Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

Just today I read a post from an Innovator in LinkedIN that Innovation is painful and that we should just accept that it will be so. Companies will resist and will fight those 'doing' innovation inside corporations and this is a fact that we must accept. As one that has endured the struggles and negativity of innovating in deficient environments I have to say: I categorically disagree. The danger with 'accepting' is that we may forget that a piece of the mission is to endeavor to make the world a better place and as such we have to always try to change the ecosystem around us to be more supportive of innovation initiatives. The World does not need more naysayers and corporate organizations that are against Innovators. We need the opposite. We need more new ideas making it into production faster for the benefit of all.  We need more innovators with minds that can blend new trends into new ideas.  We need organizations to actively support, encourage, inspire...

There are many reasons I wanted to start an Innovation practice (in the new lexicon: Innovation Lab) inside a large corporation that is at the front end of dealing with the digitally-based disruptive onslaught. The initial co-founder and I suggested such a practice to our management in response to a lunch we had with an Innovator from Nokia back in 2006 and the pre-iPhone era. (Yes, the same Nokia that is now fighting for its life.) There are huge lessons learned just from that lunch that may explain why Nokia finds itself in the situation that it is in. I will expound on that lesson at a latter date, for  now to the subject of this post. I wanted to learn and feel what it would be like to go against the grain, delve into emerging new ideas and to institute new thinking. In retrospect this is what I had always done in my career and thus wanted to put those abilities into a "legit" environment where that was "the" job. Now in its 6th year, the practice has chan...

We all know the feeling of uncertainty and how it can affect our behaviors and way of being. What is more tragic, in my view,  is the inability of those with power to reduce uncertainty and to not do so because of their individual emotional and/or ideological perceptions. As they say: "most see the world as they are and not as it truly is." This ailment seems be even more pronounced in those with power, I guess because they have more to loose. So what happened to empathy, searching for common good, collaboration, vision, passion? It seems like we are at the end of doing things the old way so when will these qualities and attributes kick in and be recognized for what they can bring to the World?  I don't have the answers but one thing is for sure, we need for this to happen sooner rather than later and for those of us with these qualities, we need to force ourselves into environments where we can effect positive change and reduce uncertainty. One way to start is to s...

So here is the thing.  I downloaded the last upgrade to my Facebook (FB) app and without warning (that I was able to read readily and was not embedded in legalize that no one can understand) it added two icons to my Android desktop: FB camera (another one that I do not need or want) and FB messenger. I was a bit taken aback by this action. I find it presumptuous of FB to think that I would want those two additional icons on my phone (I don't, btw). I am not a Facebook power user and I have a life and actually have to work all day so I really do not need these two icons to help FB in their pursuit of "frictionless sharing" (as I discussed in another blog entry). This "sharing" is becoming a study in inane self promotion and "churnalism." Very little of what is posted is actually original and worth a read. The short of it is that I don't appreciate the presumptuousness displayed by FB. This is arrogant and once a company (free service or no) ...

There are many reasons I wanted to start an Innovation practice (in the new lexicon: Innovation Lab) inside a large corporation that is at the front end of dealing with the digitally-based disruptive onslaught. The initial co-founder and I suggested such a practice to our management in response to a lunch we had with an Innovator from Nokia back in 2006 and the pre-iPhone era. (Yes, the same Nokia that is now fighting for its life.) There are huge lessons learned just from that lunch that may explain why Nokia finds itself in the situation that it is in. I will expound on that lesson at a latter date, for  now to the subject of this post. I wanted to learn and feel what it would be like to go against the grain, delve into emerging new ideas and to institute new thinking. In retrospect this is what I had always done in my career and thus wanted to put those abilities into a "legit" environment where that was "the" job. Now in its 6th year, the practice has chan...

Riding in a small plane from Philadelphia to my home town of Washington DC the other day, I could not help but hear (it was one of those small regional jets) the stories of a returning marine coming home. A very self-assured man of no more than 20 years old relating his experiences to the row in front of me. It was indeed an interesting 45 minute flight. You see, he was a crew member in a helicopter. Not sure if he was a machine gun gunner but suffice it to say that his days were packed with dynamism as he so eloquently related about his days running missions to and fro. An "adrenaline rush" and "Intense" and "exhilarating" were some of adjectives he used to describe his daily missions. He then moved on to talk about his home-town visits and how he could not understand how people could live such boring lives with very little to do. No wonder, I thought. His mind and experience-map had expanded to the point that going back to his old world was a very limiti...

