The Innovation Road Map Travelogue

New blog

2008-09-26T09:45:00.001-07:00

A new blog is at http://incollaboration.ning.com

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 7 – Electronic Media

2008-01-05T12:24:00.000-08:00

There are multiple substitutions occurring within the media for K-12 classroom instruction. Modular software and video are loosing market share. Comprehensive courseware is gaining market share now, but will reach its peak of market share in about 2010, and then begin to decline. Online courseware is gaining market share now and will reach a penetration of 60% by 2020.

Data: The Complete K-12 Report, Education Market Research, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 & 2001

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 6 - Basel Products

2007-10-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

It would appear that the electronic substitution for print in basal education products has begun. While the data indicates that the substitution is in the early stages, it does seem to indicate that it has begun. The data source for this is suspect as it is the results of two surveys without guarantee that the two survey populations were representative samples. Research in the field of substitution analysis generally agrees that if the substitution reaches 5%, the substitution models are accurate.

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 5 - Supplemental Products

2007-10-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

The educational supplemental products market is fragmented and complex. However, at a very high level it is possible to discern substitutions that are occurring. Print based supplemental products are in a steady decline. Other forms of supplemental products while increasing for a while, never gained a large market share and are now beginning to decline in market share. Electronic media based supplemental products are steadily increasing and will reach 90% of the market in 2020.

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 4 - Supplemental Instructional Materials

2007-10-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

In “A Study of the Grade K-6 Supplementary Instructional Materials Market”, the authors use instructional time used as a measure of the penetration of various materials and technologies. This is a much better surrogate measure of the penetration of new technologies and concepts into the market as it doesn’t depend upon the cost of the technology or material. (This approach should be the basis for a thorough study of the substitutions ongoing in the education arena.) However, the data is limited. What is does show is that CDROM and the Internet are gaining share of instructional time at the expense of other media, as shown in the graph below.

Data: Study of the Grade K-6 Supplementary Instructional Materials Market, Hagen Marketing Research Inc., Lois Eskin Associates & Professional Publishing Services, 2004

Ultimately, it appears that the Internet will be the primary method for computer based instructional delivery.

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 3 - Student Device Technology

2007-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

Student devices have changed from desk top to lap top over the years, and are now changing again to other types of devices. This substitution is summarized in graph below.

Data: America’s Digital Schools, The Greaves Group & The Hays Connection, 2006

While the number of data points is small, the data fits the Fisher-Pry model well, and supports common knowledge. Desktops are in decline and laptops have reached their maximum penetration of the market. Other types of student devices are rapidly gaining share of the market. While there is data presented in America’s Digital Schools on a number of other student devices, with the limited number of data points, it was impossible to segment the other device category. However, thin client, handheld, cell phones and portable gaming devices seem to be on the decline. While, tablet PCs and student appliances are gaining market share.

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 2 - Reference Library

2007-09-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

Substitution analysis is a powerful tool to examine and forecast the substitution of one technology for another. In this case, the substitution is electronic media for print media in the reference library. The surrogate data that we have is that provided by Association of Research Libraries. It is not the complete world of expenditures on reference materials for libraries, but it is representative, at least of the big libraries. The data that ARL provides is a measure of expenditures. This is a useful surrogate for the number of units, the number of users or the amount of material, all potentially more direct measures of the substitution. However, sales figures are quite often used as they provide an aggregate way of indicating the impact of the new technology on the market.

It is also important to note that there are multiple substitutions going on in a cascade of change from print - CD, LAN and Internet, to just name a few. If data were available on this level of detail, a multiple substitution model could be created.

The Fisher-Pry substitution model is often used to analyze a substitution like electronic for print media in the reference library. The relationship between the fraction of total market taken by the new technology, f, is often given as:

f = 1 /(1 + c exp(-bt))

where t is time, and c and b are empirically determined coefficients. In this case b and c were determined from the data provided by Association of Reference Libraries for the years 1992 to 2004.

When these data are analyzed utilizing the Fisher-Pry method, the graph shown in Figure 1 results. It clearly indicates that the substitution of electronic for print is well underway in reference materials. The crossover point will occur in 2008 and 90% substitution will be achieved ten years later.

Figure 1. Data: http://www.arl.org/

Taking 1990 as the beginning of the substitution, and the middle projection, the time to 90% substitution by electronic media will take 28 years.

One of the interesting, and most insidious aspects of this type of substitution, when the substitution is taking place in a growing market, is that a large percentage of the substitution has taken place before the old technology sees two successive years of decreased revenue. This is the case here as well. Fifty percent of the total time to 90% substitution has elapsed before the print media have experienced two years decline, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

There is an additional substitution going on and that is collaborative user generated content for traditional organized, hierarchical development and production. The reference industry is a pioneer in this substitution in Wikipedia. This is a substitution within the electronic reference resources, and unfortunately we have no data to indicate how this substitution is progressing. Revenue is not a good surrogate for this type of substitution as the results of the Wikipedia effort are available for free. The only possible measure would be the number of accesses or amount of time that people use Wikipedia versus other traditional reference resources. Wikipedia is certainly growing fast (Figure 3), in spite of professional criticism of the quality of the effort. Figure three indicates the growth in the number of English articles. The number of English articles is projected to be:

2007: 1.7M
2008: 4M
2009: 8.5M
2010: 18M

Figure 3. Source: Wikipedia

The transformation of the reference library has not been completed. There are many factors, trends and driving forces that could affect the future of the reference library. I think that the two most important trends affecting the future of the reference library, and by association, the reference publishing industry are: search engines vs. indexed collections, and proprietary vs. open content creation.

Search engines select information to be delivered to you based on your keywords matching them to the content of documents it searches, based on the algorithm of the search engine. It does not deliver the information that is "best" for the purpose of the researcher, as a reference librarian would, nor does it verify its authority, as indexed and abstracted peer reviewed articles/books/reports does. Most search engines will deliver documents that are current, are used frequently and are linked to my other documents (a type of authority measure). What search engines provide is quick, cheap access to over a billion web sites in the world. Given the high costs of the traditional system, and the rapid improvement of search engines, I see search engines providing a lot of the services now fulfilled by reference librarians, and the reference publishing industry.

Technology Substitution in Publishing: Part 1 - Introduction

2007-09-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

Information technologies (hardware and software) are playing a key role in innovations in industry after industry. They diffuse through an industry by improving procedures, processes and products. The diffusion usually begins with incremental changes aimed at improving costs, or more broadly, efficiency. This is like a virus infecting a living cell, the informed or informatized (we don’t have good language to describe the result) is transformed into something new. Informed segments of the economy then multiply their effects on the industry radically changing it or destroying it.

The publication industry is one of the industries being so affected. Information technologies have found their way into the processes of printing books, their distribution, the way they are sold, and even the way we communicate about the books. Now information technology is altering the very nature of publications, especially in the textbooks and supplemental materials used in K-12 education. And, now the information technologies developed to aid social change and societal development have begun to impact the industry, threatening to destroy it.

This series of eight blog entries summarizes the meta research done on the industry searching for data that indicates the nature and rate of substitution of information technologies into print. There are two overall conclusions from this study. First, that there are indications of the substitution going on in a number of areas. And, second, that we lack a coherent set of data on the industry that would enable us to make firm predictions.

Substitution analysis is a well accepted method of technological forecasting in use for 36 years. In these analyses, the Fisher-Pry model was used. The Fisher-Pry model predicts characteristics loosely analogous to those of biological system growth. It results in a S-curve (more formally, sigmoidal curve) familiar to many because the curve is in the shape of an S. These natural growth processes share the properties of relatively slow early change, followed by steep growth, then a turnover as size asymptotically approaches a limit.

The Fisher-Pry substitution model is often used to analyze a substitution like electronic for print media in the reference library. The relationship between the fraction of total market taken by the new technology, f, is often given as:

f = 1 /(1 + c exp(-bt))

where t is time, and c and b are empirically determined coefficients.

