Tag Archives: innovation

Ethnographic Walk-About (or, what to do with the rest of your summer)

A former student is searching for what to do next.  With her summer…or her life.  She’s flexible.  

Here is the reply I sent her this morning:

Dear Jennifer (not her real name):

Thanks for your note.  Great to hear your voice again.

It feels to me that you are more or less uniquely positioned to do an ethnographic walk-about.

You have a great eye, a great voice, you are not wedded to any particular ideology or cultural camp, you have a breadth of experience, you are mobile in almost every sense of the term.

It feels to me like everyone is burrowing, sticking to what and who they know. There is stuff happening “out there,” but people are so shocked by the new that they can’t manage the novelty. So they are not mobile.

I would get someone to give you a mandate and just go looking. My hero her is Frances FitzGerald’s 1986. Cities on a Hill, A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures. Simon and Schuster. She doesn’t make the mistake that hobbles a good deal of American journalism and scholarship, the mistake that supposes that only on the margin are we going to find something new and interesting. She casts the net wide.  And that’s especially important now, because cultural innovation is taking place everywhere.  The avant-garde no longer owns the ingenuity or courage necessary to reimagine the world.  

Go have a look! Most people are not looking. And most of those who are, are looking through lens so particular that they ALWAYS find what they are looking for, and miss what is really going on.  All we know for certain is that Americans are as usual reinvented themselves as a furious pitch and pace.  We don’t have a clear idea of who and what they are becoming.  And that’s probably a bad thing.

Good luck and keep me posted.

Best, Grant

Purchase FitzGerald at Amazon by clicking here.  

Photo: Ms. FitzGerald from her wikipedia entry.  

Bjork and Tina Brown: sisters of innovation

Björk and Tina Brown have many differences but one common problem: They are watching the boat beneath them sink. Their print and music industries are being disintermediated by the digital revolution. They are struggling to respond to the blue-ocean and white-space and black-swan disruption that besets us all.

For more of this post, please go to the full post on the Harvard Business Review blog by clicking HERE.

Learning to live with complexity

We are up against it, aren’t we?

The world moves so fast, changes so much, and disrupts so often, that most of our instincts and many of our strategies are just plain wrong.

We are obliged to manage a contraction.  

On the one hand we want to stay steady, grounded, true to mission, maximizing as much continuity as we can.

On the other, we want to create new ideas and behaviors, to spot disruption and reply in kind.  

Niether of these is easy.  Doing them together is really, really hard.  

In a new essay, Stanford’s brilliant Ed Batista gives a glimpse of how a coach can help.  It’s a wonderful piece reinventing coaching in order to reinvent the corporation.

See read the essay, click here. 

Photo acknowledgment: Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for the magnificent photo which appears in Batista’s post.  

Culturematics come to tourism

Please come have a look at my latest post at the Harvard Business Review “Conversation.”

With the Nextpedition, AmEx appears to be taking a Culturematic approach, taking out the predictable and adding in surprise.

See the post by CLICKING HERE.

Innovating at your public library the culturematic way

My local library recently did a sleep over.  Not for local kids.  But their toys. 

Brilliant.  Here, I thought, was a brilliant little Culturematic to change the way people, and especially kids, thought about their library.

Please come to HBR and see the full essay.  Click here.  

Culturematics in the workplace

My wife works at a place called Sterling Brands. Recently, the company next door, a fashion merchandizer, left some mannequins by the freight elevator.  

In no time at all, Sterling people had “liberated” the mannequins, spirited them into the office and pressed them into service.  They dressed them, reassembled them, animated them, reassigned their identities, and generally made them live.  The office bloomed with good ideas.

CLICK HERE for the way I wrote this up for the Harbard Business Review Blog.  

These mannequins worked as a kind of culturematic for Sterling.  They served as a spontaneous experiment.  No one could say ahead of time what people would do with these mannequins or the kinds of interactions and provocations they would create.  But stuff happened.  Creativity flowed.  The intellectual and the social capital of the firm grew.  The mannequins proved amazingly productive of meaning…considering the fact they just stand there.

Resolved: that big companies are better at innovation than small ones

Resolved: that big companies are better at innovation than small ones

PRO

Schumpeter in the Economist reports new research on innovation and the corporation, specifically the work of Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute

Mandel proposed three explanations for the big corporation as an engine of innovation:

1. The best path to economic growth is the creation of a new product category or operating system. Only big companies, like Apple and Google, can create these. (Plus, small companies may or may not be able to live in the shade of these giant oaks.)