False flat is a term used in cycling and it refers to a situation that occurs when one is pedaling in what one believes to be a flat road. The mind is a funny organ an tricks us all the time. Faced with a perceived flat portion of a road, ideally in a sunny day in a California road with low humidity and no cars, the mind relaxes and perceives the challenge of pedaling the next few miles to be easy and consistent. We are basically seduced by our visual perception of the terrain. Said perception starts to change as the pedaling becomes arduous for no apparent reason and we start to feel differently. All the while the brain is still persisting in that this should be easy; it is a flat road after all. Is is amazing how a 1% to 3% incline, not readily evident to our visual sense, can affect physical effort and of course results over a long period. The longer the miles pedaled in such a section, the longer the struggle and the longer the dissonance. In my experience a very similar thi...

Recently my wife and I had occasion to reflect on the different levels of maturity that our children have to deal with as they go about their growing up. The discussion evolved, unexpectedly, to organizational maturity. Don't ask me how the leap happened, but it did. What makes the human drama so perplexing and interesting is that we are all very different. We learn differently, our brains are wired differently, we are different. Why should maturity be an exception with our institutions? At the end of the day our institutions (and dare we say "governments") are managed by us. In my eternal quest to try to understand how best to manage companies via an innovation imperative, I find that this maturity coefficient must be relevant and it will influence an organization's innovation DNA. A lack of maturity severely retards development and the generation of new ideas. Enhanced maturity allows for more openness, exploration and the generation of ideas (quantity and quali...

The question of Face Book's new "frictionless sharing" was asked in a recent Trends forum in LinkedIN. My contribution to it is written below.  Yes, I consider myself a techno-utopian and believe that technology can help us immensely. Witness the emerging field of neuro-science and how it may be able to help us understand ourselves better and aid our poor decision making skills.  On the other side of the coin, I have witnessed how technology has atrophied our social abilities: call it our "social curation" abilities. Regrettably, I think Facebook frictionless sharing will exacerbate this trend. Like the author says: there is value on what our friends write or say and we base a lot of our decision on this curation from our circles of influence. Overall, I have mixed emotions about Facebook. It can be a great tool for communication but it can also blunt our humanness in ways we are only now experiencing. How many of us just "park" our friends in Face...

I came across Nova Now on PBS yesterday and the episode had to do with the growing field of Neuro-Science and the different fields of research. An absolutely fascinating piece of content that everyone should watch and that profiles various scientist and their areas of focus. You have always wondered how magic happens? Well, now you will know: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/change-blindness.html My particular interest is in merging this field with business management and thus explore better ways to run ourselves and our institutions and also to pursue innovative ways of being. Who would not want more Steve Jobs, right?  There is so much to delve into, but one area that is interesting and applicable to my World has to with the perception of change.  There is a phenomenon called: Change  blindness  and it occurs in situations where we are so focused on one thing that we miss a larger event happening right in front us.  For more intriguing demonstrations, s...

Two separate and distinct events occurred to my wife and I as we were trying to help people with their specific causes. Please remember that I wrote help - as in going out of our daily routines and struggles to assist another human being with their specific idea and cause. In both instances the people that we were aiming to help (after getting their approval for us to do so) reacted in ways that were anathema to the situation. Both felt challenged and the basis for these feelings appeared to be caused by a sense of loss of control. In addition, both seemed to have reacted impulsively without giving the circumstances its due deliberation and thought. This got me thinking, and while I am not a psychologist, it occurred to me that as we live on the edge driven by economic  and social insecurities, we are reacting instinctively and protecting our "space" even when people are trying to help us. Or, is it a more profound issue, where people have lost their ability to distinguish...

In keeping with the new digitally enhanced human behaviors, we must pay attention to how these behaviors are carried over to the rest of people's lives. This means that we must be aware of the "impatience" factor that has been accelerated by our digital expectations. I feel that as we adopt communication technologies with increased speeds - such as mobile broadband on our smart handsets- these accelerated expectations are being carried over to the rest of our lives. I can't prove this is happening, of course, but I can feel it and based on my past reads of emerging trends, I am probably right on this one. This is reflected in our increasing intolerance for "too much"; too much text on web sites for example, too much going on in car dashboards, too many TV channels, too much avertising. We are now processing more information faster than ever and - well - there is only so much we can retain. Recently, I experienced a more poignant example of this impatience ...