Keeping Austin Wyrd

2007-08-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

Note: This essay is about the city I live in - Austin, Texas.

When I first heard the unofficial slogan for Austin, "Keep Austin Weird", I was turned off. The word "weird" had too many negative connotations for me. But, then I remembered an old mythology that I had written about in March, 1989 for Creativity!, a now defunct IBM magazine*. And, some conversations with Natalie Shell (http://www.natalieshell.com/) helped connect the two concepts together and I decided to do some further research. I now understand that the concept of "wyrd" is exactly right for Austin. What do you think?

Once upon a time

A great tree grew in the earth by a pool of water that was spring fed from the bottom.
The tree was known as the "World Tree" in some customs, "Tree of Life", or "Word Tree" in others.
The pool of water nourished the tree’s roots.
The tree dropped water from its leaves back into the pool.
The pool was known as the "Well of Wyrd".
The pool was tended by three women whose names meant:
All that has gone before,
How the past shapes the being now, and
That which should become.
The "Well of Wyrd" is layered with past life, represented by the dew from the tree.
And, is constantly being replenished and stirred by the spring at its bottom.
Those who drank from the pool gained wisdom.

The Anglo-Saxon word "wyrd" is derived from a verb, "weordan", to become, which in turn is derived from the Indo-European root "uert" meaning to turn. Wyrd literally means that which has become.

In a wider sense, "wyrd" refers to how past actions continually affect and condition the future. It also stresses the interconnected nature of all actions, and how they influence each other. In metaphysical terms, "wyrd" embodies the concept that everything is turning into something else while both being drawn towards and moving out from its own origins. "Wyrd" can be thought of as a process that continually works the patterns of the past through the patterns of the present into the patterns of the future.

By the way, Shakespeare borrowed from this mythology when he created the three witches in Macbeth:

"Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

The cauldron was the well of wyrd. Stirring the well of wyrd created chaos. And, the three women became witches, who were weird. Hence our modern connotations.

The concept of "wyrd" is complex and deeply ecological. The system of the well and the tree is obviously ecological with respect to the physical world. But, by deeply ecological, I mean that it also applies not only to the physical system, but the social, spiritual and information systems as well. It is "glocal" as well involving the individual and all of humanity. Our past, ancestral and experiential, affects us continually. Yet there is the interplay of our personal wyrd and the universal wyrd and the role we must play in creating our own destiny. We interact with that which has become to create personal patterns that affect and are reflected in the universal patterns. These universal patterns then exert forces that shape our lives.

The patterns created by individuals at a certain time and place create the sprit of the community that shapes the beliefs and behavior of everyone in the community. Every action we take, or don’t take, will have implications for own future choices as well as the future choices of others in the community. Therefore, we have ethical obligations to think carefully about the possible consequences of everything that we do. We are affected and constrained by our past actions, but we are constantly creating what should become through our reaction to present situations.

The three young women tending the tree and the well don’t just simply represent the past, present and future. They stand for:

all that has gone before
the process by which what has gone before and its bonds and connections shape the being that is now
the obligations that exist between people, that must be fulfilled, that shape the present being into what should become

Barton Springs Pool is our Well of Wyrd archetype. It is a physical manifestation of the process of wyrd. We get constant reminders of our past actions and their impacts and constraints on the pool. It is spring feed, but our present state of being produces water that flows into the pool, often polluting it. Dedicated people have fought hard to maintain the obligations we have to each to each other and the future to at least keep it as it now is. As an archetype of our community and its spirit, the pool should be protected, sustained and nurtured. It’s no wonder that people who swim in the pool regularly speak of it as a spiritual experience. It is a spiritual place.

If it is safe to drink the water from the pool, drinking of it should provide wisdom if one reflects on why the water is safe to drink.

I don’t think we’ve done as well on the social, spiritual and informational aspects of our wyrd. We do have a history center, but what about modern history? I don’t think anyone is studying the process of how we have become who we are. And, I’m equally sure that no one is thinking about the network of obligations we have to each other and how that should shape our future.

Keeping Austin wyrd has to become more than an unofficial slogan. It has to become how we perceive, think and act.

* I republished this essay on my blog (http://www.innovationtravelogue.blogspot.com/200)6_11_01_archive.html).

iPhone

2007-07-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

When I moved from Wappingers Falls, NY to Austin, TX in 1980, I was moving from one IBM location to another. I was supposed to have the position of Technology Manager for the IBM Austin site. I didn't find out until I got there, that the position was filled. So, I had some time to get acquainted with the technology important to the site. Austin had been a second source manufacturing facility for typewriters and was transitioning into electronic hardware software systems, then in the form of word processors.

I did a research project on the key technologies important to the future of systems similar to word processors and concluded that they were all going to merge - audio, visual, text, electronic communications, and all digital. When I tried to communicate that to Austin IBM executives, I was met with blank stares. I might as well have been from Mars.

The iPhone has finally done just that. And, there's still more to come. Watch what happens when TV goes all digital.

Opportunity

2007-05-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

The first announcement I heard upon entering the terminal of Chicago’s O’Hare airport was that it was illegal to solicit transportation at the airport. After getting my bag and walking towards the taxi stand, a man dressed is a suit solicited me for a limousine ride to downtown. After a brief bargain on the price, I accepted his solicitation in order to get a clean, well kept car. I figured that if the car was a nicely dressed as the driver, it should be an improvement over the taxi. I was not wrong.

On the drive into downtown Chicago, which took almost an hour, the driver made various business deals over his cell phone taking notes on scraps of paper. The one that caught my ear was his attempt to find out about a car wash for sale in McAllen, Texas. I am from Austin, Texas and have done some consulting in the area. He was trying to find the owner or real estate agent, and he patiently, but persistently, would not take “I don’t know” as an answer. After several phone calls, writing notes along the way, and flawlessly driving in Chicago traffic, he finally got the name of the real estate company offering the property. He still had to get that number and the follow that lead.

I asked him if he was trying to buy the car wash. He said that he was. I asked if he had ever been to McAllen. He said that he had and that his cousin lived there. It was his cousin who gave him the lead to a car wash for sale. I volunteered that the McAllen area was still fast growing and that real estate values had held. McAllen is on the border with Mexico and has benefited because of trade with Mexico. He said that that was what his cousin told him and that real estate values in Chicago had dropped by 30%.

As we drove on in silence I looked out the window and saw a sign from the Bank of America that had two messages on it that changed:

Opportunity is everywhere
If you know where to look.

I’m not so sure it’s knowing where to look, but knowing how to look that is key. Opportunity can be right in front of you, but if you can’t see it, it’ll do you no good. Yogi Berra was right when he said, “You can see a lot just by looking.”

Did I mention that this guy was from the Mid East? I’m not an expert, but I think he was speaking Arabic on the phone to a friend. His English was good and he was demonstrating many of the characteristics of an entrepreneur. I’m sure he will do well.

Maybe Tom Watson, the founder of IBM was right, when he adopted as his vision in the 1930s, “World peace through world trade.”

Market Driven Innovation: A Systematic Method to Focus and Encourage Innovation

2007-04-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

This chapter argues the need to focus on efforts to produce effective and efficient innovations and presents a new approach to target those innovation efforts. It proposes a market-driven innovation methodology as a means to approach the organization's opportunities and threats.
Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

From: Innovation Management: Concepts and Cases, edited by B Sujatha, ICFAI Books, 2006

Innovation History of the Automotive Industry

2007-04-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

View Video (wmv, 4MB, 1 min)

This is a compressed view of the innovation history of the auto industry from the 1820's to the 1970's. The innovation profile is displayed as a matrix of nine different types of innovation as described in Innovate! The cycle is repeated three three times in the one minute video. For more information about the history read below. For more information about the innovation model, visit The Innovation Roadmap

History
A classic example illustrating these observations about innovation strategies is the U.S. automobile industry. There were five major stages in the development of strategy in the auto industry from the 1820s until the 1970s.

