brenda m. michelson 's Library tagged Innovation →  View Popular, Search in Google

"You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an "I'm not creative" mind-set for an "I am creative" one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.

The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator's DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the "I'm not creative" brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack."

innovation creativity mindset christensen

Provocative view. Lots of good linked content.

"It's an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there's another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, "It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.""

internet neal-stephenson innovation

"Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable."

nytimes innovation bell_labs

"Achieving continuous innovation, Hamel stresses, “lies outside the performance envelope of today’s bureaucracy-infused management practices.” It will require major changes in mind and heart. It will need, Hamel writes, new values, new processes for innovation, a greater adaptability, the infusion of passion in the workplace and a new belief system or ideology."

Innovation Hamel

"They work very hard to stay very small. Even top-tier talent is turned aside or denied. The emphasis has shifted from "how do we successfully scale the team?" to "how do we successfully scale the team's influence and deliverables?" Instead of seeing an explosion of virtual teams, what's emerged are teams cleverly using digital and social media to extend their reach both inside the enterprise and out. Key suppliers and channels are contacted on an "as needed" basis"

innovation teams hbr

"Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a "paradox of expertise" in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions. "When it comes to innovation," she writes, "the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization's success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it." "

innovation hbr

"The maker movement is both a response to and an outgrowth of digital culture, made possible by the convergence of several trends. New tools and electronic components let people integrate the physical and digital worlds simply and cheaply. Online services and design software make it easy to develop and share digital blueprints. And many people who spend all day manipulating bits on computer screens are rediscovering the pleasure of making physical objects and interacting with other enthusiasts in person, rather than online. Currently the preserve of hobbyists, the maker movement’s impact may be felt much farther afield."

makerfaire innovation diy

"Yet we've found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map-a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products."

hassle map thinking innovation

"Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things..."

innovation economist clay-christensen

"If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.

But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?

So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets, because the bad case never seems that bad to me."

amazon innovation

"It's natural for people pursuing innovation to jump into idea-generation mode. After all, when you generate ideas you feel like you're making progress. But my experience suggests that you should spend roughly six times longer generating a killer question than positing answers."

"..The next time you or your team start generating ideas, stop. Step back. Make sure you've thought about the question you're trying to answer..."

innovation thinking

"But if innovation is simply a matter of learning about more technologies, why do organisations find it so hard? One reason, says Mirchandani, is the fact that people are encouraged to specialise in their careers. “During the Renaissance, people were encouraged to be good at many things,” he says. “Today, that’s a dying breed. Even in business, we encourage people to be very siloed.”

That specialisation happens at an organisational level too. The IT department, Mirchandani says, has been typecast in a particularly narrow role. “IT was sent into the woods at some point in the late 1990s; we had Y2K overruns, we had ERP overruns, we had e-business which was overhyped. In the early 2000s, therefore, a lot of CIOs started reporting to the CFO and what the CFO wants is compliance and control.”

This puts IT departments, and the executives who run them, in a difficult position when it comes to innovation. On the one hand, Mirchandani says, “they have a 30-year lead in terms of deployment of technology, understanding its cost and how to deal with technology suppliers.” This means that “CIOs are extremely well positioned as we move into a world of more compound innovation.” But Mirchandani argues that innovating while serving the ‘compliance and control’ agenda is beyond even the most polymathic of IT executives. “You can’t expect the same person to do both – they are mirror opposites.” "

innovation Mirchandani

"Fourth are the cyborgs, companies like Google, Amazon and Apple that have been purpose-built to achieve super-human feats of innovation. You won’t find much industrial age DNA in these organizations. These companies have been built around principles like freedom, meritocracy, transparency and experimentation. They are so endlessly inventive and strategically flexible they seem to have come from another solar system—one where accountants are treated as servants rather than gods."

innovation hamel wsj

Forrester report on creating Architecture Innovation Zones to encourage business innovation. Speaks of risk management over risk mitigation, enterprise architects embracing (rather than stifling) innovation and need to ready to operationalize innovation zone technology.

"Architects have long struggled to find the correct balance between innovation and standardization. Over the past few years the scale has been more heavily weighted on the standardization side. The economic downturn put pressure on operating budgets increasing the pressure to reduce costs, while CIOs put pressure on EA organizations to prove their value. These pressures have encouraged EAs to focus more on cost savings than strategy realization, and standardization is their No. 1 tool to manage cost. This shift hasn't stifled innovation so much as it has moved it even further into the business - and farther away from IT's influence. When architects don't fully embrace and support innovation, they fundamentally cut themselves out of the innovation process."

forrester entarch innovation

Michael Schrage asks readers to pick 2 from his list of 6 Innovation Ideas of 2011. I pick #2 and #3. Especially 3 - experimentation at scale. (can you say cloud computing?)

innovation 2011 technology schrage