BIF Speak - Crossing Disciplines
Friends Matter and Other Innovation Lessons From the 18th Century
Last month we launched the BIF Book Group with author and outside.in creator Steven Johnson's new book The Invention of Air. Our thanks go out to everyone who joined and participated. As the great conversations wind down and we begin looking at our next book selection, I’m struck by a couple of common themes from the book which are as applicable today as they were in the late 18th century.
Collaborative Platforms: Experimenting the BIF Way
I get asked all the time for recommendations of gurus of open innovation. Always, professor Satish Nambisan from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is on my list. As more and more companies shift from innovation initiatives that are centered on internal resources to those centered on external networks and communities, Nambisan's book, The Global Brain, provides a roadmap for innovating faster and smarter in a networked world.
He's written a new article on collaborative social innovation titled “Platforms for Collaboration.” Published in the Summer 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review it uses BIF’s Trauma Bay project as an example in the article.
Collaborative Platforms: Experimenting the BIF Way
I get asked all the time for recommendations of gurus of open innovation. Always, professor Satish Nambisan from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is on my list. As more and more companies shift from innovation initiatives that are centered on internal resources to those centered on external networks and communities, Nambisan's book, The Global Brain, provides a roadmap for innovating faster and smarter in a networked world.
He's written a new article on collaborative social innovation titled “Platforms for Collaboration.” Published in the Summer 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review it uses BIF’s Trauma Bay project as an example in the article.
Design and the Elastic Mind
Follow-up to a blog entry a couple of weeks ago about the innovation and design exhibit at MoMA. Paolo Antonelli, the exhibits curator, appeared on the Charlie Rose show last week. Antonelli is an Italian-born, self-described "generalist." Watch the interview and you'll realize quickly how insightful she is too. During the hour-long talk, she descibes the bridging of science and design (developing comfort and trust between both parties is key) as well as the changing face of scale in 2008, the relationship of architecture and nanotechnology and the need to push designers toward "pragmatic intellectualism."
More on hiring for collaborative innovation: Pixar's Brad Bird and his flock of black sheep
Following up on my blog post last week - Spanning Silos...Fostering Collaboration...How do you hire for that? - a friend passed along a great interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird from last month's McKinsey Quarterly. In the article, the director talks about how he pushes teams of animators beyond their comfort zones, encourages dissent, and builds morale. He also explains the value of "black sheep" - restless contributors with unconventional ideas.
Friday Linkage from our BIF Community
Several interesting posts from members of our BIF community I want to share:
BIF Research Advisor Alph Bingham has a meaty entry on R&D Productivity Metrics and Ohm’s Law. Layman that I am, I still managed to follow his substantial argument that most R&D productivity metrics fail because they're just too fuzzy. It's pretty easy to screw up metrics says Alph - but there are also plenty of ways to get them right and his post will definitely get you thinking.
Dancing with Complexity: Roger Martin on The Opposable Mind
Yesterday I spent some time at the offices of Continuum. The Boston-based design firm was hosting a book signing soiree for Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School in Toronto and author of the new book The Opposable Mind.
Martin has spent the past few years searching for patterns in thinking among great leaders. His conclusion: success comes from an ability to utilize tensions between different business models in order to build a better one. He calls it 'integrative thinking' and it's a direct assault on the reductionist, either/or approach to decision-making,which is typically taught in business schools. This holistic - and yes,more complex and often times ambiguous - approach to thinking, Martin says, is at the heart of many great, new business models.
Report from the Field: Designing Networks for Innovation
A study last year conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership found that nearly 92 percent of the executives surveyed believe the challenges their organizations face are more complex than they were just five years ago. How do you innovate within such a dynamic, unstable and unpredictable environment? “Innovate together,” says BIF research advisor and UC-Davis professor Andrew Hargadon.
BIF Research Advisor Andrew Hargadon on the Design of New Ventures
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n anticipation of our workshop on the design of networked innovation, bestselling author Andrew Hargadon passed along an article he wrote a while back called Leading with Vision: The Design of New Ventures. Great primer before our hands-on workshop next Thursday, April 24th.
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New BIF Project: Introducing the Nursing Home of the Future
In case you missed it, the Business Innovation Factory is partnering with the Tockwotton Home, Quality Partners of Rhode Island and the MIT AgeLab to create a real-world laboratory for developing and testing new solutions, products and models for improving elderly care. Leveraging the BIF Experience Lab platform, the "Nursing Home of the Future" will create a platform for innovators and industry partners to transform current approaches to elderly care in assisted living and nursing care facilities.
Building Purposeful Networks: Are You a Dead Node?