Experimenters and Hobbyists: The Early Days
The search for a self-propelled wheeled vehicle began with Cugnot's steam-powered tricycle. Other technological competitors followed, with internal combustion engines and electric motors providing energy sources. During this period the fastest car was, surprisingly, an electric vehicle.

From the 1880s to the 1920s there was a rapid proliferation of different versions of the automobile. Hundreds of companies were created, each with its unique approach. Carriage shops in many cases acted as the incubator. To own a car during this period required daring and at least a modicum of mechanical ability. Purchasers were the early adopters, experimenters, and hobbyists, who weren't concerned about repairing the frequent breakdowns, and certainly not totally dependent on the auto as a means of transportation or business. There were few roads, and those were of poor quality.

The breakthrough innovation of Cugnot resulted in many distinctive and incremental product innovations. Competitors were searching for the right technologies and the right configurations to meet market needs. The thrust of this innovation activity was breakthrough and distinctive product innovations. There was not a lot of focus on process or procedure innovations.

Search and Learn: The Development of the Ford Model T
When Henry Ford began his search for the perfect car, there was still a great deal of technological uncertainty. No one knew for sure which engine type would win. Certainly no one knew which configuration would best fit the market. Ford went through a process of searching, trying different configurations of internal combustion engine autos, to find the car for the "common man." The "Model T" designation was not capricious but the result of trials A through S, which culminated in 1908 in the Model T. The major innovation strategy during this period was a continuation of the distinctive product innovations of the past, along with a movement toward incremental product innovations.

A Car for Everyone: Exploiting the Model T
Ford correctly recognized that the driving forces for change in the United States were creating a need for cheap, reliable, independent methods of transportation. He correctly understood that if he could rationalize the manufacturing system and drive the cost down, he could capture a large share of the market. To improve the reliability and decrease the cost, Ford instituted a series of product, process, and procedure innovations:

• Product innovations
Four-cylinder engine (cost, efficiency)
Works completely enclosed (more reliable)
Durable (stood up to bumps)
Reliable (didn't strip gears)
$825 price (competitors', $2000)

• Process innovations
Reinforced-concrete factory with windows /skylights
Interchangeability of parts
Moving assembly line
Task/part segmentation

• Procedure innovations
High pay (double competitors)
Nonstop eight-hour shift rotations

The results of all of these innovations plus an incredible number of subsequent incremental innovations produced impressive cost reductions.

An example that has been reported shows the depth of the rationalization. Ford requested that gears be shipped in wooden boxes, and he specified the dimensions of the pieces of wood in the boxes. This wood was just the right size to be used as is for the floorboards of the cars. Ford had all the cars painted black, and all the parts black. This maximized the interchangeability of the parts, simplifying inventory. The joke was that you could get any color Model T you wanted as long as it was black.

The results were impressive. Ford created the auto industry and dominated it for years. Some people even credit him with the creation of the consumer society we live in. He made the cars cheap enough to be purchased and paid the workers well enough that they could become consumers.

Ford took the results of what he had learned about the product design and configuration and focused on breakthrough, distinctive, and incremental process and procedure innovations.

Spectacularly successful as this strategy was, Ford made the mistake of believing in it too much. On his deathbed, he is reported to have said that the only thing wrong with the Model T was that it stopped selling.

As Abernathy and Wayne have pointed out:

"The strategy of cost minimization single mindedly followed with the Model T was a spectacular success. But the changes that accompanied it carried the seeds of trouble that affected the organization's ability to vary its product, alter its cost structure, and continue to innovate."

From Rural Utility Vehicle to Living Room on Wheels: GM's Response
Environmental forces were at work in this market to create change. People's social values were changing. They wanted more choice, more comfort, more luxury. Women were becoming drivers, and the open carriages and hand-crank starter were definite drawbacks. People began to have more disposable income and attached status to the type of automobile they owned. Porter explains that:

"The classic example of the risks of cost leadership is the Ford Motor Company of the 1920s. Ford had achieved unchallenged cost leadership through limitation of models and varieties, aggressive backward integration, highly-automated facilities, and aggressive pursuit of lower costs through learning. Learning was facilitated by the lack of model changes. Yet as incomes rose and many buyers had already purchased a car and were considering their second, the market began to place more of a premium on styling, model changes, comfort, and closed rather than open cars. Customers were willing to pay a price premium to get such features. General Motors stood ready to capitalize on this development with a full line of models. Ford faced enormous costs of strategic readjustment given the rigidities created by heavy investments in cost minimization of an obsolete model."

GM took advantage of Ford's preoccupation with an obsolete strategy and developed cars for everyone. They offered different price ranges, flexibility of choice, optional features, and a host of technological innovations, not the least of which was Kettering's electric starter and battery system. Alfred Sloan, the founder of GM, was quoted by Abernathy and Wayne as saying,

"Mr. Ford ...had frozen his policy in the Model T,...preeminently an open-car design. With its light chassis, it was unsuited to the heavier closed body, and so in less than two years [by 1923], the closed body made the already obsolescing design of the Model T noncompetitive as an engineering design ....

The old [GM] strategic plan of 1921 was vindicated to a "T," so to speak, but in a surprising way as to the particulars. The old master had failed to master change ....His precious volume, which was the foundation of his position, was fast disappearing. He could not continue losing sales and maintain his profits. And so, for engineering and marketing reasons, the Model T fell .... In May 1927 .... he shut down his great River Rouge plant completely and kept it shut down for nearly a year to retool, leaving the field to Chevrolet unopposed and opening it up for Mr. Chrysler's Plymouth. Mr. Ford regained sales leadership again in 1929, 1930, and 1935, but, speaking in terms of generalities, he had lost the lead to General Motors."

While GM certainly produced many process and procedure innovations, the principal innovation strategy was a return to a distinctive and incremental product innovation thrust. As a result of correctly reading the driving forces for change and interpreting their impact on consumers, GM dominated the auto market for a number of years. However, as Abernathy, Clark, and Kantrow point out, even when imports began to make inroads,

"The comfortable maturity into which American automobile makers drifted during the 1950s and 1960s kept all such potentially disquieting questions at bay. Like their counterparts in other manufacturing industries, executives in Detroit felt they had found the key
to unlock forever the boundaries of a secure domestic market. Their confidence was soon to cost them dearly."

Synthesizing Market Demands: Development of Toyota
In the 1950s and 1960s there were new driving forces for change. The United States was being suburbanized. People were fleeing from the inner cities and were in the process of creating the present‑day megalopolises of Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta, to name just a few. The car became essential to get around cities that were created by and for the car. But even more than that, the people left in the suburbs needed a second car. People had enough disposable income for two cars but would have liked to have a smaller, cheaper car for the second car.

There was a niche entry at the low end, Volkswagen, and the German manufacturer found a very successful niche market. Detroit tried to respond by building small cars, but found that it could not produce small cars cheaply enough to compete. The only way that Detroit could take cost out was to reduce quality, and that produced some disastrous results and eventual return to the big-car formula. To quote Abernathy, Clark, and Kantrow:

"In retrospect, then, we can see that Detroit's early flirtation with a new calculus of automobile design and production was at base a continuation of past practice, a somewhat half-hearted attempt to view the competitive dynamics of the industry in different terms. Just how strong a grip the logic of large car production had on the industry can be seen in the compacts' steady increase in size and weight during the years they were in production. Indeed, each year seemed to bring a few more inches and a few more pounds until, by the late 1960s, even a once trim car like the Falcon had added a foot in length and 500 pounds in weight. Detroit, in effect, first tried to build small cars by making little big cars."

