March 29, 2013
Issue 26 – March 29, 2013
1.
Five Free Nine Innovation Roles Gifts.........................................………….. Braden Kelley
2.
How to Build an Innovation Culture ……………………………………..…….…. Greg Satell
3.
Avoiding Innovation Debt …………………….…………………...……..…..……… Peter Bell
4.
9 Innovation Concepts& Methodologies to Embrace or Rethink ....... Stefan Lindegaard
5.
Who is Your Creative Community? .………………………...…….……… Dimis Michaelides
6.
The Innovation Chicken & Egg Problem …………………....………………. Jeffrey Phillips
7.
A New Form of Crowdsourcing - Problemsourcing ……….……..............…. Yannig Roth
8.
Inspiring Creativity in Others ……………………………………..…….. Jeffrey Baumgartner
9.
Venture Café at the Cambridge Innovation Center ……………..…….….. Johnny Hankins
10.
Tech is Destroying the Line between Manufacturing & Services ……….… Saul Kaplan
Your hosts, Braden Kelley, Julie Anixter and Rowan Gibson, are innovation writers, speakers and strategic advisors to many of the world’s leading companies.
“Our mission is to help you achieve innovation excellence inside your own organization by making innovation resources, answers, and best practices accessible for the greater good.”
Cover Image credit: paper people blue from Bigstock
Five Free Nine Innovation Roles Gifts Posted on March 27, 2013 by Braden Kelley
Are you innovative or not?
Do you possess innovator’s DNA?
What about an innovation personality?
I cringe every time I see a new article trying to basically say that some people are innovative and others are not, or than certain individuals are more innovative than others.
Hogwash I say!
It’s just not true. I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not) and as a result individuals must bring their innovation strengths together into a well-balanced, complete team in order to achieve innovation success.
One of the most toxic innovation myths is the idea, or the myth, of the lone innovator. The truth is that if you point to any supposed lone innovator, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs to Alexander Graham Bell, all of these people had whole teams of people working behind the curtain on the innovations that are popularly ascribed to them. It may be easier for our human brains to elevate individuals to the role of innovation heroes, but the fact is that innovation is a team sport.
Invention and creativity can be solo activities, but innovation is collaborative by its very nature. Because innovation success requires collaboration, it is more beneficial for organizations to take a roles-based approach to innovation than a personality or skill-centric approach to innovation. With this in mind I created the Nine Innovation Roles to be part of my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – published by John Wiley & Sons.
The following is an excerpt from my book:
“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.
I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all
people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”
Now for the big news. The news I’m so excited to share with you today.
I’m proud to announce today that I’m setting the Nine Innovation Roles free, and I’ll provide you with all of the tools that you need to conduct a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or team meeting inside your organization to enhance the success of your innovation teams – for FREE.
Some people think I’m crazy to help people not hire me, but because of my collaborative and people-centric approach to innovation I would like to give everyone five free gifts:
1.
The Nine Innovation Roles themselves
2.
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation for team meetings or workshops
3.
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet for gathering data on team makeup
4.
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles card deck design that I use with Fortune 500 clients
5.
Nine Innovation Roles video for use in team meetings or workshops
Free Gift #1 – The Nine Innovation Roles themselves
Below you will find definitions of each of The Nine Innovation Roles. One of the most common questions is ‘Can I be more than one role?’. The answer is that typically we all may feel that we tend more towards 1-3 roles, but it would be hard for someone to excel at more than this. It is also possible for people to fill different roles at different parts of the innovation lifecycle, or to be called upon to fill a role that may not be one of their strengths.
While it is not ideal to have someone fill a role that it is not their strength, it is often better than a team not having all of the roles filled. The most successful innovation teams will of course both have all of the roles performed by team members, but also by team members for whom that role is one of their natural strengths.
1. Revolutionary
The Revolutionary is the person who is always eager to change things, to shake them up, and to share his or her opinion. These people tend to have a lot of great ideas and are not shy about sharing them. They are likely to contribute 80 to 90 percent of your ideas in open scenarios.
2. Conscript The Conscript has a lot of great ideas but doesn’t willingly share them, either because such people don’t know anyone is looking for ideas, don’t know how to express their ideas, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.
3. Connector
The Connector does just that. These people hear a Conscript say something interesting and put him together with a Revolutionary; The Connector listens to the Artist and knows exactly where to find the Troubleshooter that his idea needs.
4. Artist The Artist doesn’t always come up with great ideas, but artists are really good at making them better.
5. Customer Champion
The Customer Champion may live on the edge of the organization. Not only does he have constant contact with the customer, but he also understands their needs, is familiar with their actions and behaviors, and is as close as you can get to interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.
6. Troubleshooter
Every great idea has at least one or two major roadblocks to overcome before the idea is ready to be judged or before its magic can be made. This is where the Troubleshooter comes in. Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge or expertise to help solve them.
7. Judge
The Judge is really good at determining what can be made profitably and what will be successful in the marketplace.
8. Magic Maker
The Magic Makers take an idea and make it real. These are the people who can picture how something is going to be made and line up the right resources to make it happen.
9. Evangelist
The Evangelists know how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.
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Free Gift #2 – Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation for team meetings or workshops (Please Note: I’m sharing this for internal use only, service providers will need to procure a license/certification to use it for commercial purposes)
This presentation is designed to introduce The Nine Innovation Roles framework to your team meeting or internal workshop audience. In addition to sharing definitions of each of The Nine Innovation Roles in a presentation suitable for projection, I’m happy to provide a series of questions that you can use to guide group interaction – ideally with the Nine Innovation Roles cards (Free Gift #4).
This presentation is most effective when combined with The Nine Innovation Roles cards (Free Gift #4) and some sort of inspirational message prior to going through it to get people in the mindset that innovation is everyone’s job and that everyone can contribute to the overall innovation efforts of the organization. A subset of some the messages I use in my collaborative innovation workshops is contained in the video below (Free Gift #5).
Watch or Download the Nine Innovation Roles Presentation
Free Gift #3 – Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet for gathering data on team makeup
You can use this worksheet to have your team evaluate themselves and just gather the self-evaluations to see which roles are represented and which are missing (usual the most important piece of data), or alternatively to have everyone evaluate every other team member as well to provide a kind of 360-degree type feedback to each individual (i.e. You think you’re a Revolutionary but everyone else thinks you’re an Artist).