How do you establish credibility and authenticity online? Do you find yourself often times in the middle of information? Are you a connection maker? Or are you a dead node? These questions and more were answered last week when entrepreneur and network impresario Ellen Levywas in the house for a casual meet-up with a dozen or so innovation heads here to learn more about building meaningful virtual networks in purposeful ways.
BusinessWeek Editor Bruce Nussbaum and Mavericks at Work Author Bill Taylor to Co-Host BIF-4 Summit
Duo to take stage at the Business Innovation Factory's fourth annual Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 15-16
BIF announced today that BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Bruce Nussbaum and "Mavericks at Work" author Bill Taylor will co-host the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 15-16,2008 in Providence, Rhode Island.
John Kao Q&A: How the U.S. Can Reclaim its Innovation Edge (and why Rhode Island may hold the key!)
Today’s conversation on innovation typically focuses on individual companies or market sectors, but with his new book, Innovation Nation, Business Innovation Factory Research Advisor John Kao takes the talk to a whole new level: how can you innovate a country?
Kao may just have the most interesting–and diverse–resume of anyone I’ve come across. A celebrated jazz pianist, he’s toured with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention band, produced several movies including sex, lies & videotape, taught at Harvard Business School for 14 years, wrote a best-selling book called Jamming, founded a few firms and consulted to big companies, small start-ups and government agencies around the world. Along the way, he also trained in philosophy with a B.A from Yale, psychiatry with a M.D. from Yale Medical and also business with a M.B.A from Harvard Business.
Eric von Hippel Joins BIF Research Advisory Council
If you've been following my blog entries of late, you know that I'm a huge fan of Eric von Hippel. His guidance in recent weeks in helping me shape a BIF initiative driven by his lead-user innovation research has been invaluable. So I'm thrilled to announce that Eric has joined our Research Advisory Council. He joins an amazing cast of characters comprised of leading business executives, academic and consulting innovation thought leaders who are helping our BIF community shape our research initiatives as well as provide direction on the best practices and next practices that are most valuable for our members to understand.
Building Lead-User Research into an Innovation Platform
The real exciting thing about the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) is that we’re trying to figure out how processes work from a systems perspective and then provide a real-world environment where those systems can be innovated upon. More than the typical action-oriented research that just takes one slice of one issue and follows the thread down the rabbit hole, we’re providing a platform that generates true collaboration; bringing in disparate, and often times analogous points-of-view into our experimentation process.
Chris Meyer on Recombinant Strategy
I always enjoy my conversations with BIF board member and research advisor Chris Meyer. Chris is the CEO of Monitor Networks and a great thinker in the field design-thinking. His work since 1995 has revolved around recombinant thinking and figuring out ways that diverse groups can collaborate around a single issue.
Wanted: Chief Integration Officer
I had an interesting conversation last week with BIF research advisor Stefan Thomke and MIT professor Eric von Hippel about the role of the integrator. What's more important, we asked, the various components that go into a successful innovation or the foundation/platform that the components are built upon?
BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Bruce Nussbaum Joins BIF Research Advisory Council
I have exciting news for the BIF community: Bruce Nussbaum has been appointed to our Research Advisory Council. Bruce is an assistant managing editor for BusinessWeek, responsible for coverage of design and innovation.
For years, Bruce has been at the center of a global conversation on the discipline of innovation and is a fierce advocate of the field of design thinking. He has written extensively about how organizations,both inside and outside the corporate sphere, should apply design thinking concepts to their innovation strategy. His blog, NussbaumOnDesign reflects his personal and provocative take on what smart companies are doing (or should be doing) in the U.S., Asia and Europe.
The TopCoder Business Model: Collaboration by Competition
When Dan Pink first introduced the concept of a free agent nation back in 1997, I wonder if he imagined a world where testosterone-driven, competitive collaboration would be the engine for a new free agent business model.
BIF-3 storyteller Jack Hughes is the founder and president of TopCoder, a Connecticut-based company founded in 2002 that has institutionalized programming competitions. These software competitions are a novel way to both showcase programmers from around the world for companies seeking top-flight talent, while at the same time develop computer applications for blue-chip clients who recognize TopCoder’s ability to tap a global talent pool.
Lessons for Innovation from Hollywood
In preparation for my interview with BIF Research Advisor John Kao later this week, I came across another interview he gave several years ago about how to weave together different disciplines to find a new tool box for business model innovation. One of John's major career accomplishments is Hollywood producer (he produced and financed sex, lies and videotape). John is as close to a contemporary renaissance man as you're likely to find. He says his life always been about making journeys back and forth between different contexts. As it turns out, he found that Hollywood offers some of the best conditions and environment for innovative change.
