innovation

What does the future of America hold? Some good perspective from a recent video series at the Wall Street Journal titled "America: A Portfolio of Ideas" featured several different perspectives and is highly recommended. To give you a feel for what it holds we share this brief audio featuring John Naisbitt (Megatrends) and Gloria Naisbitt on the influence of culture on our trading relationship with China.

SwineCast 0456 Show Notes:

• Dr.  Fiona Murray at MIT's Sloan School of Management recommends setting up a competition to get those creative, problem solving juices flowing in your organization.  

SwineCast 0364 Show Notes:

• Special leadership training conversation with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at Stanford University   

SwineCast 0287 Show Notes:

• Special episode on re-igniting innovation in the U.S. with Tech Nation's Dr Moira Gunn and John Kao. Link to Kao's book at Amazon.com
  

In 2005 I had the fun time of listening to Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) and Tom Kelley (Art of Innovation and IDEO). Before the start of the talk I took the chance to ask Tim this question: How do innovation and 6 sigma coexist?

There is no magic innovation gene or bullet.

You can create the environment in which "innovation" can happen.

The environment must include:

• the ability to fail and try again,
• recognize that not all things will succeed,
• there must be a way to "escape" the cultural bubble in existence,
• formality at the beginning of idea creation must be relaxed (no forms, business cases, project management plans, etc...),
• people from varied backgrounds (experience, expertise, domain knowledge, etc.) must be able to interact on a regular basis,
• less money is better than more (this forces you to think about ways to get stuff done), and
• quick prototyping (aka the IDEO way) is explicitly encouraged.

However, the environment alone will not guarantee innovation. People must be willing, able, excited, engaged, diving into, running full speed, jumping up and down, tumbling, springing at the opportunity the environment allows/supports. The barrier to participate in such an environment must be zero; Any barriers one has to cross to get to such an environment reduces the innovation spark just a bit.