Download the simple Nine Innovation Roles worksheet
.Free Gift #4 – Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles card deck design that I use with Fortune 500 clients
To make my Nine Innovation Roles framework accessible to as many people as possible inside organizations all around the world to explore and improve innovation team dynamics and success, I am happy to announce that I have now made the print-ready files for the cards available here for FREE download – http://sdrv.ms/YXFP47 – and you can either work with the vendor I use – adMagic – or work with a local printer in your part of the world.
I’ve made the card design available so that people without a budget to bring me in to conduct a keynote combined with a workshop to make the most of the framework can still benefit by getting the cards printed and using them together with the downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation (Free Gift #2) and/or the Nine Innovation Roles video (Free Gift #5).
Free Gift #5 – Nine Innovation Roles video for use in team meetings or workshops (Please Note: I’m sharing this for internal use only, service providers will need to procure a license/certification to use it for commercial purposes)
This video is designed to help you introduce The Nine Innovation Roles framework to your team meeting or internal workshop audience. In addition to sharing definitions of each of The Nine Innovation Roles suitable for projection, it also provides a series of questions that you can use to guide group interaction – ideally with the Nine Innovation Roles cards (Free Gift #4).
This video is most effective when combined with The Nine Innovation Roles cards (Free Gift #4) along with your own personal messages and examples to get people into the mindset that innovation is everyone’s job and that everyone can contribute to the overall innovation efforts of the organization. I’ve included a subset of some the messages I use in my collaborative innovation workshops.
Watch the Nine Innovation Roles Workshop Video
Conclusion
As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to sub-optimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people. And of course people, not ideas, are the key to successful innovation.
I’m extremely proud that these tools will enable you to strengthen your collaborative innovation efforts and explore The Nine Innovation Roles for free and on your own.
Collaborate to innovate!
Braden Kelley is a popular innovation speaker, embeds innovation across the organization with innovation training, and builds B2B pull marketing strategies that drive increased revenue, visibility and inbound sales leads. He is currently advising an early-stage fashion startup making jewelry for your hair and is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. He tweets from @innovate.
How to Build an Innovative Culture Posted on March 24, 2013 by Greg Satell
Every manager would like to be Steve Jobs, but very few ever even come close. Many seek out advice, read case studies and go to workshops to help guide them. Yet still, very few companies are able to innovate effectively. Why is that?
Surely there is no lack of desire. Ask any top executive and he will tell you that innovation is a top priority. It’s not a lack of commitment either. Businesses invest billions in R&D every year, yet all to little avail.
One big reason is a the lack of innovative culture, especially at successful operational firms. Competing for the future is different than competing for the present. If you try to innovate the same way you operate, you probably won’t get very far. To break the cycle, you’ll need to build a culture that promotes innovation as well as operational excellence.
Embrace the Audacity of Youth Unfortunately, innovation is often confused with strategy, so it’s not surprising that it’s often approached the same way. High level meetings with senior executives are convened, big decisions are taken, announcements are made and vast resources are deployed.
The problem is that decisions made that way will reflect the skills and experience gained in the past which, while possibly still effective at present, often isn’t relevant to the future. What you get, in other words, is an attempt to advance past paradigms instead of a serious commitment to creating new ones.
The truth is that breakthrough innovations are more often the product of the audacity of youth than the wisdom of experience. Newton, Einstein, and Watson and Crick all made their major contributions as the foolish young men we forget, not the mature men of science that we have come to revere.
So the first step toward creating an innovative culture is recognizing that senior management is often unable to drive it. We can monitor it, enable it, promote it and ultimately decide when and how it gets deployed, but most of us are ill equipped to create it (and I include myself in that number).
Be The Dumbest Guy In the Room Innovation is frequently a product of synthesis across domains. Quite often, breakthrough solutions in one field are achieved by borrowing wisdom from another. Experts often hit a wall, because they are blinded by past successes. Old solutions are often poorly suited to new problems.
In his recent book, The Idea Factory , Jon Gertner explains how Bell Labs designed their buildings so that people with varied expertise would be forced to interact. Jonah Lehrer describes much the same at Pixar in Imagine , his (somewhat tarnished, but still worthwhile) book about creativity. The highly innovative Santa Fe Institute is specifically set up for cross-disciplinary study.
The problem is that if you manage innovation, you end working with people who know a lot about things you don’t. Therefore, you have to get comfortable being the dumbest guy in the room. It’s frustrating and takes some getting used to. Nevertheless, it’s absolutely essential to breaking new ground.
So feel free to be the dumbest guy in the room. After all, if you already had an answer, it wouldn’t be an innovation. Better to feel silly in the office than in the market.
Promote Sustainable Failure As I’ve written before, the truth about innovation is that it’s a messy business. It rarely springs forth fully formed, but rather comes to us in a crappy disguise. It usually doesn’t work very well at first, existing customers are often skeptical about it and rarely delivers immediate ROI benefits.
Many innovations ultimately fail. Failure is part and parcel of innovation. That’s why venture capital funds expect most of their investments to founder. The trick is to fail cheaply and not to penalize those involved with a failed project. If you can do that, you can make failure is sustainable and stumble your way to success.
Here’s the thing though. Failing cheaply requires minimal involvement by senior management and highly paid consultants. Once they’re involved, failure becomes expensive. Vast resources (and egos) become invested and projects begin to take a life of their own. When they go under, they can take the whole enterprise with them.
The Ultimate Question A lot of people think they have an innovative culture, but very few are actually able to innovate. So how do you know? What can you do to ensure that you are building a culture that promotes innovation rather than one that smothers it? I believe many of the answers can be uncovered by asking yourself one simple question:
If someone came to you with a breakthrough innovation, how would they sell it?
Wal-Mart and Sears. Netflix and Blockbuster. Nucor and US Steel. In each case, the market leader had a chance to invest or partner with the upstart that eventually disrupted them. They simply weren’t buying.
So ask yourself, how would you avoid the same fate? If Sam Walton came to you with a new retail concept, or Reed Hastings with a new way to rent videos, how would they get through the front door? Who would they talk to? How would they be received? What if the next great entrepreneur already works for you? Would she fare any better?