Increasing the Ripple Effect of Green Design
Last Thursday, 60 or so green designers gathered at BIF member Continuum’s Newton, MA offices to spend the day talking about green design. Included in this conversation were 8 green believers who are trying to change the world. They came from all walks of life and from their stories, we were all trying to answer two big questions: what is sustainable design and how do you build (or evolve) a business model around it?
Do Lead Users Have a Role In Business Model Innovation?
Let’s talk about lead user innovation. I traveled to MIT last week with BIF chief catalyst Saul Kaplan to spend some time with legendary innovation guru Eric von Hippel. A 45-minute packed conversation later, we left armed with a whole lot of questions about what it means to innovate and whether it might be prudent to put the lead user (as opposed to the average user) at the center of our innovation process.
Multidisciplinary Innovation: It's Time to Throw the Shackles Off
Irving Wladawsky Berger has become my new favorite blogger. Yet another insightful post this week from the semi-retired VP of Innovation at IBM. This time around he's writing about multidisciplinary innovation.
How do you respond to the increasing requirements for collaboration across departments and disciplines that are necessary in order to address new market problems, asks Irving? From his post:
More on Constraints and Network-Centric Innovation
Good post by Satish Nambisan about the challenges companies face moving from firm-centric innovation to network-centric innovation. It nicely extends my earlier post about open innovation.
From Satish's post:
Cross-Boundary Disruption - Andy Grove Style
Forbes magazine asks the question: How do you innovate in a field that already exists? Longtime innovator extraordinaire Andy Grove is teaching a group of kids at Stanford how to do that through "cross-boundary disruption." Grove is a disciple of BIF research advisor Clay Christensen so it makes sense that this smells a whole lot like disruptive innovation.
The Hidden Tyranny of Transparency
"Every truly great accomplishment is at first impossible," said U.S. Homeland Security Under Secretary for research and development Jay Cohen to an audience of innovators at BIF-3 on October 11th. Prior to his post with Homeland Security, Cohen was head of naval research. His directive was very clear: make the navy more innovative. "When I took over naval research, it was an organization with 232 years of tradition unhampered by progress," he said.
Together We Innovate: Meet BIF-3 Storyteller Andrew Hargadon
BIF Research Advisor and BIF-3 Storyteller Andrew Hargadon co-wrote a good piece which appears in September's MIT Sloan Management Review. Together We Innovate outlines how companies can come up with new ideas. Bottom line: get employees working with one another.
Organizing for innovation is the basic premise of Hargadon’s research. He shatters the accepted folklore that icons of innovation such as Henry Ford, Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison were "lone wolves" and inventors. In almost every case he’s researched, these inventors “borrowed” existing ideas and brought them together with the necessary people and materials to build on them. “Ford didn’t bother starting the Model T until he had 1500 sales agents on the ground,” he told me recently.
BIF-3 Storyteller Jay Cohen: The Ultimate Risk Management Innovator
I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't heard of Jay Cohen until a few weeks ago when BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan invited him to be a storyteller at our upcoming Summit. At a time when confidence in our government is critically low, I can't quite explain the security I felt after profiling the former Rear Admiral, now Under Secretary for Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate Jay M. Cohen. He's the ultimate risk management innovator...
BIF Research Advisor Bruce Nussbaum on the need for a national innovation policy
BIF-4 co-host and BIF research advisor Bruce Nussbaum writes about America's need for a national innovation policy. In Time For a National Innovation Policy. McCain And Obama Need To Get Real Bruce challenges his readers - and our presidential contenders - to start a conversation in earnest on the need for a policy that goes beyond federal government support of technology, math and science.
Here at the Business Innovation Factory, we believe our entire nation must compete in an increasingly complex, global economy where innovation and knowledge are the primary drivers of growth. It is not technology that is getting in the way of progress in the areas that matter most: like health care, public safety, education, and quality of life. It's people. Humans and the organizations we live in are stubbornly resistant to change and do not know how to work and play nicely together across boundaries. What else are we missing? A road map for systems level experimentation.
Innovation and Collaboration: The BIF Way
An interview with BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan is posted on Steve Hardy’s Creative Generalist blog where the two talk about everything from Rhode Island’s position as a national innovation hot spot to the real world innovation lab BIF is developing to what it takes to really drive systems change.
