The latest issue of Fast Company has a great piece – well half the magazine actually – on the fifty most innovative companies in the world.ย There’s loads of interesting insights in here, and I’ll be commenting on them in the next week.ย Highly recommended reading.
Category / Innovation CULTURE
Art meets Science
A recent edition of Wired had a fascinating interview with Jonah Lehrer on how science can benefit from the arts.
Jonah Lehrer wants scientists to bone up on the classics. A former neuroscience lab drone, the 26-year-old Rhodes scholar would devour pages of Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” whenever he wasn’t spinning down DNA. In the process, he made a discovery: Artists have something to teach researchers. In his new book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, Lehrer argues that many artists have foretold the scientific future โ Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cรฉzanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.
This is a lovely illustration of what happens when two sectors collide. Another example is the programme in New Zealand which resulted in a book called “Are Angels OK?” One review of this book by David Clark summed it up thus :
Scientists and musicians, and scientists and artists have worked well together in the past. Thus a successful alliance between scientists and fiction writers is not perhaps as strange as it might first appear. Both science and writing are creative endeavours. Both require considerable imagination, and the courage to “think the unthinkable” (although scientists are denied the luxury afforded writers of fiction of “thinking the impossible”). After this successful experiment, perhaps we will see more examples of the coming together of creative individuals from different fields of human endeavour.
Innovation at a country level
There’s a great quote from Jason Pontin – editor of MIT Tech Review – in his editorial of Feb 08 :
…can governments do anything to increase innovation among companies and organizations within their borders? Not much. Ever since I became the editor of Red Herring magazine in the mid-1990s, I have heard countless story pitches about the establishment in different countries of government-supported technology clusters or hubs. All were to have competed with Silicon Valley and Cambridge, MA. All ignominiously failed, with the possible exception of the technology cluster in Cambridge, England. The things that governments can do to foster innovation are limited and simple: fund research based on long-term discovery, devise regulations and tax incentives that promote risk capital and entrepreneurialism, protect intellectual property, uphold the rule of law, and maintain flexible labor markets. Otherwise, governments do best by doing least.
Scott Berkum on innovation
In Wellington last week I dropped past Webstock, and caught Scott Berkum presenting on innovation. He talked about the myth of innovation – or how the eureka moment actually takes years of prior effort. What I found most interesting was his linkages between innovation and the early explorers. How are they similar? Here’s a quick list :
- they head off into the unknown
- the time scales for their discoveries are largely unpredictable
- there’s long periods of boredom before the discovery takes place
- people think they’re a little mad to challenge paradigms (“Of course the world is flat”)
- when they report their discoveries, eventually people think it was common sense that the discovery should eventually happen (“Of course the world isn’t flat” and “Of course iTunes was the reason the iPod was so successful”)
The other interesting part of Scotts talk was his link to the innovation culture that used to exist at 3M, and how it was driven from the top (my emphasis):
“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.
“Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.
“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.”
This is company that produced masking tape and Post-It notes – neither of which was on any corporate strategic roadmap, but which was devised by coal-face employees.
NESTA and Fringe benefits
For various reasonsย – and connections – I’ve just spent a bit of time reading the work of the NESTA Connect team in the UK.ย One of the blog entries had a link to a fascinating event in the USA called the Triple Helix.ย The aim of the event is to encourage a model of innovation that looks across sectors to seek the collision points. With a heavy bent on collaboration, both the NESTA blog posting and theย Triple Helix website are fascinating reads.
The Un-conference
At the weekend I attended Kiwi Foo Camp. It was damn interesting on several counts:
- The people there were all fascinating in their own right
- The format meant that people could hold sessions on their passions. Those that were also passionate contributed in such a way that added value
- The venue was a standard school, with no fancy trappings or dressing up. It was proof that of that old photography adage I like “the last thing you should add to a great photo is a sunset.” (However the same adage does not always apply to nudist beaches – especially ones frequented by overweight European tourists – where there are definitely some things that need dressing up)
- People camped. Literally. I took my tent. People who have bank accounts which require calculators with extra wide screens also camped.
- It was casual. Being a New Zealand summer, shorts, t-shirts and bare feet were often the order of the day.
- Invite only increases the quality of the event immensely.
There’s pages you could write on the implications for innovation events, but I’ll leave it at that. Next time you are planning an event, consider the above list.
By the way, raving about the weekend seems to be par for the course…
Innovation in a recession
It’s been widely covered in various blogs, but I think the message is worth re-iterating. In a recession, you should not cut back on innovation, but increase it. When your competitors are cost cutting and shedding talent, your company should work doubly hard to make the next best thing in your market.
Why?
When the economy picks up again you’ll be very well placed to slay the market.
Want proof? Look no further than Apple. This was pointed out in the BusinessWeek blog in two postings. The first one mentions that “in the last recession, Apple worked on iTunes and the iPod”
The second post quotes the sceptics who – at the time – bemoaned Apples innovation strategies. One commentator is quoted in 2001 as saying “Maybe itโs time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently.โ
Well worth reading.
Breaking Paradigms
After the holidays, and a long break, here’s one of the more interesting articles I came across while away from the office. It’s about breaking paradigms, and how people who get stuck in their own thought patterns find it astounding when they meet people who do not do the same. It’s from the New York Times.
Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called โtappers,โ a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called โlisteners,โ were asked to name the songs.
Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not โhearโ it in their taps?
How does this relate to innovation and product creation?
โLook for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, whoโve done work in a related area but not in your specific field. โMake it possible for someone who doesnโt report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.โ
Putting a personality to the name : video of Bruce Nussbaum
There’s a great little two minute video featuring Bruce Nussbaum (of BusinessWeek innovation blog fame) and his experience in setting up an “innovation gym.” If anything else it’s a great reflection of – an insight into – the person behind the writing (he comes across as quite amusing). One thing that surprised me was that he is wearing a tie. I’d always assumed that the ‘head and shoulders’ shot on his blog was one of those ‘file shots’…
This does however go someway to soundly disproving my theory that to find the interesting people at a conference, avoid those that wear ties….
How paradigms form – NYT article
During a conversation with Denis Dutton (of the always good Arts and Letters Daily) he pointed me to a fascinating article about the formation of the current paradigm that surrounds popular thinking on diets and heart disease. There’s a great extract which gets to the heart of the matter (excuse the pun – which you’ll understand if you read the article) :
We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at โWho Wants to Be a Millionaireโ usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.
If the second person isnโt sure of the answer, heโs liable to go along with the first personโs guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, sheโs more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an โinformational cascadeโ as one person after another assumes that the rest canโt all be wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.
So what does this lead to?
The informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.
What “popular wisdom” will you question today?