by lmorris on March 13, 2010
I’m reading a book that I am enjoying enormously, and although I haven’t finished it yet, I found a passage that I appreciated so much that I wanted to post it here because it says so much about innovation.
“An animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge. An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time. Children are protected from the usual exigencies of adult life; they don’t need to hunt deer or ward off saber-tooted tigers, let alone write grant proposals or teach classes–all of that is done for them. All they need to do is learn. When we’re children we’re devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that the world could be. When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned and imagined to use. There’s a kind of evolutionary division of labor between children and adults. Children are the R&D department of the human species–the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They make the discoveries, we implement them. They think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good ones and make them real.”
The role of innovation management, of course, is to foster the synthesis of these two – the creativity and imagination of the child, who sees things for the first time and understands them in ways that someone who has seen them a million times cannot; and the systemic, rational thinking of adulthood, which knows how to transform a good idea into a truly valuable product or service or process.
The book is The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik. The writing is smooth and effortless, the ideas provocative. And the implications for anyone interested in innovation are worthy of close attention.
The interplay between the child’s mind and the adult’s is exemplified in this story about Edwin Land. Land was an avid photographer, and one day he posed his young daughter in front of his house and took her picture.
Did he tell her to “Say cheese”? Perhaps.
In any case, when the picture was taken she ran to him and said, “I want to see the picture, Daddy.”
“Yes, dear, of course,” he replied. “I just have to take out film and develop it, and print, and then you can see.”
But that did not satisfy his daughter in the least. “No, Daddy. I want to see it NOW!”
Inspired by his daughter’s insistence, her imagining that she should be able to see it immediately, Land went on to develop the Polaroid instant camera.
I made up the dialog, but the story is basically true.
I mentioned this exchange in a speech I gave recently, and I used it as an example of the power of questions to unlock insights that lead to innovation. Indeed, all innovators are insatiable question-askers.
Just as children are.
•••
I will post more insights from The Philosophical Baby as I read on.
by mkaufman on March 8, 2010
Product Trends and Inspiration
Most people who have been engaged in creativity and innovation, at some point, come to realize that cross pollination and lateral thinking are important sources for creating insights and generating breakthrough solutions to complex problems. I imagine most people have come to rely on particular resources for their inspiration and for providing stimulation during the ideation phase of the innovation process. I started to wonder about what these particular sources might be and realized I could do a small experiment using a social network to find out.
In the process of preparing to write this blog post I extended a question to my small network on LinkedIn. I asked people to share with me the kinds of resources they use to identify trends and anticipate the future. Those that chose to participate then submitted a wide range of resources – from people, to blogs, to publications, to trend watching groups, to asking 14 year olds (it’s actually quite a nice list).
I’ve compiled their responses into an open-source, shared data base on Factual.com – a project to create an open data ecosystem. These resource can now be updated and combined with other lists being developed by people around the world. If you are interested in viewing and/or updating this work in progress it can be found at this link.
Patterns Emerged
The compiled list is a reflection of a small group of people and doesn’t claim to be all inclusive nor comprehensive. What is quite remarkable is that most of the sources compiled are free (or have components that are free while providing additional services that can be purchased).
What also stands out in my mind are the resources that weren’t included in the list (some of these I added myself after compiling was complete).
For instance, there were very few resources dealing with sustainability, few dealing with industrial design, one dealing fashion, none dealing with architecture specifically and none specifically related to trends in the retail space.
For instance, the couple of resources focusing on sustainability included Enviu and Flow while they didn’t include a site like World Changing. The list did not include something like Trends Ideas – focused primarily on architecture, interior and landscape design, and kitchens nor did it include a site like Core 77 (focused on industrial design).
So What?
So what’s important about having a rich supply of trend data, and stimulating ideas about the future?
In Langdon Morris’s white paper entitled Innovation Metrics he articulates a model of the innovation process as a funnel. The Ideation phase of the funnel is a really important step in leading to Insight. If we don’t have a process for understanding what we are seeing it’s possible we’ll miss the pattern that is the difference that makes a difference.
As Bryan Coffman, InnovationLabs partner and co-founder writes in his white paper entitled Learning to See,
an important tool in our quest for insight is the ability to uncover principles that organize bodies of knowledge about systems in ways that reveal their underlying patterns.
Further on Bryan writes:
When we look for insights we either want to understand the structure of some aspect of the world—how it’s put together—or we want to know how it works and how it produces the behaviors that we see and experience. The object of the former inquiry is a body of knowledge, while that of the latter inquiry is a system in focus.
What is possibly more important than having resources and a plethora of ideas about the future is the process we use to mine those trends and turn them into patterns and insights.
The bottom line: it’s important to have a rich ideation process as part of an overall innovation process but having the right process to lead to insights is potentially more important.