Detroit's insistence on following its old business theory caused a backlash. There were attacks on the quality and safety of the small cars, and a general discrediting of the large U.S. automakers. Kotler et al. describe the situation:

"The U.S. automobile companies ignored these warning signals and continued to build larger and more expensive regular automobiles. This total ignorance of consumer demand led to significant negative car buyer attitudes-a pro-foreign, anti-Detroit syndrome. As Donald Peterson, vice president of car planning and research for Ford's Product Development Group, observed: "People believed that we make too many changes for change's sake-i.e., non-functional changes. There's a credibility gap. People don't believe our advertising. It has done more harm than good."

Toyota was watching. They saw the success of Volkswagen, the driving forces for change, the changing needs of auto buyers, and the power of innovation to redefine the small auto with quality. As Kotler et al. state,

"As strategic planners of the highest order, the Japanese aim their marketing efforts, not at where the competition is situated, but at where they think the competitive battlefield will be in the future."

Toyota did extensive market research in the United States using Volkswagen as the prototype. They used U.S. market research firms and U.S. data, and beat us at our own game. Their first entry, the Toyopet, was not a success, but they stuck with their new business theory and the result was a restructuring of the market.

Toyota focused on distinctive product, process, and procedure innovations. Then their thrust was incremental innovations across the board. Eventually, Toyota became the market leader.

Becoming Your Company's Futurist

2007-04-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

View the Video (wmv, 147 MB, 72 minutes)

Market research is in the cross hairs of change. Demographic, sociopolitical, technological and economic forces are driving significant, maybe even revolutionary, change in your industry. In times of systemic change, you have to ask yourself the question, "Does my company need a prophet in order to have a profit?" I think that the answer is a resounding "Yes!". In this talk I will establish some steps you will have to take to become your company's futurist. I will discuss three steps - how to develop insights about the future, how to use those insights to become competitive, and how to become a futurist. In addition I will briefly describe the potential business opportunity of strategic market research for companies in your industry.

Paul Schumann is a practicing futurist with expertise in creativity and innovation. He has lived long enough to see forecasts fail and succeed, including some of his own. He had a thirty year career with IBM in three very different arenas - as a technologist and technology manager in semiconductor technology, as an internal entrepreneur creating the first independent business unit within IBM, and as a cultural change agent developing a more creative and innovative culture. Since retiring from IBM he has been consultant as a business futurist with programs in creativity and innovation. He is the founding president of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society (http://www.centexwfs.org/). And he is member of the Advisory Board to the MRA, the Austin Center for Community-based and Nonprofit Organizations and the American Creativity Association. More information about Paul can be found on his web sites - http://www.theinnovationroadmap.com/ and www.glocalvantage.com.

Talk given at Competing in the Research Coliseum, 20th Annual Joint Conference, Southwest Chapter, Marketing Research Association, 4/7/06

Autobiography in Five Chapters

2007-04-12T07:12:00.000-07:00

Chapter One:
I walk down the street and there's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two:
I walk down the same street and there’s the same deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it and I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place. It takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three:
I walk down the same street and there's the same deep hole in the sidewalk. I see that it is there. I still fall in. It's a habit; but my eyes are open and I know where I am. I get out almost immediately.

Chapter Four:
I walk down the same street and there’s the same deep hole in the sidewalk. This time, very carefully and cautiously I manage to walk around it.

Chapter Five:
It occurs to me to walk down a different street.

Not sure where this came from originally. I've had it around for over twenty years.

It sure seems to apply to my life, but I'm always cycling between Chapter 3 and 4...

The Future of Strategy

2007-04-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Listen to Paul Schumann Respond to questions from Tom Carroll on the future of strategy:

Note: all files are mp3 and range in length from 0:49 to 13:30 minutes

What is corporate strategy?

What does it mean to have an effective strategy?

Are there some best practices to develop strategy?

What should an effective strategy include?

Who should be involved in developing strategy?

What is the 'knowable future'?

Are there new techniques to develop strategy?

What are some global trends important in developing strategy?

Were you surprised when you understood about the speed of technology development?

Are there some global companies who exhibit good strategy?

What are some first steps in developing strategy?

How can people contact you?

What do you think is the most important question in the world now?

2007-04-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

Note: This was a question posed for a number of Conversation Cafe's recently. The following is my answer.

I think that the most important question facing the world now is how to create a set of values that transcends, but can be accepted by, the world’s major spiritual traditions, ethical systems and cultures while supporting simultaneously pluralism and integration. Without some shared values, we cannot have a world conversation.

Omar Khayyam had an answer to this question when he wrote in the Rubaiyat:

"The Grape can with logic absolute
The two and seventy jarring sects confute…"

By confute the translator probably meant ‘argue away’ or he could have meant confuse.

Of course Khayyam also wrote about wine:

"…I wonder often what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the wine they sell."

Khayyam would probably be surprised to find that the answer in today’s world is not the wine that is sold, but the process of selling and buying, or business, that is having the most successful conversation in the world. Is it the values of business that can be shared over most of the world? Are our global conversations going to be business?

When confronted by Marley’s ghost in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge comments on Marley’s condition – captive, bound and double ironed – not comprehending the reason for his condition, "But you were always a good man of business…"

The ghost responds, "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Science, and technology as well, have established a successful global conversation. Are secular values the only ones that can deal with the two and seventy jarring sects?

Religion and politics seem to have had the most difficulty establishing a global conversation. Violence seems to be the value of this global conversation.

Ecology may be the conversation for today’s environment. It is based on science with strong components of technology and business, and it embraces the values of life, common to most of the world. The realization that we are all affected by the environment, individuals, business and governments, coupled with the fact that anything anyone does, or doesn’t do, affects everyone else, could drive the values of ecology toward the forefront of the world’s conversation.

What do you think?

A Formula for Sustainable Global Prosperity

2007-03-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

Listen to Interview (mp3, 27MB, 1 hour)

David Pearce Snyder, Life-Styles Editor of The Futurist magazine, is a data-based forecaster whose thousands of seminars and workshops on strategic thinking have been attended by representatives from most of the Fortune 500 companies, and from local and federal government agencies, educational institutions and trade associations. Before entering private practice as a consulting futurist in 1981, Mr. Snyder was Chief of Information Systems, and later, Senior Planning Officer for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, where he designed and managed the Service's Strategic Planning System. He was also a consultant to the RAND Corporation, and served as an instructor for the Federal Executive Institute, and for Congressional and White House staff development programs. Mr. Snyder has published hundreds of studies, articles and reports on the specific future of a wide range of U.S. institutions, industries and professions, and on the socio-economic impacts of new technologies. He is the editor/co-author of five books, including Future Forces and a sequel, America in the 1990s, both published by the American Society of Association Executives. He has appeared on Nightline, the Today Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC World Service.

The common assumption that the Information Revolution will create a new generation of high value/high pay rank-and-file jobs remains an article of faith that is not reflected in current hiring patterns or official long-range employment forecasts. To the contrary, routine workplace activities are increasingly being automated, infomated, and commoditized, reducing the need for skilled labor. Simultaneously, macroeconomists expect that international competition made possible by free trade and our new global infostructure, the Internet, will increasingly drive local labor markets worldwide to pay comparable wages for comparable work. But real revolutions arise from the bottom up, and a confluence of spontaneously adopted technical innovations and collegial workplace practices is currently foreshadowing a grassroots reinvention of work itself that can be expected to increase the value added and the income earned by rank and file employees. What is emerging is an absolutely unexpected yet intuitively compelling social invention, open collaboration, uniquely capable of mobilizing the creative capacities of workers everywhere to exploit the productive potential of information technology, and to address the growing inventory of social, economic, environmental and biomedical challenges confronting the future of human enterprise.

David Pearce Snyder
Consulting Futurist
The Snyder Family Enterprise
8628 Garfield Street
Bethesda, MD 20817
301-530-5807
david@the-futurist.com
www.the-futurist.com

Extreme Creativity

2007-03-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

Listen to Interview (mp3, 15MB, 30 minutes)

How will the practice of creativity be a driving force in the future world of work? What role can we play to take advantage of the current uncertainty to leverage creative thinking? What are the links between strategic and creative thinking? How do you totally engage the brain in the creative process? Come and engage your brain in this thought provoking session that will stimulate your thinking!