2. Big companies do better in global marketplaces.

3. Only large companies have the scale to address big problems, and many of our our current problems are big problems (education, health care, environment).

Schumpeter adds three more:

4. Big companies have the resources to find and afford the best talent.

5. Big companies are learning to be more porous and more nimble.

6. Big companies now come scaling up out of small ones at a ferocious pace. Some of them remember their origins. They get large without growing out of their smallness.

CON

As Schumpeter notes, conventional wisdom holds that large companies are too slow and clumsy to be creative, that small is beautiful.

Indeed this wisdom is so conventional we tend more to assume than prove it. I wish I could recite all the evidence that supports the CONTRA case.

The only thing I can report is that several people inside the corporate and consulting world have told me how deeply frustrated they are by the corporation’s inability to innovate.

Indeed, to judge from these unscientific results, this is now a critical moment in the history of the corporation. Some few years ago (less than a decade) the corporation decided that innovation was the thing and it devoted itself to centers, institutes, laboratories, skunk works and a range of strategies and tactics meant to deliver innovations out like a major leaguer firing sunflower shells round the dugout.

Many corporations are now on notice: innovation is much harder than it looks. Much, much harder despite vast amounts of money and managerial initiative.  

A truth is dawning:

that the corporation can sometimes act like a gravitation field from which new ideas and products cannot escape. Someone has great ideas. Entire teams can have great ideas. But the corporation itself acts like a dark star. It does not create alternatives to itself. It consumes them.

How we do innovation in the corporation must remain high on the todo list for 2012.

Cambodia calling (putting innovation, design, and research to work)

Planners, ethnographers, designers!

Ever think about taking a year out?

Ever think about making yourself really, really useful?  

Here’s your chance.

Mariko Christine, a friend of a friend, is setting up the first Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab in Cambodia.  The Lab exists to develop products/technologies/solutions for the BoP (base of the pyramid / rural poor).  Mariko works for IDE, an international NGO.  The Lab has support from the Stanford DSchool, MIT DLab, IDEO, among many other leading organizations and funders.

Mariko is looking for a Fellow to help launch the lab.  It’s a one-year appointment.  The Fellow will lead the design of and guide the research process for innovation projects.  The Fellow will need practical social science and research expertise, and the ability to use design thinking to create tangible solutions to real-world problems.

Here is the “call for application” for this amazing position:

FELLOWSHIP:
Social Science Fellow – Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab

Interested in leading ground-breaking research in the developing world? Passionate about designing extremely affordable innovations to tackle problems that are of life-and-death importance?

We are building the first Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab in Cambodia. And we need you to help us launch it. IDE is looking for a social science expert (anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc). We seek a design-thinker, with 2-5 years practical experience in design research methods including research planning, field work/interviews/observations, and synthesis into design opportunities. You will be the lead social science and research expert on a multi-disciplinary team, based in Phnom Penh for a 1-year Fellowship.

This is an opportunity to work on real-world problems alongside a close-knit, diverse, and top-calibre team. You’ll wear many hats, including that of a coach, to grow HCD in Cambodia. You’ll conduct ground-breaking research within the Cambodian culture in order to turn the findings into tangible interventions that improve the lives of those who need it most.

For full details, including how to apply, please download the position description at http://www.ideorg.org/GetInvolved/HCD_social_science_fellowship.pdf.  [this pdf is still under development.  Patience please.]

Breakfast: breaking stuff quickly

I have been digging around doing research for the new book.  And I just came across a not-agency called Breakfast.  It sounds like a Culturematic powerhouse.

It is also very likable.  Breakfast has done several brilliant things, including:

1.  A bike called Precious that reported its experience was ridden across the country.

“Precious’s brain is an on-board device that captures all of his experiences, combined with a cloud-based system that analyzes those experiences. Put this all together and get a bike that’s able to express itself in his own words. He shares his up-to-the-moment thoughts and has a subconscious which allows him to dream about all he’s been through.” (from the Breakfast website: http://www.breakfastny.com)

2.  A red phone that they leave with prospective clients. The client only needs to pick up the phone to be put in touch with one of the Breakfast partners.