At its core, building an innovative culture means instilling the spirit of the future into the practicalities of the present.
image credit: motherearthnews.com
Greg Satell is an internationally recognized authority on Digital Strategy and Innovation. He consults and speaks in the areas of digital innovation, innovation management, digital marketing and publishing, as well as offshore web and app development. His blog is Digital Tonto and you can follow him on Twitter.
Avoiding Innovation Debt Posted on March 23, 2013 by Peter Bell
By now, most people have heard of Technical Debt; the cost of messy code that grows over time, like interest on an overdue loan. For the last couple of years I’ve been talking at No Fluff Just Stuff conferences about the concept of “Innovation Debt”. I’ve been planning to blog about this for a while. Thanks to Aaron Frost for persuading me to finally write up the post.
Innovation debt is the cost that companies incur when they don’t invest in their developers. It happens when the team is too busy putting out fires and finishing up features to keep up to date with advances in languages, frameworks, libraries, tools and processes. Just as technical debt can kill a code base by turning a green field project into a big ball of mud, innovation debt can kill an engineering team – moving them from a cutting edge crew to a group that’s barely competent to maintain a legacy app. In this post I’ll summarize some of the potential cost of innovation debt and some of the simple steps you can take to ensure your development team doesn’t incur an unsustainable amount.
The Costs of Innovation Debt
You’ll lose your best developers – If, over a period of months, you don’t create any slack for your development team, they’re not going to have the time to learn anything new. The best developers are going to see this and leave. The worst are going to hang around because they don’t really care that much about learning and might be worried that they couldn’t get a better job elsewhere. Because of this, over the course of a year or two, the average quality of your dev team is going to drop. And because great developers are mainly attracted by the chance to work with other great developers, if you’re not careful this alone will create a death spiral where the quality of your team keeps edging downwards until no great developer would consider joining the team.
Recruiting will get harder – With top developers leaving and with a lack of “shiny” things to play with, it’s going to become increasingly hard to hire great new developers for your team.
Productivity won’t improve – Many new technologies are designed specifically to make developers more productive. If your team aren’t learning any of the new technologies, they won’t be bringing the productivity gains to your business.
Your software will get stale – Over time, users expectations increase. Whether it’s integrating OAuth into enterprise software to authorize via LinkedIn, using a responsive/mobile first design for your web applications or delivering a mobile application for your users, unless your team is experimenting with new technologies, they won’t have the skills you need to keep your software competitive with the rest of the industry.
While innovation debt is incurred incrementally, teams will sometimes hit a wall with a particular project where the cost of the innovation debt can potentially cause a project to fail. I remember a “bet the company” project I was involved with a number of years ago. The dev team hadn’t
had time to learn new technologies for a number of years and the new project required them to learn a new version control system, build system, test framework, project management tool, and web application development framework. Any one of those changes might have been manageable, but unsurprisingly with so many new technologies to learn, the project took much longer than expected and nearly put the company out of business.
Avoiding Innovation Debt
Lots of companies talk about a “culture of learning”. There are plenty of ways of actually creating one. Some ideas include:
Lunch and learns – Ask one team member every month to take a morning and hack on something interesting (maybe a new javascript library or to try out a new version control system) and ask them to give a presentation to the rest of the team (or write a blog post if they don’t like to present). It’ll give everyone a chance to hack on something new every few months and will create a sense of shared learning within the team.
Conferences – Make sure all developers hit one local conference a year and ideally send them to at least one conference a year that’s out of town. It’s a great way to learn about new technologies, but it’s an even better way to build a network with other developers who might be able to help with technical issues in the future.
Hackathons – Take a couple of days once or twice a year to allow your teams to hack on passion projects that support the company’s goals. Encourage them to create mockups using new technologies so they can get some hands on experience with technologies that might become important to the company over time.
Continuous consulting – Most teams I’ve met would be well served by putting aside 3-5% of their annual budget aside for ongoing consulting. Bring in a consultant for a few days once a quarter to help your dev team to learn something new on a regular basis.
Pair programming – Pairing can be a great way to increase the sharing of knowledge within your dev team, but you do still need to invest in other activities to make sure your team are still learning from external sources and have new ideas to share.
Allow failure – The goal of trying a new technology is not to use the technology. It’s to learn whether the technology might be worth using. If you never try a technology that ends up not being worth using for your projects, you’re probably not trying new technologies aggressively enough.
Another approach that I’ve found very successful is to use new technologies that have the capacity to improve your core business but to test them on low risk projects. If you think that your core matching algorithm might work better in Clojure but don’t want to bet your entire company on a technology you’ve never deployed, rebuild your email delivery system or write a bug tracker in the language. Then once you have in-house experience with developing and running it in production, you can decide whether or not to rewrite a more critical part of your infrastructure using the technology.
Innovation debt is a real risk for any company that needs to hire and retain a software development team. Of course, there will always be times where you can’t justify the time to learn new technologies for a month or two, but realize that what you are doing in those periods is accruing innovation debt. Have a plan for paying down the debt in the following quarter and follow it, otherwise you’re likely to become an increasingly less attractive place to work with technology that is getting further and further behind that employed by your competition.
Peter Bell is an evangelist/hacker at hackNY, trainer for Github and co-founder of CTO school. He presents regularly at conferences like DLD Conf, QCon, Ruby Nation, UberConf, and the No Fluff Just Stuff enterprise Java tour. He’s been published in IEEE software, Dr Dobbs and Information Week and is writing a book on managing software development for Pearson publishing. He tweets at @PeterBell and blogs at http://blog.pbell.com.
9 Innovation Concepts & Methodologies to Embrace, Consider or Rethink Posted on March 23, 2013 by Stefan Lindegaard
For decades, the key challenges on innovation management in large companies have evolved around four elements; strategy, structure/approach, culture and people. This has been a constant, but the innovation concepts and methodologies keep changing and they continue to impact how we deal with the key challenges.
Here I give you my views on the concepts that I think corporate innovation teams need to embrace or consider (they are fairly new) and those that you need to rethink (they have been around for a while and some adjustments are needed).