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi is CEO of Herrmann International, publisher of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) which is based on extensive research on thinking and the brain. Multiple applications of whole brain technology include creativity, strategic thinking, problem solving, management and leadership, teaching and learning, self-understanding, communication and team/staff development. Ann seeks to apply the principles of whole brain technology to her varied responsibilities: from day-to-day operations, to sales, to workshop design and presentations. Having resided in Europe for 13 years, Ann brings a global perspective to the company. Since joining Herrmann International USA 19 years ago, Ann has expanded the network of international offices to 16, spanning Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America.

Her personal goal is to promote better understanding of how individuals and organizations think and become more effective, as well as enhance learning and communication technologies worldwide through the application and development of whole brain concept. Ann is an advisor to the American Creativity Association, and has served such clients as Bank Of America, Coca Cola, General Electric, BMW, Target, Cintas, Cisco Systems, Hallmark, IBM, Milliken, Novartis, the US Forest Service and The Wharton School, Vanderbilt, as well as many educational groups. A powerful and highly energetic speaker, Ann has delivered keynotes and large group presentations around the world including events for ACA, CPSI, ASTD, ISA, American Planning Association, Training, the International Alliance for Learning and Innovative Network.

Herrmann International, celebrating its 25th year in 2006, was founded by Ned Herrmann, a Past President and founding member of the ACA and major contributor to the association for many years before he passed away in 1999. Ned, a physicist by education, was Manager of Management Education for General Electric where he began his groundbreaking study of the brain, creative human development and learning which resulted in the formation of the HBDI. The HBDI has been used worldwide to profile individuals’ learning and thinking styles and preference in accordance with brain theory. Herrmann developed and validated the HBDI and the Whole Brain Model while at GE, and designed several workshops that are internationally recognized for their use of cutting-edge creativity-learning models. Herrmann authored several books outlining his findings, including The Creative Brain published in 1996; The Whole Brain Business Book, published in 1998.The work of the North Carolina company has been featured in O Magazine, Business Week, USA Today, Discover, Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review. Herrmann International, with affiliates world-wide, continues to research and develop products and applications in the fields of thinking, creativity, leadership and learning.

Prisoners of Our Thoughts

2007-03-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Interview (mp3, 19 min, 9MB)

Drawing on his book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles at Work (Read a Book Review, PDF), Dr. Alex Pattakos underscores the close relationship between creativity and the human quest for authentic meaning in life. Indeed, the intrinsic motivation to "actualize creative values" is one of the primary sources of meaning that defines our human-ness. Moreover, the will to meaning is based upon our individual and collective willingness to be held responsible--for our attitudes, our beliefs, and our behaviors. In this regard, Dr. Pattakos calls for a new paradigm that connects creativity with responsibility. In other words, we not only have a responsibility to be creative and to inspire creativity in others, but also to ensure that our personal and collective creative outputs are "responsible" and seek to make a positive difference in the world.

Dr. Alex Pattakos, affectionately nicknamed "Dr. Meaning," is the founder of the Center for Meaning and a principal of The Innovation Group, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. He has had a long-standing passion for creativity as an academic (he began teaching creativity courses at the University level in the early 1980s), as an author (he's published extensively on the relationship between creativity and learning within complex organizations), and as a practitioner (he's worked in/with the government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors). In 1986, he received the "Creativity Award" from the University of Maine for his pioneering work in distance learning. The World Future Society credited him with inventing the concept of the "Electronic Visiting Professor" and IBM showcased his work as an innovation in academic computing.

More recently, Dr. Pattakos has integrated his passion for creativity with the emerging discipline of Innovation Management (see: www.seedsofinnovation.com ). Among his recent publications is the book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts, already translated into eight foreign languages, which applies the wisdom of his mentor, Dr. Viktor Frankl, to contemporary work and personal situations and provides a meaning-centered platform for innovative action. In addition, he is a member of the Honorary Advisory Council for the Statue of Responsibility Foundation (www.SORfoundation.org ), which seeks to erect a Statue of Responsibility monument, an idea that originated with Dr. Frankl, on the West Coast of the USA (as a "book-end" to the Statue of Liberty) by the end of this decade.

Alex N. Pattakos, Ph.D.
Principal, The Innovation Group
223 North Guadalupe Street, #243, Santa Fe, NM 87501-1850
(505) 820-0254 (direct)
alex@themeaningdifference.com
www.themeaningdifference.com
www.seedsofinnovation.com

Whither the Creativity Clan: Challenges for Global Solidarity

2007-03-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Interview

Kirpal Singh is an internationally recognized writer, the author of 15 books, and a Singaporean icon. Among other things, he teaches courses on and directs a program on creativity at the very innovative Singapore Management University.

Kirpal Singh
School of Economics & Social Sciences
Singapore Management University
90 Stamford Road
Singapore 178903
65.68220207
kirpals@smu.edu.sg

Creativity and the Future

2007-03-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

View the Video (slides & audio, 55 minutes)

Creativity and the future are inextricably intertwined. We create the future and creativity is required to perceive the future being created. In today's complex environment, foresight requires the interaction of a number of creative minds with expertise in a variety of fields. Creativity is required to analyze or synthesize data from noise, knowledge from data and wisdom from knowledge. And, that creativity must be tapped and channeled through the use of appropriate futures methodologies. This presentation will cover some concepts of the future and useful ways to utilize the creativity of people to develop foresight. It will also include a discussion of the limits of our ability to forecast.

Paul Schumann is a practicing futurist with expertise in creativity and innovation. He has lived long enough to see forecasts fail and succeed, including some of his own. He had a thirty year career with IBM in three very different arenas - as a technologist and technology manager in semiconductor technology, as an internal entrepreneur creating the first independent business unit within IBM, and as a cultural change agent developing a more creative and innovative culture. Since retiring from IBM he has been consultant as a business futurist with programs in creativity and innovation. He is the founding president of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society (www.CenTexWFS.org ). More information about Paul can be found on his web sites - http://www.theinnovationroadmap.com/ and http://www.glocalvantage.com/.

Creativity in the Cosmos: A Philosophical Appreciation

2007-03-23T06:41:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Interview (mp3, 11MB)

(1) Appreciate some philosophical ideas that offer an intellectual foundation for many more practical efforts; (2) Relate these, if one chooses--but it's not necessary--to a contemporary view of spirituality; (3) Relate these, also to the processes in one's own mind and personal evolution; (4) Apply the techniques of asides, multiple parts of self, and future projection to enhance effectiveness in communications; (5) Recognize the sources of creativity and cultivate receptivity to these "dramatic muses"; and (6) Appreciate the roots and interconnections of drama, creativity, and the psychologies of play and creativity.

Adam Blatner, M.D., T.E.P., is the only certified trainer of psychodrama in the United States who is also a psychiatrist, and, indeed, a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Doubly Board Certified in Adult and Child/Adolescent Psychiatry, Dr. Blatner has retired from active clinical practice and instead devotes himself to writing and teaching about "Psychological Literacy," seeking to foster a higher level of social and emotional skills in the population as his contribution to mental hygiene. In the field of psychodrama, Dr. Blatner was the recipient of the field’s highest "J. L. Moreno Award" for lifetime service. He’s the author of three of the most widely used books on the subject, as well as numerous articles and chapters and books.

Adam Blatner
Teacher, Writer
Senior University Georgetown (Texas)
103 Crystal Springs Drive
Georgetown, TX 78628
512 864-0516
adam@blatner.com
www.blatner.com/adam/

ET Light: Enlarging the Circle of Creativity to Include the Doctor Whos

2007-03-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Interview (mp3, 12M)

A courageous outrageous storytelling musical presenting encounters with extraterrestrial beings--intuitions, events, dreams, psychic messages and memories--with interpretations of what they may be telling us. It will move past the edge of what "authorities" tell us is our universe. Come prepared to laugh about, question, awaken or renew your relationship with extraterrestrial collaborators.