I am honestly not sure how this works, but I think the idea is that Breakfast leaves the phone at the clients without much explanation. Who can resist picking up a red phone, especially when it has a blinking red light?

Client reaction? Here’s one, transcribed from the Breakfast website. It is the Senior Vice President of Entertainment Marketing at Turner. She says “This is the coolest thing I have had any agency send! This is awesome!!!”

3.  All of this is done in a manner of that is as seeking, forthright, and scientific as possible. See the “full disclosure” diagram above and especially its “seperatory funnel” and “client fluid.”  The Breakfast website sums things up:

Just like the brilliant Edison and Bell discovered, inventing groundbreaking technology doesn’t happen first go. Think, draw, prototype, break. Then do it all again. We take pride in the fact that we break a lot of things. With purpose, and in an effort to invent new and unique ways to help clients reach people.

For more on Breakfast and co-founders Andrew Zolty, Mattias Gunneras, and Michael Lipton, go here.

How fast are we traveling? iPad2 as a measure

We are traveling at speed.  And we move faster and faster.

That’s the assumption.

But a little voice in my head says, "but is this just the thing we like to think about ourselves?  What’s the proof, actually?"

Well, here’s some proof.

This is from Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple.

In the event that announces the iPad2, Ive says

I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category, and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time.  

As Steve Jobs points out in the opening moments of the event, the iPad2 redesign comes as the competition is just now struggling to catch up to the first iPad.  

I think the conventional wisdom was to exploit the advantage, especially when you are a category-creator (and not merely a successful innovator).  

So, at least for this player, at least in this category, the pace of change is extraordinary.  

References

The Apple event video is here.  Mr. Ive’s comment comes at the 62:53 mark.  

Harnessing the Innovation Paradox

Steve Crandall and I took the train to Rochester last week.  NBC was so excited by the idea of a physicist and an anthropologist investigating the universe by train, they optioned the concept without ado.  They kept using phrases like "high concept" and "Lorre-esque" but I don’t think we said one funny thing the entire trip.  I guess that’s what writers are for.

Steve and I were off to Rochester to join Pip Coburn and Dave Bujnowski for a brain storm. As Steve and I made our way from Penn Station northward, the topics of innovation and idea generation were very much on our minds.  (Yes, and come to think of it, our preoccupation may also have had something to do with the fact that we were travelling on rolling stock that hasn’t been updated for several decades in an industry that continues to use the term "rolling stock.")  

Steve had interesting things to say about the role of serendipity at Bell Labs, a place he worked for some 20 years.  People applied themselves to Lab problems around the clock, but sometimes, and strangely, it was when they went to lunch that some of the best progress was made.  

The creative world is familiar with this paradox.  For some reason, it is when we are free to stop thinking about the problem that we sometimes manage our best work on the problem. And it is especially when we are free to think about something unrelated to our problem that our problem stops being a problem.  

This is another way of saying that we are terrible at problem solving.  We are those little wind up toys spinning our wheels and giving off that horrible, metallic, wind-down sound.  

What does lunch do?  It gives the world a chance to supply it’s "metaphoric materials." Cause that’s what’s happening, isn’t it?  We are working on a problem to do with logistical systems and someone starts talking about the organization of ganglia in the brain and we go, "But of course.  That will do, nicely.  Thank you."

I blame the Dewey Decimal system.  (And frankly it’s done so much harm in the world, I am pretty sure no one is going to mind me adding one more accusation.)   The DDS clusters like minded things together.  And that’s what we always do when trying to solve a problem.  We cluster the data, theories, methods, colleagues we think we’ll need when in fact we should be invited serendipity into our lives to give us the chance for those metaphoric materials.

This leaves us with a problem.  To harness the innovation paradox, we need ideas we can’t possibly guess we need.  We must canvass concepts that are entirely unrelated to our present problem set.  We need to find away to get away from the problem the hand and to give our deeper powers of pattern recognition a chance to work.  

In sum, we have to go somewhere, and we have no clue where.  We have to engage new ideas, but we have no clue which.

Every lunch table, especially when staffed with smart, interesting people, can serve to help us harness the Innovation paradox.  But surely, we can do a little better than this.  Surely, there is some way of narrowing the range of our stimuli in order to increase the chances of "contact."  

Your thoughts, please.