COMPANIES SHOULD EMBRACE‌ Business model innovation:
According to Wikipedia, business model innovation refers to the creation, or reinvention, of a business itself. Whereas innovation is more typically seen in the form of a new product or service offering, a business model innovation results in an entirely different type of company that competes not only on the value proposition of its offerings, but aligns its profit formula, resources and processes to enhance that value proposition, capture new market segments and alienate competitors.
The focus on business model innovation really took off with a book by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers is an easy to approach guide that explains the most common business model patterns and inspires you on how you can apply them in your innovation process.
I often say that companies need to have a more holistic approach to innovation that goes beyond products and technologies. Well, that is what business model innovation is all about.
The new corporate garage:
Big companies will become more competitive than ever and in this HBR blog post, Scott Anthony, states that three trends are behind this shift:
“Three trends are behind this shift. First, the increasing ease and decreasing cost of innovation mean that start-ups now face the same shortterm pressures that have constrained innovation at large companies; as soon as a young company gets a whiff of success, it has to race against dozens of copycats. Second, large companies, taking a page from start-up strategy, are embracing open innovation and less
hierarchical management and are integrating entrepreneurial behaviors with their existing capabilities. And third, although innovation has historically been product- and service-oriented, it increasingly involves creating business models that tap big companies’ unique strengths.”
Scott Anthony is one of the leading innovation minds and I think he is spot on with this. Big companies are about to kick small company butt when it comes to innovation.
Open innovation:
Many people ask what open innovation is. I suggest that you view open innovation as a philosophy or a mindset that you should embrace within your organization. In a more practical definition, open innovation is about bridging internal and external resources and act on those opportunities. The value proposition (better innovation to market faster) this gives companies that get it right is simply too good to miss out on.
I also like this quote from Henry Chesbrough; “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”
Open innovation is often viewed as an umbrella term that also includes crowdsourcing, user-driven innovation and co-creation. In order to avoid too much confusion on semantics, I suggest that we focus on what really matters here; bring external resources into your innovation process.
COMPANIES SHOULD CONSIDER…
The lean startup methodology:
Eric Ries, the key thought leader on the lean startup methodology, states that this is a movement that is transforming how new products are built and launched. His initial focus was start-ups, but he is definitely right in also pursuing this for big companies.
Some of the key ideas behind the methodology are: fail fast – fail cheap, “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” and develop a minimum viable product to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible.
Social media for innovation efforts:
Yes, this is one of my favorite personal topics, but it is also something that is picking up interest among clients, in blogs/media and at conferences. The intersection of social media tools and (open) innovation is still at the very early stages, but it will become increasingly important as open innovation takes hold. One reason is that the future winners of innovation know how to make communities (virtual and physical) work and a social media will be a key driver for this.
You can read more on this in my latest book: Social Media for Corporate Innovators and Entrepreneurs: Add Power to Your Innovation Efforts
Reverse innovation:
Reverse innovation is an interesting concept / book that helps us understand what it means to develop in emerging markets first, instead of scaling down rich world products, to unlock a world of business opportunity.
Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble based their concept on these three key elements:
1. You must innovate, not simply export, if you want to capture the mammoth growth opportunities in the developing world.
2. The stakes in emerging economies are global, not local. Passing up an opportunity in the developing world today may invite formidable new competition in your home markets tomorrow.
3. Legacy multinationals must rethink their dominant organizational logic if they are to win in an era of reverse innovation.
COMPANIES SHOULD RETHINK‌ Disruptive innovation:
Clayton Christensen was one of the first innovation thought leaders that really came across to a bigger business audience. His ideas and concepts on disruptive innovation are still relevant. However, I wonder how the increasingly speed of change and globalization impact this. Is it getting easier to pursue radical or disruptive innovation? I don’t think so, but on the other hand I think it has become more difficult to defend an existing business against disruptive innovation.
I think this is an interesting paradox that goes back to the ideas of the new garage by Scott Anthony and I continue to ask myself this question: What if big companies could become better at disrupting themselves?
Crossing the chasm:
This is a classic by Geoffrey Moore. He does a very good job of describing the five main segments of the technology adoption lifecycle of: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
I still think these ideas are valid, but again, how is the speed of change and the higher focus on business model and open innovation movement impacting this?
Blue ocean strategy:
Hmm, what happened to the idea of creating blue oceans of opportunities where you do not have any competitors? The idea sounds intriguing, but I wonder why I never meet any companies that actually used – and succeeded – with this methodology. Their community is still active so maybe I just miss out on some good stuff here.
There are of course many other concepts, methodologies and approaches for driving innovation in big companies, but I had to make some choices. Let me know what you think of this and please feel free to argue why others should be on this list.
image credit: hand pushing image from bigstock
Stefan Lindegaard is an author, speaker and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, social media and intrapreneurship.
Who is your Creative Community? Why innovators need to know! Posted on March 22, 2013 by Dimis Michaelides
Realize the innovation potential of your people
In an organization innovation needs supporters. Who might they be?
Is it your Board of Directors? Is your Board a group of people open to change, who recognize the importance balancing the future and the present and who will support risk-taking with open eyes? Or is it a bunch of old fogies (or young fogies) intent on squeezing maximum profit now and ready to blame you for everything when you do not deliver next quarter?
Is it your C-suite? Does your top team drive innovation and change with its mind and heart, with clarity in its targets, openness of spirit and focus on innovative actions? Or are your senior managers content with preserving the systems and culture that worked so well in the past without rocking the boat?
Is it your middle management? Are your managers developing into leaders by managing change that comes from outside and from above and indeed by initiating change themselves? Or are they a conservative constituency, suspicious of new thinking and action, protective of the organization chart and their own silos and unwilling to empower their own people?
Is it your R & D Department? Do you have a broad minded set of people generating imaginative new products and services in collaboration with your clients, suppliers and their colleagues? Or do you have a narrow minded clique who will always reject whatever is “not invented here”?
Is it your Marketing Department? Are your marketers strategists who are constantly seeking new ways of relating to your clients and constantly seeking new clients? Or are they pompous asses who are convinced that only they have a right to be called “creative” and who spend all their time writing briefs to publicity agencies?