Carol McCormick studied over a period of three years at the Anna Wise Center in California. She has been a teacher and trainer at schools, colleges, universities, and corporations for thirty years. Her teacher Anna Wise wrote Awakening the Mind: A Guide to Mastering the Power of Your Brainwaves and The High Performance Mind - Mastering Brainwaves for Insight, Healing, and Creativity. Anna has taught biofeedback meditation and brainwave training for the past three decades and has led workshops and seminars throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, South America, and Asia. She is a leading authority on EEG and Higher States of Consciousness.

Carol McCormick
Storyteller, Trainer, and Public Speaker
SpiritMind Institute
625 Windemere Drive
Plymouth, MN 55441
763-546-4133
mccobuch@comcast.net

Community Weaving: A New Solution for a New Century

2007-03-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Interview (mp3, 5 MB)

Community Weaving is a grassroots community mobilization strategy that weaves the social fabric of community. This social change methodology incorporates the use of web-based technology to weave the human and tangible resources of the grassroots with the knowledge and skills of formal systems to create new ways of being in community. The approach raises social consciousness and awakens the human spirit to its purpose by engaging people to take responsibility for what they care about to create a more caring, just and civil society. In this networking session, Cheryl will reveal the techniques she used to grow a Family Support Network across the U.S. This transformative community building approach weaves a multi-cultural community tapestry of connections within communities, across organizations and around the world. Community Weaving is a cutting-edge methodology featured in the new Change Handbook, 2nd Edition. You don't want to miss this incredible opportunity to learn simple tips on how to grow your networking potential exponentially.

Cheryl Honey, C.P.P., of Bothell, WA, is president of Excel Strategies, Inc. and pioneer of Community Weaving, a social change methodology. She founded Family Support Network, Int'l and developed web-based technology to weave fabric of community within community systems around the world. Cheryl spearheaded a national movement by engaging citizens to take responsibility to creating a more caring, just and civil society. She is an advisor to the Alliance for Human Empowerment and member of the American Creativity Association. She received a B.A. in Liberal Arts & Transformative Community Building from Antioch University, Seattle. She authored Community Weaving in The Change Handbook 2nd Edition, and published numerous articles on community organizing and volunteerism. Communities tap her expertise to develop innovative approaches to build and bridge social capital. She's an Ambassador for Peace, and recipient of the Excellence in Leadership Award and the Giraffe Award, for sticking her neck out.

Cheryl Honey, C.P.P.
Master WeaverFamily Support Network, Int'l
14316 75th Ave. NE
Bothell, WA 98011
206.240.2241
www.familynetwork.org

Risk Taking as a Factor of Creative Thinking

2007-03-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

Listen to Interview (mp3, 10 MB)

Risk-taking has not been a major area of study during recent decades, but increasing interest is being taken in its relation to creative thinking. The definitions of risk–taking vary widely depending on the researchers, purposes and theoretical biases .most definitions of risk-taking were concerned with economic theory in the first half of twentieth century. Moreover, Lopes (1983), indicates that the psychological dimension of risk-taking was generally neglected.

Before discussing the educational implications of risk taking, in its relationship to creative thinking, certain basic factors involved in risk-taking deserve mention. These include situational factors such as the nature of the risk taking task, the nature of motivation provided by the task, and the effect of other people on risk taker. These also include gender differences, age, profession, values, anxiety level, and creativity of the risk taker. Discussion of these will lead to suggestions on how risk –taking can be integrated into the learning environment.

Professor Abdullah Alsafi, who received his Ph.D. Degree in educational psychology 1989 from the University OF Wales, U K., is a professor and senior lecturer in department of educational psychology at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia ,he was member in many academics and university administrations .he was consulted with many organizations regarding teaching learning in Saudi Arabia ,and he has presented his ideas regarding creative thinking, problem solving, learning strategies etc in many formal schools. He has presented papers in many conferences in Saudi Arabia, United State (APA) & (ACA), and Malta. He has published in English and Arabic language journals on topics focusing on creative thinking , motivation , learning and thinking ,anxiety , attribution ,achievement ,personality traits that dispose to creativity ,verbal production , psychological reality in pre school etc. and is the author of two books in Arabic: one on Creative Thinking and the-Evaluation in education. His third book, on educational psychology, is due to be published soon.

Abdullah Taha Alsafi
King Khalid University
Department of Educational Psychology
Abha, Saudi Arabia
PO Box 9035
009667 2247303 Office
009667 2263986 Fax
profalsafi@gmail.com

Creativity is Not Being Afraid to Fail: The 3M Experience

2007-03-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Listen to Interview (mp3, 18mb)

Dr. Andrew J. Ouderkirk received his Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from Northern Illinois University in 1978. He earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Northwestern University in 1983. After working two years at DuPont, he joined 3M in 1985.

Andy formed and led the team developing 3M’s Multilayer Optical Film (MOF) technology platform and developed the program’s intellectual property strategy. MOF products have wide-ranging, innovative applications, such as light-polarizing products, ultra high efficiency light reflectors and wavelength-selective products. The initial MOF product, Dual Brightness Enhancement Film, was the world’s first, commercially successful reflective film polarizer, which is now commonly used in LCDs for handheld, monitor, and TV applications. Andy is one of the lead developers of the new business Platform Architecture series being taught to 3M technical employees.

Andy has over 95 issued US patents and made more than 35 publications and invited presentations. Recognition includes the 2000 Fast Company Fast 50 award, the 2003 Finance and Commerce Innovator of the year, and the 2004 ACS Award for Creative Invention. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005. Andy is a 3M Carlton member, and is a Corporate Scientist in 3M’s Optical Systems Division.

Innovation

2007-03-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

Paul Schumann speaking about innovation from his perspective.

Click to view video.

The Wave of the Future: Revisiting Marshall McLuhan

2007-01-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

Audio (mp3, 1:39)

This seminar by Paul Schumann will be held on February 15, 2007 begining at 4:30 p.m. (CST). It will be held online in the OPAL Auditorium. There is no charge and there is no registration. The seminar will last two hours.

You will need a PC with Internet Explorer, and speakers. A microphone (available for less than $15 at most computer stores) is optional. With a microphone you will be able to interact verbally. Without it, you will still be able to interact through text. If this is the first time you have used this virtual room, you will need to download some software so you may want to allow yourself a few minutes before the event begins. If you have any questions, e-mail Paul Schumann or call 512.302.1935.

Click here to participate in the seminar a few minutes before the start of the session. You will be taken to the registration for the Texas Forums OPAL Auditorium. You will be asked to enter the name that you wished used in the seminar. (If you are asked for a pasword, just skip.)

This event is sponsored by Texas Forums, Taylor Willingham

Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, academic, professor of English literature, communications theorist and one of the founders of the study of media ecology.

McLuhan's most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is a pioneering study in media ecology. In it McLuhan proposes that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study -- popularly quoted as the medium is the message. More controversially, he postulates that content has little effect on society. He notes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways.

McLuhan began his study of media with work on advertising that culminated in his book The Mechanical Bride. He was an academic who refused to act like one. He was criticized for his use of media to get his message out, an undeserved criticism. He felt strongly about the necessity for everyone to 'wake up' and become aware of the invisible effects of media, not the message, on our culture. He was not a critic or an advocate of the changes he was describing. He was like an artist trying to show others what he saw.

McLuhan was a poet and philosopher, not a scientist. He was similar to Lucretius who wrote an epic poem describing his philosophy of the world. His writing is dense, with references to a vast amount of knowledge not possessed by the ordinary reader and filled with poetics, making his work difficult to understand.

His insights into the effects of media are extremely valuable to us today. What he wrote about 40 to 50 years ago is a guide to understanding what is happening now.