Report from the Field: Thoughts on Design Thinking
Some 40 attendees participated in last week's experiential workshop Design Thinking: Beyond the Buzz Words hosted by Dan Buchner, Vice President of Innovation and Design at renowned design consultancy Continuum. A lively and engaging workshop from beginning to end, Dan and his team of designers presented a day-long deep dive into the world of design thinking. Turns out that you can indeed use design thinking to solve business objectives - all you need is an open mind and a few tools.
Sharing is Winning: Open Innovation Case Study at Nestlé Co.
Nestlé Co has a case study in this month's Food Technology magazine highlighting some of the steps and processes the company is applying in their open innovation strategy. The article also suggests several recommendations concerning the paradigm shift required for organizations to go from a "not-invented here" mindset to a "sharing is winning" culture.
My Innovation Blueprint from the BIF-4 Summit
This post was written by guest blogger Stephen Brand, Chief Imagination Officer of The New Enterprise Factory
I attended the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit last month and was inspired by the innovators that told their stories. All had sparked ideas for me that could inform emerging innovators, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders.
Want to learn about innovation? Head to Toronto
I’m thinking I should move to Canada... This past Tuesday I traveled to the University of Toronto with BIF chief catalyst Saul Kaplan to spend an incredible day with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School, Richard Florida of Rise of the Creative Class fame, and Heather Fraser who directs a unique program on campus called “DesignWorks.”
Learning Outside the Classroom: The Medici Effect in Singapore
Frans Johansson is doing really well these days – “phenomenal” in fact, he says. When I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago he was headed to Singapore to launch a program to 60,000 Singaporean kids based on the concepts outlined in his wildly successful innovation book The Medici Effect.
Frans is a good friend of the BIF community. Many might remember his story from the BIF-2 Summit or his workshop “Diversity Drives Innovation.” His guiding philosophy is that innovation happens at the intersection where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide, “igniting an explosion of extraordinary new discoveries.”
Ripples in the Pond
A point of view is a terrible thing to waste. It should be shared as broadly as possible and improved with vigorous and diverse input. Only then will a point of view have a chance to become shared and an actionable platform to make things happen. I recently asserted in a BIFspeak post Creating a Passion Economy that we must move from a knowledge-based economy to a passion-based economy. I claimed that we could create a more prosperous economy and stronger communities if we enable connections between passionate people and create an environment where innovators can more easily pursue their passions.
Steven Johnson Returns to BIF to Discuss Latest Book
BIF-3 storyteller Steven Johnson will be in the house on March 16th to discuss his latest book The Invention of Air. Like his recent bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Johnson uses another little-known historical story to explore very BIF-like themes that have long engaged him: how innovative ideas emerge and spread in a society.
Podcast Interview with Roger Martin Now Available
What a treat to present this podcast interview with newly appointed BIF Research Advisor Roger Martin. Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Roger has spent a career exploring and teaching how organizations can build, grow and sustain themselves through a concept he calls integrative thinking. Perfect timing in these financially turbulent times because according to Roger, integrative thinkers are wired to deliver breakthrough business models.
Design-Thinking's Role In Business Model Innovation
Thanks to Twitter I've connected with several new and interesting people in the innovation space during the past couple of weeks. One of them is Ralf Beuker who has written a good blog entry on design-thinking that should strike a chord with many in our community. What is design-thinking? Is it a process? A mind-set? A profession?
Register for Steven Johnson's Book Talk on March 16th
Author and outside.in creator Steven Johnson returns to Providence on March 16th to discuss his latest book The Invention of Air. Like his recent bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Johnson uses another little-known historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: how innovative ideas emerge and spread in a society.
Steven Johnson: The Actionable Network Key to Innovation
It was a great pleasure to welcome Steve Johnson to BIF yesterday for a conversation about his new book, "The Invention of Air." In a forum with a few dozen members of the BIF community, Johnson discussed the story of Enlightenment-era innovator Joseph Priestly and the emerging social networks that enabled his ideas to flourish.
Podcast Interview with Continuum's Harry West Now Available
This week I’m pleased to present BIF research advisor Harry West. As Vice President for Strategy and Innovation at design consultancy Continuum, Harry has probably been in your business, your house and maybe even in your car.
Have you picked up a Swiffer lately? Seen the slick dashboard interface on a BMW? Or how about locked something up with one of those titanium Master Locks? West and his teams at Continuum have an impressive record conceiving innovations and delivering them to market.
Yet design shouldn’t be just about making things work better and look better. Instead it should be about understanding the emotions that drive buying decisions.
BIF Bookgroup's February Selection Is In!
Why does design thinking matter? This month the BIF Bookgroup will tackle the question and read Roger Martin's latest book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. Roger is a BIF research advisor and visionary Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
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