Is it your IT Department? Are your information technologists at the cutting edge, constantly seeking to be ahead of your competition in close collaboration with their users? Or are they boring programming geeks writing code blissfully unaware of the world out there?
Could it be everybody in your company? Are all your people irrespective of rank enthusiastically bringing forward new ideas in their own areas and in others and do all people accept, digest and process these ideas and rally for the implementation of the best ones? Or are they simply content if they just do their jobs?
Am I asking too many questions? I suggest all these questions are important because discovering your creative community is important. Innovation in organizations is not a solo act and driving innovation in a dynamic way is key to any leadership role. Ideally, mobilizing everyone’s
creativity and making it thrive alongside an order of strategies and systems that promote innovation is what all organizations should be doing. The power of a mass movement is generally more potent than that of an elite. If they cannot get the masses on their side, innovative leaders may have to consider which of the above constituencies (or other constituencies) are the most likely proponents and which are the most likely inhibitors to innovation. And how to deal with them too.
Your creative community is after all your best ally in your innovation quest.
image credit: usa.helpministriesinternational.com
Dimis Michaelides, Managing Director at Performa Consulting, is global business consultant and keynote speaker on The Art of Innovation. His book, The Art of Innovation: Integrating Creativity in Organizations, was published in 2007.
The Innovation Chicken & Egg Problem Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jeffrey Phillips
Here’s a question that has befuddled even the best innovation thinkers, and has led to countless articles, white papers, surveys and other analysis: which is more important to innovation success, leadership or culture?
Does an engaged leadership engage an organization and direct its energy toward innovation, or does a sustained culture engage the organization regardless of the will of the leadership toward more innovation? It is a classic chicken and egg question, and one that my clients and our consultants at OVO deal with constantly.
The fact is that both are vital, and both are predominant depending on the organization. But the fact is that culture doesn’t ring you up one day and ask you to drop by to provide advice about innovation. Typically its the leaders of an organization that do that. So it’s far easier to place emphasis on leaders and leadership as the key innovation driver, since we can single out a small team of executives and point the finger of blame at them.
That’s what Hayden Shaughnessy and Scott Anthony just did in a recent Forbes article. I was alerted to the article by my good friend Paul Hobcraft, who has also had much to say in this vein. Anthony suggests in his interview with Shaughnessy that the “One Innovation Rule that Matters Most” is that leadership is vital. Anthony goes on to say that:
“Any company that thinks it has an innovation problem in fact has a leadership problem.” All well and good, and in may ways this is true. In fact I wrote about this very topic recently, making the argument that poor prioritization, poor vision and little funding by executive teams lead to a lack of innovation. My article was based on a recent innovation survey by McKinsey, so the assertions are backed by survey data.
The other side of the coin
However, claiming that an innovation problem is always and everywhere a leadership problem seems a bit too narrow to me. In my work I’ve found many executives who are exceptionally focused on innovation, who are willing and able to fund innovation and set clear priorities, but they face a significant hurdle called corporate culture. You see, no matter how much a small senior team of executives works to influence a culture, that change happens incrementally and slowly if at all. A leader who is not focused on innovation doesn’t necessarily distract a culture that is engaged with innovation (see 3M as an example), and far too often we are caught up making examples of charismatic leaders (see Steve Jobs as an example) that we use to make the case that leadership is what matters alone.
When you see the phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” on a regular basis you begin to grasp the subtle and intangible power of corporate culture. The unfortunate aspect of corporate culture is that senior executives don’t have nearly as much impact as they’d like to think. Culture is somewhat immune to leadership edicts, since the culture is long established, and recognizes that leaders are temporary. When leaders are in their roles on average less than five years, the culture will patiently wait out the leadership. What changes culture is a burning platform.
Large and established cultures will change, and they will change swiftly when threatened. Too often executives create plans and strategies that keep the culture relatively comfortable and safely ensconced in its existing image of itself. A burning platform – an immediate threat to the business, a sudden shift in consumer demand, a new law or regulation which changes the playing field – is often what will force a culture to change. And note that the culture is something that every employee contributes to. Their expectations, attitudes, behaviors and actions in aggregate make up the culture, so every employee contributes to the shape, size and attitude of the culture.
Don’t leaders establish culture?
You’ll be thinking right about now that my arguments are interesting but ultimately futile. Don’t leaders set culture, or at least influence it? For the most part, most leaders don’t understand the true power of corporate culture and fail to understand how to change it dramatically. Their attempts to change the culture only shift thinking and behavior temporarily, since executives fail to stay engaged with cultural change over their tenure. The real leadership necessary for innovation to take root is both a clear strategy, well articulated and funded, as well as consistently engaged leaders who work to slowly shift the culture to a new way of thinking, incorporating innovation as a consistent part of the everyday activities, rather than an occasional moonshot.
Leaders don’t want to spend a lot of time on culture change, because they realize the work necessary to dramatically change a culture and they feel they don’t have the time or energy. While they may demand innovation activities, they won’t ultimately succeed at “making the firm more innovative” until the culture changes as well.
Which comes first?
Which comes first then? Leadership or culture? Well, since the culture is a monolith made up of the expectations and behaviors of the entire company, few organizations can start there. Leaders engage experts and consultants to help improve innovation performance, and many honest innovation experts will frankly tell the leaders that while leaders can impact innovation activities, they can’t impact innovation engagement and sustainment without a focus on the culture. It’s easy to run innovation projects, which will be successful in the short run, but which ultimately don’t change the culture in the long run, and as soon as the leadership changes and priorities change, the culture reasserts itself and innovation is banished. Unless there is a string of leaders who are committed to innovation, or a significant burning platform forces an organization to change, or a charismatic leader drags his company kicking and screaming into a new paradigm, its the culture that matters.
And before you suggest that Jobs demonstrates that leaders matter, know this: Apple was probably a quarter or two from bankruptcy when he took over. Jobs was a charismatic leader, yes, with a big vision, who rekindled the original culture at Apple, but he also had a significant burning platform. Apple had to change, and to its credit it has remained an innovator. Time will tell whether that attitude has permeated the entire culture.
image credit: pretty one image from bigstock
Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of Relentless Innovation and the blog Innovate on Purpose.