This seminar will begin with a description of some of McLuhan's observations - the medium is the message, hot and cool media, pre-literate to literate to post literate, my interpretation of the characteristics of the post literate society, and the four laws. It will close with a discussion of the wave of the future.

Paul Schumann is a practicing futurist with expertise in creativity and innovation. He has lived long enough to see forecasts fail and succeed, including some of his own. He had a thirty year career with IBM in three very different arenas - as a technologist and technology manager in semiconductor technology, as an internal entrepreneur creating the first independent business unit within IBM, and as a cultural change agent developing a more creative and innovative culture. Since retiring from IBM he has been consultant as a business futurist with programs in creativity and innovation. He is the founding president of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. And he the founder of the Innovation Commons Network (www.innovationcommons.net) More information about Paul can be found on his web sites - www.theinnovationroadmap.com and www.glocalvantage.com.

Clues to the Runes

2006-11-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Note: This is an artilce I wrote for an IBM magazine I created and edited, Creativity!, in 1989. Creativity! was a success in that it greww to a circulation of 60,000 readers inside of and outside of IBM, Except for the reference to Fax's (how quaint that seems now), it's all still relevant. Perhaps even more relevant now if you consider that we're moving away from the literate to post literate society.

"Clues to the Runes" as a title to a column in an IBM publication may raise questions in your mind. The reference may be obscure, or even unknown to you. I briefly explained the choice in the first column written for the second edition of Creativity, 1983. But now, Creativity is seven years old, readership has expanded from 3,000 to 19,000, and the column has evolved. Especially for new readers, I thought it worthwhile to explain the reasons for the choice of the name. Then, I will close with some observations which I hope will be of interest and value to you, as I hope all the Clues columns are.

The purpose of the column is to provide some insight into the current and future business world, elucidating the forces for change, or explaining the present. The vehicle used for this purpose is personal observations and experiences, or the detection of weak signals of impending change buried in the avalanche of information that cascades on us daily.

Runes are an ancient written language. The language was discovered in the modern era, but not deciphered for some time. Since it was one of the early written languages in the West, and as I will discuss later in this column, important for other reasons, great interest existed in the interpretation of the runes. The runes have also been associated with magic and mystery, being tied to ancient religious ceremonies. This is true of most creative discontinuities. Unable to be understood by the majority of people, and demonstrating immense power, they become magic.

Consider the FAX machine in this context. The use of FAX machines has exploded just in the last year, and now they are common business tools. FAX machines can be found in the most unusual places, including many airports. A cartoon in a recent New Yorker showed two businessmen being escorted to their table in a restaurant. The maitre d' asks, "Do you want a table with or without a FAX?" We take the FAX for granted, a few may even know how it works. But consider a literate person of a few hundred years ago. Bring them to the present and show them the FAX. It would appear magical to them. Unaware of the actual physical workings, they could only assume that a letter was dematerialized and put back together before their eyes. To them there would be no difference between the Star Trek transportation system and the FAX machine.

If we now conspired to hide the secrets of FAX technology from everyone, we would be doing what the ancients did with languages such as the runes. They wanted the language to appear magical, with the power remaining in a few hands. Today, some authorities are concerned that we are creating the same two class society‑those that understand technology and those who do not. And as technology accelerates, the gap widens.

In addition, our society has honored "zero sum" activities more highly than technical activities, accentuating the problem of interesting students in technical careers. (See "Manufacturing and Product Innovation," Creativity 7:4, Dec. 1988). To a growing percentage of the population, an increasingly greater part of today's world is indistinguishable from magic.

The word "rune" itself is derived from the Norse word "runar," which meant "magic sign." It also has its roots in the German "runa," meaning either "to whisper" or " a secret." So the rune was a magical secret that was whispered only to those with a need to know.

In mythology, the origin of the runes is credited to Odin. Odin was the Norse god known in Germany as Woden or Wotan, and as Grim in Anglo‑Saxon England. He was a ferocious warrior who represented the wilder aspects of the dark forest of the northlands. He frequently was ascribed the powers of the all‑father, the creator of gods, nature, and men. Known as the one‑eyed warrior, who had given one of his eyes to Mimir, who guarded the well of wisdom and knowledge‑a caldron of inspiration, Odin had to go through a terrible ordeal to arrive at the runes. He was, in addition, as the myths say, the first to be able to communicate it to other beings. From the myths we are told,

"I know that I hung on the windy tree.
Swing there nights all nine,
gashed with a blade,
bloodied for Odin,
myself an offering to myself,
knotted to that tree,
no man knows
whither the roots of it run.

None gave me bread. None gave me drink.
Down to the depths
I peered
to snatch up the Runes,
with a roaring scream
and fell into a dizzied swoon.

Well being I won,
and wisdom too.
I grew and joyed in my growth.
From a word to a word,
I was led to a word,
from deed to another deed."

It is not clear when the runes originated, or whether they were the first phonetic alphabetic language. Unfortunately, runes first were written on wood, which often does not survive. Runic script is angular, with straight lines‑thus easy to carve on wood. Surviving records of the language exist in stone and bronze executed by Neolithic and Bronze Age artists.

Communication is the process that fuels progress. Innovations in communication have always driven major improvements in the human condition. No one knows when we first began to speak. No record has been left. The first art that we have records of is about 30,000 years old. The paintings on the walls of the caves in France are about 15,000 years old. These appear to be our first attempts to communicate ideas and feelings through media outside of our bodies, extrasomatically.

It took another 12,000 years before writing began in Sumeria and the hieroglyph was invented in Egypt. The pictograph‑based hieroglyph was a great step forward, a shorthand notation that facilitated communication greatly. But written and spoken languages remained separate. A student of the language had to memorize many symbols to represent important concepts. In addition, he or she had to memorize the sounds that went along with the symbol. The phonetic‑alphabetic language was a way to merge the two. The symbol set was based on pictographs or ideographs, but with sounds associated with them. This was a giant step. Now the student of the language could learn some rules, string the symbols together to represent the concept, and be able to pronounce the word. It also limited the number of symbols that had to be learned. Instead of thousands of characters, only 24 in the Runic alphabet, or the 26 in our modem English alphabet, need be memorized.

The first alphabetic writing has been attributed to Syria in about 1500 BC, and the runes may have derived from that invention. Many argue that the runes were independently created, and if transfer occurred, it was the other way around. The cultures of Babylon and Egypt left a history, a record of what they did. The early northern Europeans did not. The continuous and persisting society of the Near East thus became the basis for our historical perspective on our development, the fountainhead of our historical memory. No living memory links us with the inventors of fire, the cave painters 15,000 years ago in France, or the builders 4,000 years ago of Stonehenge. They left us signs of their intent. They left messages, but we do not clearly understand their meaning.

Runes then, in the context of this column, are secrets that are only vaguely understood, messages that must be interpreted. But the messages do not come only from the past. They come from the future, or our already complex present.

Runes are also symbolic of innovation and creativity arrived at through a process of hard work and struggle. According to legend, Odin struggled, gave up some of his life blood, and sacrificed an eye to achieve. Then, going deep within himself, from where all creativity must originate, he brought forth with a cry, symbolic of the birth cry of a mother, the runes. After the struggle, he felt joy as we all still do after having a creative idea. Then, he reaped the benefits as he applied his creation to one use after another.

We now know that the two hemispheres of our cerebreum are specialized. The right hemisphere is intuitive, holistic, spatial. The left is rational, linear, temporal. Our right and left fields of vision are also segmented and reversed. The right field of vision is interpreted first by the left hemisphere, and vice versa. Intuitive wisdom of the ancients is represented here also as Odin had to give up one of his eyes, symbolic of having to give up one of the ways of perceiving in order to develop the symbol oriented alphabetic language. Before the development of the alphabetic language, man was a dominate r‑mode perceiver and thinker. The alphabetic Language required the development of l‑mode, and western society has steadily progressed toward l‑mode dominance.

