To paraphrase the words of broadcasters around the world – at least the English speaking ones – I apologise in advance for the break in transmission.
I’m off to India tomorrow for the next phase of the Innovaro Technology Futures programme. When you’re running a programme like this, spare time is gold dust, and so I expect I’ll return to normal broadcasting after March 7th.
Stay tuned…
I’m proposing doing some work with a public sector client who wants to take a serious look at the culture of innovation.
As part of this I’ve been putting some focus on innovation spaces and come across two really worthwhile sources.
The first is from Leland Maschmeyer where he writes with a lean towards agency office design.
The second is a paper by Ed Reilly which takes a very serious look at the topic and can be found (in PDF form) here.
For a while now I have been toying with the idea of starting coverage of advertisements which use the word “innovation” in them, and running a critique. As you might anticipate, this was going to fall under the category of “This is not innovation.”
Why do this?
It’s linked to the innovation backlash that BusinessWeek has covered. Maybe it’s because I’m sensitive to it, but I feel that the word ‘innovation’ has crept into ad agencies default vocab. I can picture a couple of uber-creatives in black polo necks staring at some copy about 2am in preparation for an early morning pitch. The conversation goes like this :
Uber #1 : “It doesn’t really….errr…do it for me.”
Uber #2 : “Yeees. It doesn’t grab me either.”
Uber #1 : “Haaaang on!”
Uber #2 : “What???”
Uber #1 : “We haven’t used the word ‘innovation’ in there anywhere”
Uber #2 : “Damn. You’re soooo good.”
But I digress. “This is not innovation” is on hold because over at Endless Innovation Dominic has looked at three “innovation” ads in a recent copy of Fortune. He looks at how the ads project the innovation story. Take a look…
Over at Jugaad Niti Bhan picks up on the BusinessWeek discussion and posts an insightful look at the backlash against innovation.
She makes the connection between the Gartner Hype Cycle – which, in itself, is very insightful – and the trend for media reporting about innovation. Niti makes the point that after all the hype about innovation, it is now falling into the ‘trough of disillusionment*’
She adds that now – in theory – innovation should start moving onto the Plateau of Productivity.
Recommended reading.
As an aside Niti also has a lovely quote about innovation cultures and the value of the ‘skunkworks’ type approach.
Kanter also advises managers to make sure there are no culture clashes between internal teams working on a company’s traditional products and its new, innovative experiments.
* I happen to like the Hype Cycle. Whether you love it or hate it, you just have to give credit to the creators for the names they use. I mean look at the terms : the ‘Trough of Disillusionment” almost needs a Jaws-like soundtrack to go with it. You could also use it in the next Lord of the Rings movie : “I’m buggered if I’m coming with you Frodo – it’s gonna take more than a magic ring to get me to cross the Trough of Disillusionment”…
Over at Open the Future, Jamais Cascio has a fascinating post about holding virtual online workshops. It’s well worth a read as he details the tools he used, how they worked and ideas for future implementations.
Next week I’m on a plane again, this time to Bangalore where we will be flying in about forty people as part of the Innovaro Technology Futures series for 2007. While we have bought credits to make it carbon neutral, the possibility of holding mini-tech futures events online is appealing.
As many people have observed, the word ‘innovation’ is overused and little understood. In todays business environment, your chances of making sense of it are about the same as your chances of successfully translating the drinks menu at Starbucks for a non-coffee drinker*.
When this starts to happen with a trend – especially in the business world – the end result is a blend of confusion and scepticism. Business Week – among others – has noted a backlash against design and innovation. It was only a matter of time.
Bruce Nussbaum blogs about it here, and makes reference to the original article which has a couple of interesting quotes :
Kanter says that the most common mistake companies make is to focus on so-called practicality, or the application of traditional corporate processes to adventurous new projects. The problem, Kanter writes in an e-mail, is that applying tried and true processes to “fledgling ideas that are still unfamiliar, undeveloped” is problematic because truly innovative pursuits are “hard to forecast or measure in traditional ways.”
* I’m talking from experience here. As a non-coffee drinker I was recently offered a free tasting by a roving Starbucks evangelist. I tasted it. It was nice. I asked what it was. “Oh,” he said, slightly confused I’d even ask. “It’s a Decaf Light Toffee Frappuccino”. Like I’m going to remember that?
Will the future of computing be simple, small and distributed? Flexible electronics might bring that vision to a reality. Consider this quote from a recent New Scientist article, which in turn quotes Hermann Hauser of Amadeus Capital Partners, investor in Cambridge company Plastic Logic. :
People often think of electronic circuits doing very complex things, but very simple plastic ones, in which each device is reporting wirelessly where it is and what it is, over simple mesh networks, will be of very great benefit.
Just back from a week in the UK working on a Technology Futures programme for Innovaro. We assembled a wide range of world experts from around the globe to build a picture of what the world might look like in twenty years time from a technology perspective. In the same room we had people that had just come back from Davos, TED presenters, geneticists, Koyoto negotiators, cold fusion experts and ex-Presidential Advisors.
It generated a range of fascinating and jaw-dropping insights.
I’ll blog these as I churn through my notes over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s one to get you started. It comes from an expert in foresight who is working for one of the worlds largest architectural firms (I cannot name people as we ran the event under Chatham House rules to ensure the discussion was as open as possible).
“We are already constructing buildings that have been designed as Faraday cages.”
Oh, and in the same vein, he also noted that on any average day, “there is two and a half miles of smog over Shanghai.”