A New Form of Crowdsourcing for Innovation: Problemsourcing Posted on March 27, 2013 by Yannig Roth
An increasing number of companies use crowdsourcing today, tasking the crowd to come up with creative solutions to their corporate problems. But this open, companyinitiated approach has drawbacks, like the uncertainty of crowd response, the temporary nature of the relationship or the identity clash that can arise when there is a poor fit with the identity or culture of the organization. Researchers from New Zealand have come up with an interesting twist to the crowdsourcing model: instead of having a company asking the crowd for solutions, they had a government-owned R&D organization asking the crowd for problems (“What is Your Problem?“). Here are some learnings.
When you ask a crowd for solutions, you benefit from a variety of things: access to a wide knowledge pool, generation of market or consumer insights, fast and cost-effective problem-solving capabilities, buzz around your brand… The academic literature and popular press has covered the topic extensively (and you probably know it, too). However, you have du juggle with some issues: potential project delays, possibly few and poor responses, the sporadic nature of the call for entries… Crowdsourcing might be good to solve problems and stimulate creativity, but seldmomly does it allow you to engage in deep interactions with crowd members (also see this article on co-creation and crowdsourcing being complementary).
Crowdsourcing can be more time- and effort-intensive and the solution may not “stick” within the firm because it was not in- ternally generated (Davenport et al., 2013) In a recent article, researchers from Victoria Business School in Wellington, New Zealand, suggest a solution. Instead of asking solutions, let organizations ask for problems. “We look at how an R&D organization in New Zealand developed a variant of crowdsourcing processes that addresses some of the dilemmas identified above,” they explain in their paper, “we have termed this approach problem-oriented crowdsourcing, or “problemsourcing.” The example described in their article is the What’s Your Problem News Zealand? challenge, which was organized by the government-owned R&D organization Industrial Research Limited (IRL), recently rebranded as Callaghan Innovation.
The "Call For Problems" on IRL's March/April 2009 issue
In 2009, IRL launched the “What’s Your Problem New Zealand?” competition by putting out an open invitation to all New Zealand firms to describe their challenging R&D problems that would advance their business. IRL offered the winning firm $1 million worth of R&D services at its facilities. The competition involved two stages (in the first stage, applicants submitted a two-page proposal and completed a questionnaire; in the second stage, the 10 finalists consulted with IRL experts to determine a possible path to solving their problem) and attracted over 100 applicants. Paint manufacturer Resene’s “problem” was determined as that most likely to benefit from the application of IRL expertise and was announced as the competition winner.
Employees of Resene Paints, a family-owned business with a strong commitment on producing environmentally friendly paints
Resene proposed to develop a paint made of 80% sustainable ingredients, but the firm had been unable to find such a product on the market. The existing improvements in paint sustainability were small tweaks of current technology, but Resene wanted to challenge the fundamental
dependence on petrochemicals and hoped to make a superior paint for around 4/5 the price of competing sustainable paints. Yet, Resene lacked the necessary resources to develop it on its own, and therefore entered IRL problemsourcing competition.
We had a clear idea of what we wanted. More than anything, we knew where the gap in the market was (Danusia Wypych, Resene’s technical manager) By January 2010, Resene announced that, with the help of IRL, the team had discovered the ingredient required to produce its environmentally friendly paint. By mid-2012, a novel binding ingredient had been developed and a patent application had been submitted. The market performance of the newly developped product has yet to be proven, but the researchers from Victoria Business School in Wellington saw the experience as an innovation: “Whatever the eventuality for IRL and Resene, we believe that this case represents an interesting new organizational manifestation of local open innovation, which is a variant of crowdsourcing for corporate R&D,” they conclude in their paper.
What did the government organization IRL get out of this experiment? I asked Shaun Coffey, Chief Executive at IRL at the moment of the problemsourcing initiative (“Shaun’s major legacy at IRL is a more creative science system and people with a keen focus in putting science to work in industry,” said the press release that announced him leaving IRL, which is clearly in line with the creative problemsourcing approach).
Here are his enlightened answers:
How did the “problemsourcing” idea come about?
The idea for “IRLs What’s your Problem New Zealand?” originated as a project devised and developed by a cross-functional group of staff who were participating in the companies Leadership Development Program. Each cohort completing the course was given a different corporate problem or opportunity to consider and to come up with project ideas to address the problem. The “problem” giving to the groups in this particular cohort was how to better make potential client/customer companies more aware of the capabilities and services that IRL had to offer.
What did IRL and, to a different extent, New Zealand, get out of this initiative?
The benefits of “IRLs What’s your Problem New Zealand?” have been seen in many areas. Of course, there was the winning project itself that was very successful from a commercial and a scientific perspective.
There were many other outcomes. For IRL some these included (in no particular order): (a) the winning project has resulted in new business and now opportunities for the company involved, and the development of new capabilities within IRL; (b) from all of the entrants, IRL was able to accumulate a large amount of information about industry needs, and opportunities for future work; (c) the impact on morale and productivity was positive, it build confidence right across the company about our ability to work with industry, and made recruitment easier (IRL was seen as an exciting place to work); (d) the contract pipeline grew measurably as a result of the new relationships developed; (e) a vastly raised public profile for IRL, a measurable increase in awareness of the organization and its work; (f) IRL was able to develop deeper and stronger partnerships with private companies.
For New Zealand, some of the benefits included: (a) a recognition that there was a large unmet demand for R&D in industry (b) a recognition that insufficient resources were been devoted to innovation in the manufacturing and services sectors ; (c) many individual companies identified and pursued innovation possibilities that they had not work on previously; (d) a better understanding of R&D and innovation developed. e. many other research institutes and universities reported positive spin-offs from the project, and new partnerships between research organizations and private companies. f. the information gathered during the submission and analysis phase was a key part of successful proposals put by IRL to the national government to create and advance technology institute with almost double the existing resources been devoted to manufacturing.
Do you think the problemsourcing approach will be pursued at national and/or international scale?
“IRLs What’s your Problem New Zealand?” was run on a national scale, and the model could be run at that scale, on a regional scale, on an industry sector scale, or at a global scale. Other national projects have been spawned in NZ as a result – such as a project to enlist the general public in identifying national science challenges.
