’LL GET MEDIOCRITY
10. CREATE A NEW TYPE OF PRODUCT
11. OFFER EMPLOYEES SOMETHING EXTRA

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Declaration of Innovation proposed by Secretary Gregory Bialecki, Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development - for anyone living and working in Massachusetts, this is a great step. Help sustain the innovation agenda - it takes far more than just the government to step up and state innovation is important.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1. Innovation is our edge. For almost four hundred years, our economic prosperity and our quality of life have been advanced through technological and social innovation. Innovation has always been, and still is, our fundamental competitive advantage. Our innovations have benefitted the state, the nation and the world.

2. Innovation is everywhere (Part I). Our innovation instincts show up in every industry sector, from manufacturing to digital technology to life sciences to the creative economy, and also permeate our nonprofit and government sectors.

3. Innovation is everywhere (Part II). There are innovation success stories all over the state and indeed in our neighboring states as well. We must keep in mind that innovation knows no bounds.

4. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let’s face it, when it comes to innovation, we rock. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve (a lot) on what we are doing, but it does mean that we should stop wasting our time worrying about whether we are really in the big leagues. We are.


5. Together we can. The keys to success for a Massachusetts innovation agenda will be local collaborations among business, academia and government and global collaborations with innovators from around the world.

Here within the Patrick Administration, we strongly believe that the Commonwealth must have a deliberate innovation agenda as a core element of our economic development strategy. We will be using this blog to talk more about that agenda, but our objective is simple: To create and sustain what is widely recognized as the most effective collaboration of industry, academia and government in support of technol

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And Sam is back on the scene... Innovation, speaking the right language to the crowd, balancing a drive to invent the next new thing with the process to actually EXECUTE on the idea. All great ideas. Commented on the article - what are YOUR thoughts?

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Evolution, Crisis, Too Many Definitions, Sparta, Courage... whew, this article by Moses Ma at Psychology Today packs quite a punch. I've commented on the article there. What's your take?

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Ideas - the Ties that Bind? Haven't read this yet, but an interesting premise.

"Abstract: Ours is an argument for ideas that become us. Illustratory is a statement by a well-known management author who lamented the difficulty of “escaping one’s past ideas”. Viewing himself a prisoner, his past published ideas had devoured him: they limited his ability to imagine or credibly present new, different ideas. The predicament reflects the perspective we wish to develop in this paper: Ideas may be seen as our embodiments rather than what is more often put forth, externalized as objects that we create and dismiss at will. We argue that a way of looking at ideas is to start by considering humans, and managers, as spokespersons for out-there ideas, which inhabit them at a time of readiness. People become possessed; they become imprisoned by certain ideas that they then begin to perform. A jester is an example of a performer of an idea of a fool even if occasionally, as we argue in this paper, the jester may also counterbalance the cognitive inertia of managers. We draw attention to the common difficulty managers have, to move beyond the particular idea that has become them, once – like the jester - they have begun performing the idea(s)."

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I'm honored to be presenting at the Front End of Innovation in Boston May 18th-20th, 2009. Lucky enough to be the kick-off podcast interviewee for all of the speakers this year.

"Yesterday I had a brief conversation with Dan Keldsen, the Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected, in which he talked about some of his work at the consultancy firm and some insights he plans to discuss at the Front End of Innovation Conference taking place in Boston this May. Dan will be presenting on Enterprise 2.0 and its heavy connection to innovation on Tuesday, May 19th. Stay tuned as we will be bringing our readers more podcasts from those speaking at FEI."

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Interesting take at BusinessWeek by Douglas MacMillan regarding Amazon releasing the Kindle app for the iPhone.

My take:
The ongoing revenue stream for Amazon is clearly in the electronic books themselves, not in the Kindle (or Kindle 2), and in general, as I found out when I was consulting with a company who served the microfinance world - credit card companies aren't competing with each other, they're competing with CASH.

Amazon isn't competing with Apple, they're competing with non-consumers of books and magazines, and for those who, particularly in this economy, who aren't willing to pony up for the Kindle but who still want the content. I have the Kindle app on my iPhone, and while it works just fine, I agree with the general sentiment, that for serious readers (I frequently consume 2-3 books a week), the iPhone isn't the format you're going to want to read. The Kindle? Perhaps.

The economics of e-books are still a bit expensive for the consumers, and publishers have only begun to get their heads around this "new" distribution model. Then again, Apple's iTunes Music Store wasn't exactly an overnight success. Innovations take time to find a foundation. All sorts of baggage that needs to be undone, for consumers, authors, publishers, and on and on.

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Interesting ideas - having a company now that is all about architecture (of a different kind than would be built by cardboard), of course I think about architecture and re-usable building blocks more than ever. Neat tweak on Legos, Cuboro, Megablocks, Lincoln Logs and other playful architectural elements. They're Bloxes, originally created by the venerable Jef Raskin of Apple fame.

Cardboard creativity
"A few months ago, the Google Open Source team had an offsite in our Chicago office, and we were looking for something fun, social, and geeky for the teams to do during informal discussions. Before that, my colleague Aza had shown me a cool new thing that he was making called Bloxes -- interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They were actually invented by Aza's father, Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project at Apple), and were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles). Having seen some samples of what you could build with them, I thought it would be fun to order a bunch of Bloxes for the team to build things out of while sitting around chatting and brainstorming."

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cardboard creativity innovation architecture experiment google

Ah, lean and process. Still obsessed with trying to bring Lean Thinking out of the manufacturing world and into white-collar work.

Interesting exercise:
"Sal Runfola, director of operations at Food Sciences and the person directing our event, had six members of our group stand around a conference room. He gave a tennis ball to one man, who was instructed to toss it to someone else. The second person had to toss it again, but only to someone who hadn’t touched it before. This went on until the sixth person had the ball." (read more)

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lean_process lean_thinking lean process business_process_management tennis_ball game innovation

Ran across a Forrester "call to arms" looking at the innovation market space. Many people in my network should hop on to the blog post and make sure you have mentioned your company and solutions to Chris. I added a few, and of course dropped a line for our new company, Information Archiected. Is your Information Architected for Innovation? I certainly hope so! And if not, well, I have some ideas that should help.

So, innovators - get thee to Forrester to help them scope the space, and please, comment to my blog post/bookmark to let me know you've done so. Want to set up briefings as we head into 2009 so I'm fully aware of what you're all bringing to market!

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Good to see the X Prize Foundation turning it's eyes towards more pressing needs on Earth, not just the space race.

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Off the beaten path, but permit me a personal bookmark. Looks like 3 fine tomes for the Lego MINDSTORMS crowd. (need to sell my old version, and buy the new...)

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Interesting AP article, found via WIRED syndication. MIT's OpenCourseWare has been around since 2001, and separating learning/teaching from the credentials of "going to MIT" seems to have done the trick. Driving up the "brand" while leaving revenue alone,

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education innovation itunes learning teaching video podcasting MIT credentials opensource online free freeware

Nice short collection of Office 2.0 tools. The blog on this site is an interesting read, although "colorful" commentary is putting it mildly.

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