When understanding complexity gets too hard for our feeble minds, go back to basics; as in biology and other sciences. Here is an interesting deep thinking resource for all of us in the business of business. The Sant Fe Institute: http://santafe.edu/research/topic/robustness-innovation/

So, interesting report on how magazine reading on the Ipad is not holding people's attention. Not surprised. What is the first thing you do when you buy a magazine? As for me, the first thing is I do is bend it and flip through it back to front. I know, weird , right...The thing is a lot of people do this. Buying an "analog" magazine is akin to buying a toy (I feel) with all of the allure of the feel and physicality of if. In the digital world, consuming the magazine is more about consuming " content ", which in my opinion is a totally different experience and one that competes with all the rest of the screen consumption that we do. Not sure how to bridge the gap. Perhaps Apple in all its magic will be creating flexible digital magazines? Doubt it. Technology is a wonderful thing but is not all and it can't make up for the real world feel of...well, the real world.

I think the author of this piece and book is on to something powerful. Brain research is already showing that digital natives are using their brains in different ways. I won't go into how they are different, but if awareness is in fact our own individual cerebral projections (as some brain scientists attest) well then, maybe digital natives do in fact see and "use" reality in a different way. Case in point: research shows that digital natives are not so prone to own autos. Why? Simple, they are comfortable with having relationships on-line and thus are not compelled to buy cars so they can drive to see their friends. From our digital immigrant perspectives this is crazy of course, but herein is the challenge of innovators: we must have open minds and accept new realities however different they may be to ours. Back to gaming and in its defense; it is changing everything. Even the way we learn when you bundle it with story telling. The retention rates learning via these mea...

Here is the genesis of this insight. I was sitting in a bar with a good friend of mine last week sharing some deep and non- chronic conversation about...you know, life stuff. That day I was particularly down due to a sequence of news events from friends and their latest struggles . So, my friend - who basically plays the role of life coach for beer and food - was asking me why was it that all these latest news were getting me so down. He challenged me to find the common theme from these different bits. After thinking about it for a nano -second, the insight came as it it had been waiting there for years. All the bits of information had to do with good, talented and really intelligent people having difficulties with bad management or - if independent like some of them - with getting themselves or their businesses going. So here it is: our social systems do not do a good job of "processing" talent. The system - whatever that is - lets us down all the time: We have the wrong p...

It has been awhile since my last post. This is because that balance thing erred on the side of a lot of work for the last couple of months. Perhaps I need a ghost writer: Nah, I like the excruciating pain of putting thoughts into paper in a way that has some impact. It is tough to compete with the constant media stream hitting our brains now days, you know. In any case, here is the latest insight coming from a call I received from a friend of mine last night that was hired by a very large bank to create and run an innovation practice. She basically called to tell me that the bank was shutting the practice after about one year. I can conjecture a lot of reasons why this may have happened, starting with the "real" reasons the sponsor of the practice decided to start it in the first place. Was it a play thing for the CEO? Did he want to use it to drive others out? Did he genuinely want to create new products? Did he want to just capture new knowledge? etc... The first mistake...

Malcom Gladwell at his best.... http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

So you ask…how can video help me and my organization prosper? How can I get that pesky ROI to talk to me and my CFO? While I am fascinated by video and its entertainment potential, I am even more fascinated by its potential for education and knowledge transfer. Well, here is a hard fact confirmed by a couple of friends of mine that are both brain scientists (I know, right, cool company I keep :-)). So, here it goes. If you desire to be good at a certain activity that is recordable, learning that activity will be accelerated by 20 to 30% if you see yourselves performing that activity on video. So, let us say you are a piano player and you are having a difficult time learning a sequence. What you would do is record yourself doing the sequence the correct way and then viewing the video multiple times. Or, let us say you are a cyclist and want to improve your pedal stroke or posture, well, record yourself doing the activity the correct way and watch yourself on video. We are primarily vis...

Yeah, I know, I have written about this before: about how we need to refresh our perspective on a daily basis. I realized how hard it is to maintain this ethos the other day as I was travelling into the District of Columbia with my son at the wheel. As we go about our daily routines I think our brains fall into complacency mode. It makes sense, I suppose. Not being a brain scientist but having read research on the matter, our brains seems to accommodate to the sameness of the routine and seems to block new inputs. In any case, here is the situation. My son was driving our new Mazda 3 ( btw , an awesome "little" car) and as we entered DC and we are sitting at a traffic light he makes the observation that the light posts for the traffic signals are placed on the street corners to the left and right and do not hang over the center as in most suburban environments. While this observation may not seem radical to most, to me it is since I had missed it. First it shows that subur...