The problemsourcing is an original approach in the field of innovation. It requires an interested audience of applicants, with an open mindset for innovative thinking. Problemsourcing was a win/win for IRL and Resene, and it addressed many of the drawbacks of traditional crowdsourcing. But the research article also underlines that “A potential drawback of the competition format was that the losing finalists were disappointed,” which is the case in most competitions! “We hope to find ways to get all of the 10 finalists’ ideas into proper business cases and then funded in one way or another,” said IRL science group leader Richard Furneaux. We would be glad to hear about it!
References: Davenport, S., Cummings, S., Daellenbach, U., & Campbell, C. (2013). Problemsourcing : Local Open Innovation for R & D Organizations. Technology Innovation Management Review, (March 2013), 14–20. image credit: eYeka.com
Yannig Roth graduated in marketing and is currently Research Fellow at eYeka and PhD student at University Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris (France). His main research interests are creative crowdsourcing and community co-creation. Yannig regularly blogs at http://yannigroth.wordpress.com
Inspiring Creativity in Others Posted on March 25, 2013 by Jeffrey Baumgartner
If you want to push others – such as colleagues, team members, children, students, sweethearts or friends – to be more creative, there are a few simple things you can do.
Ask Questions
The best thing you can do is ask lots of questions. In particular, ask openended questions (questions which require more than a “yes” or “no” answer). Answering questions makes people think, particularly if they believe you are genuinely interested in their answers. Hence you also need to acknowledge answers.
“Why” and “Why do you think…” questions are particularly powerful and this is doubly true if the question relates to a problem for which you are seeking creative ideas. “Why do you think sales of our electronic toilet paper dispenser are so poor?” “Why do you think people do not separate their rubbish in this neighbourhood?” Such questions force people to use their imaginations in order to understand a problem, sometimes from the perspective of other people. This is great for creative thinking.
Be Provocative
I like provoking people. Not offending them – that doesn’t provoke. It simply offends. But provoking people forces them to question assumptions, question the status quo and consider alternatives. For instance, if you are talking with a group of general practitioners, you might say, “I believe technology is reaching the point where, in a few years, robots and computers will be able to perform most routine medical work.” With bankers, you might suggest, “once mobile telephone payment systems become standardised, it will surely make cash, debit cards and credit cards obsolete.” To a group of patriotic Americans, you could say, “Belgium makes better beer. Pity when we bought Budweiser, we didn’t improve the taste of the beer!”
Of course you have to be careful here. There is sometimes a very fine line between provoking a group of people and offending them. Arguing that God does not exist to a group of fundamental Christians will only spark defensiveness and strong emotions rather than thoughtful debate. You would do better, with such a group, to question the meaning behind one of Jesus’s parables. Likewise, criticising a nationality, particularly if you are not a part of that nationality, generally offends. If an American tells a group of French executives that the French are lazy, the chances are that the executives will simply stop listening. But if a French executive says the same thing, it would likely encourage debate on whether or not it is true and if so, why. The French do love to intellectualise.
Positive Reinforcement
If you are too critical of other people, particularly people who see you as some kind of authority (pupils to a teacher, children to a parent, subordinates to a boss), then those people change their behaviour towards you. They plan their actions to avoid criticism. This usually results in cautious and secretive behaviour. People do not want to take risks that might be criticised or share thinking that might be rebuked. However, being cautious with your thinking is is effectively keeping your creativity to yourself. On the other hand, if you regularly compliment people and give positive reinforcement, then the same people start acting to receive praise. This is more likely to encourage trying new things and sharing ideas for encouragement.
This does not mean that you should never criticise or that you should always praise, even when nothing praiseworthy has been done. Rather, do criticise when it is warranted. That will make your compliments more valued. More importantly, formulate criticism into something more positive such as a suggestion. For instance, instead of telling your child, “you’ve left all the lights on upstairs. You know that wastes electricity!” Tell her, “please remember to turn the lights off when you come downstairs, that way we use less electricity and you know that is better for the environment.” Instead of telling a subordinate, “that PowerPoint presentation is not at all convincing. Try again” say, “That’s a good start, but we need something really convincing to win the sale. Could you try to make it more compelling?” Can you feel the difference?
Challenge People
When you do need to criticise, or positively reinforce people, sometimes adding a challenge can push people to think about solving problems with new ideas – which is essentially what creativity is about. To a child, “You’ve lost your bus pass three times this month. What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?”
There is more on this theme, albeit in a business context, in my article on the 3Cs.
Inspire
Inspiration fuels creativity like few other things. Sometimes you can inspire people through your own actions. But, you need to find other inspirations too. Introduce children to the books and authors who inspired you. Take them to art museums, theatre and other cultural places. But do not just take them. Many younger children will be bored in an art museum. So, talk about the paintings. Even with very young children, this is important. For instance, you might ask a very young child what she sees in a painting or how she thinks the sculpture feels.
With employees, you can also take them to cultural events or, better still, give them tickets and let them go themselves or with family. Share articles that have inspired you and suggest good books. When someone on your team has done something incredible, share it so that everyone can be inspired.
Be Delighted with Creativity
When someone shares an idea with you, be delighted with it, even if you have doubts about the veracity of the idea. Be delighted even with small ideas. Be delighted with creative thinking. You can always review and improve the actual idea before implementing it. But if you are delighted by creativity, then people will be delighted to be creative with you.
Jeffrey Baumgartner is the author of the book, The Way of the Innovation Master; the author/editor of Report 103, a popular newsletter on creativity and innovation in business. He is currently developing and running workshops around the world on Anticonventional Thinking, a radical new approach to achieving goals through creativity — and an alternative to brainstorming.
The Venture Cafe at the Cambridge Innovation Center Posted on March 22, 2013 by Jonny Hankins
Every Thursday in Cambridge Massachusetts the Venture Cafe opens its doors to the innovation and start up community, so this week I went to check it out on behalf of the Bassetti Foundation and Innovation Excellence.
The Venture cafe website has a calendar section that describes the event I attended, as well as those forthcoming and past. As described, the cafe hosts tables for individual meetings with lawyers, venture capital groups and other interested parties, as well as innovation competitions and this week an invitation to a green energy hackathon. Appointments are free, the tables have a schedule and an individual can sign up to as many as they like upon arrival.
There are also several meeting rooms where different actors offer advice on everything related to start up management, money raising and a host of other issues, as well as lectures delivered by leaders in the field. Again they are free to participate in and registration is done on site.
The event is not only about information though, it is also about networking. The cafe has a bar and beer and wine is served free of charge. Anyone is allowed to visit the event 3 times before they are asked to become a contributor, and it takes place every Thursday. 3 is the magic number because it is also the number of free drinks an individual can have each week.
One particularly interesting character was that of the doctor. A wooden visiting room was set up next to the bar, staffed by invited individuals that have experience in the start up world or related fields. The logo above the door was very telling; Advice Booth, for the betterment of good ideas. I had the pleasure of a long conversation with Lisa Sasso of Medical Development Partners, and we entered into a real dialogue about my work and the mission and goals of responsible innovation.
Another interesting table was occupied by the TiE Challenge 2013, a start up accelerator that is looking for applications for a competition whose 5 winners gain year long mentorship, introduction to investors, office space and cash, to name but a few.
A second interesting table was occupied by the 2nd Boston Cleanweb Hackathon and Data Jam Challenge Competition. This event boasts a $25,000 prize pool, and competitors are asked to create an application that addresses energy issues. The Data Jam section of the competition focuses on transportation energy efficiency, all takes place between 5th and 7th of April in Boston
The atmosphere was very pleasant, people were open about their work and I spoke to many innovators, entrepreneurs and funders, and I can see that the meeting could be a great resource for anyone looking for help in setting up or maintaining a start up business. The Venture Cafe is situated within the Cambridge Innovation Center, a complex that offers office space of all types to anyone who needs it.
All in all I would say that the event is a great resource for anyone interested in innovation and the fast changing world of start ups.
image credit: gabc-boston.org
Jonny Hankins is a researcher and writer for the Bassetti Foundation for Responsible Innovation in Milan. Trained as a sociologist at the Victoria University of Manchester UK, his interests range from innovation in the renewable energy sector, bio and medical ethics and the role of politics in innovation, to questions of ethical and moral responsibility. He lives in Boston Massachusetts where he is also a professional musician, actor and street performer.
Tech is Destroying the Line between Manufacturing & Services Posted on March 25, 2013 by Saul Kaplan
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama made a big deal about manufacturing jobs as a central part of his economic vision for the country. “Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs in manufacturing”, he proclaimed.
I support the president’s aim and passion to revive manufacturing, but to accomplish it we first have to jettison industrial era thinking. The industrial era and the 7.1 million manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. from 1979 to 2012 aren’t coming back. We must create new 21st century manufacturing jobs that leverage what America is great at, creativity and innovation. Manufacturing will grow in the U.S. when we accelerate the use of technology to increase productivity, enable new business models designed for mass customization and unleash the manufacturers in all of us.
To begin, we need to recognize that manufacturing isn’t an industry sector, it’s a capability with plenty of opportunity for innovation. We take industry sector definitions for granted. As if industries were clubs with exclusive admission criteria and secret handshakes only revealed to companies that agree to play by understood rules. The industrial era was defined by clearly delineated industries, making it easy to identify which sector every company was competing in. It was all so gentlemanly really, as if competition was governed, like boxing, by a code of generally accepted Marquess of Queensberry rules. Companies were all assigned a numerical Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code (now North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS) identifying which industry sector they fit in to.
Those days are over. Industries don’t work that way any more, the industrial era isn’t coming back. Is Google a manufacturer or a service provider or both? Their acquisition of Motorola Mobility and U.S. production of the Nexus Q home media player suggest Google is serious about building manufacturing capability. Is Apple a manufacturer or a service provider or both? It’s hard to tell the difference between a manufacturer and a service provider and the distinction is limiting. Today the lines are blurring. Think iPod. Apple didn’t bring the first MP3 player to the market. It changed the way we experienced music by delivering on a value proposition that bundled product (iPod) and service (iTunes). Apple didn’t view the competition as other product manufacturers. Apple is a market maker not a share-taker.
Industrial-era thinking and NAICS industry codes force companies into characterizing their business models as being either product- or servicefocused. This is a false choice. Making a product doesn’t define the market a company is creating or competing in. Describing a business as a manufacturer immediately constrains business model innovation opportunities. If we want to bring back manufacturing we have to start by changing our thinking about manufacturing.
Once we realize that manufacturing is a capability we can get on with democratizing it. We can all be manufacturers. In the State of the Union Address President Obama announced his plan for a $1 billion investment to build a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation composed of
fifteen advanced manufacturing hubs. To bring manufacturing back to the U.S. we don’t need fifteen hubs, we need fifteen million makers creating stuff.
It won’t be long before everyone will have access to a 3D printer. Talk about democratized manufacturing capability. Armed with a 3D printer, individual makers can create their own digital design for any imagined object or borrow a design from anywhere around the world. By simply pressing a button makers can set a 3D printer into motion rendering the physical object with layers of plastic or other material right before their eyes. What was science fiction ten years ago is reality today. It wasn’t long ago we listened to the whir of a dot-matrix printer spitting out documents from our computers, now a 3D printer renders any object we can dream up the same way. With the magic of 3D printing capability we are all manufacturers, constrained only by our imaginations.
I agree with President Obama that our national mantra should be to make more stuff. I just think the effort should be less top-down and more bottom-up. The maker movement is already in full swing. If you want to witness it first hand just go to one of the 60 community Maker Faires being held around the world in 2013. Maker Faires are all-age community gatherings of makers. They are part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new. 165,000 people attended the two flagship Maker Faires in the Bay Area and New York in 2012. If you go, prepare to be blown away by an infectious passion to make things, creativity to hack and reassemble the parts and a do-it-yourself (DIY) fire in the belly that won’t be stopped.
A maker movement is already happening across the country. Imagine if instead of looking for top down solutions in a small number of manufacturing hubs we encouraged the bottom up maker momentum emerging in every community. Less push, more pull. We can all be manufacturers.
This post originally appeared on the Fortune site here.
Saul Kaplan is the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory. He is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence, RI, and blogs regularly at It’s Saul Connected. Follow him on Twitter at @skap5.
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