Since most of us live in a society that uses an alphabetic language system, it is hard to imagine what a great creative leap it must have been to originate the first alphabetic phonetic language. History does not tell us how the idea originated. But if the development was like others of major significance in recent times that have been documented, it probably was thought about by many people, and even tried out haltingly by some. After many tentative and abortive attempts, some individual put it all together, and the new language was born. It probably evolved then, making it better, more efficient. The improvement likely was a group process, with many people suggesting improvements.

Imagine the struggle of the lone individual groping with concepts only vaguely comprehended. The process of stretching the mind to new concepts is difficult, even painful. New neuronal connections must be made. A totally different way of thinking about language had to be forged; while interaction may have taken place with others, it was probably, as it is still today, a lonely individual process.

The epic poem that describes the myth tells us that Odin sacrificed himself for himself, symbolic of our nature. Creativity must arise from within us. We are creative because we have a need to be creative. We are creative for ourselves, not for anyone or anything else. Yet, Odin was tied to a tree and slashed with a knife, his life blood flowing out to nurture the tree. Trees are the oldest living thing on earth. To ancient man, the tree was symbolic of growth, and eternity, for the tree outlived several generations of mankind. So while creativity is driven from within, its purpose is outside the individual. In our highly structured society, the tree is symbolic of our institutions, made up of many individuals joined together for a common purpose that the individuals hope will outlive them individually.

In the mythical stories of Odin we are told that he was the first one to understand the power of the runes and be able to explain them to others. Creativity has no social purpose unless its results can be taught to others. This then is the essence of professionalism, driven from within to exercise innate creative powers, tied to a social or institutional purpose, capable of teaching what has been created to others and compelled to do so.

Creativity!, March 1989

Seven New Principles of Leadership

2006-10-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Leadership is now a state of mind, not a position. In this highly interactive age, we will increasingly find ourselves in situations that demand the exercise of our innate capability to lead. It is imperative that each of us bring up the leader within us. We must all develop our leadership capability to its fullest in order for our organizations and institutions to be transformed. The path to leadership is one of personal growth. Bringing up the leader within requires an understanding of seven new principles of leadership:

1. Know who you are.
"Who are you?" the caterpillar asked Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We are now confronted with this same question. Making the decision to answer this question is the beginning of the journey to becoming a leader. We must understand what we know and what we don't know about ourselves. We must assess our resistance to‑and tolerance for‑change, our fears, our preferences, and our skills and abilities.

2. Let go of what you've got hold of.
In the Industrial Age, the first rule of "wing walking" was applied: Don't let go of what you've got hold of until you've got hold of something else. In the Age of Interaction, progress cannot be made until you let go of what you've got hold of. We must discover the chains that bind us to our past and prevent us from understanding who we really are. Once we understand the chains that bind us, we must let go of them. Letting go puts us on the path to new experiences, from which we gain more understanding of who we are. Letting go allows us to become responsible for our own actions and future.

3. Learn your purpose.
Each one of us has a purpose. Not all of us understand what our purpose is. Even those of us who think they understand their purpose probably only have a glimmer of what their true purpose is. But if we define our purpose too soon, we may limit what we can accomplish with our life. We learn our purpose through lifelong introspection coupled with interaction with others. It is also important that we develop habits of mind that allow us to filter through interactions and choose the positive ones. Habits of mind are developed from values that we have. Values propel us along the path to discovering our unfolding purpose. As we discover more of our purpose, we can decide to change our values, allowing us to continue our lifelong process of learning.

4. Live in the question.
In the Industrial Age, we learned to analyze a situation, isolate the problem, and administer a quick fix. In the Age of Interaction, we must. recognize that everything is tied to everything else. Therefore, we must live in the question long enough to understand the relationships important to a systems solution. The temptation in Apollo 13 was to turn the spacecraft around and fire the engine as soon as the magnitude of the problem was known. The flight director avoided the quick solution and instead asked his team to "live in the question" for three days, relying on their capabilities to get the astronauts home safely. As it turned out, the quick solution would have been a deadly one, since the engine was damaged. Flexibility is required so that we can be open to the potential of the unknown.

5. Learn the art of "barn raising."
"Barn raising" is a tradition of the pioneer culture where people came together to help someone build a barn. Individuals applied their talents, teams were formed to accomplish specific tasks, and a community was developed in the process. Today's emphasis on teamwork recognizes this. basic need to work with and through others. A shared purpose motivates individuals to contribute their energy, skills, and abilities.

6. Give "it" away.
A paradox of life is that the more we try to hold on to something, the more likely we are to lose it. Viewing people as abundant, renewable resources and giving away authority allows the full power of individuals to be realized. The potential of teams and organizations can likewise be multiplied. This is accomplished through ennobling, enabling, empowering, and encouraging ourselves and others. Empowerment fails if it is attempted without ennoblement and enablement first. And it will fail if people are not encouraged to learn from their mistakes. We must relentlessly pursue the release of authority and control.

7. Let the magic happen.
The final principle of leadership is to let go of the deniands of our ego. We must become a member of the team and utilize our abilities‑joining in the shared purpose‑to help the team achieve its maximum potential. There are always three choices‑lead, follow, or get out of the way. The wisdom of leadership in the Age of Interaction is to know which action to choose for each situation.

Interviews on Creativity

2006-08-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

At the American Creativity Association conference in Austin, Texas March 22 - 25, 2006, Catherine Crago and I interviewed many of the keynote speakers and some of the other speakers. These interviews were with:

Abdullah Taha Alsafhi (King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia) - Risk Taking as a Factor of Creative Thinking
Adam Blatner (Southwest University) - Creativity in the Cosmos: A Philosophical Appreciation Presenting the "Process of Thought"
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi (Herrmann International) - Extreme Creativity: A Perspective on the Future
Cheryl Honey (Excel Strategies) - Community Weaving: A New Solution for a New Century
Randall Macon (Lance Armstrong Foundation) - Creative Marketing and Fundraising
Carol McCormick (SpiritMind Institute) - ET Light: Enlarging the Circle of Creativity to Include the Doctor Who's
Andrew Ouderkirk (3M) - Creativity is Not Being Afraid to Fail
Alex Pattakos (The Innovation Group) - Discovering the Meaning Difference: Creativity and Responsibility
Kirpal Singe (Singapore Management University) - Whither the Creativity Clan: The Challenges for Global Solidarity
David Pearce Snyder (Snyder Family Enterprise) - A Formula for Sustainable Global Prosperity

All of these can be found at http://creativity-at-work.blogspot.com.

Creativity at Work

2006-02-08T08:50:00.000-08:00

The American Creativity Association will hold it's International Conference on March 22 - 25, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

What will this conference mean to your organization and your employees? You and your employees will gain skills and knowledge that will increase their value to your organization while enhancing their self-growth. They will have opportunities to learn from and network with renowned national and international experts – including:

Peggy Van Pelt (Walt Disney Imagineering, Los Angeles, CA)
Andrew Ouderkirk (3M Corporate Scientist, 3M, Minneapolis, MN)
David Pearce Snyder (Independent Consulting Futurist)
Michael Beyerlein (Director of the Center for Collaborative Organizations, University of North Texas, Denton, TX)
Sam Stern (Dean, School of Education, Oregon State University, Portland, OR)
Doug Hall (Founder and CEO, Eureka Ranch, Cincinnati, OH)
Kirpal Singh (Professor, School of Economics & Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore)
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi (CEO, Herrmann Brain Dominance Institute, Lake Lure, NC)
Alex N. Pattakos (Director, Center for Personal Meaning, Santa Fe, NM)
Abdullah Alsafi (Professor, King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia)
Ta -Wei Lee (Professor, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan)
Betty Otter Nickerson (COO, Lance Armstrong Foundation, Austin, TX)
Mitchel Stoller (CEO, Lance Armstrong Foundation, Austin, TX).

A few of over 70 sessions offered in four session tracks plus Master Classes:

Enabling Collaborative Creativity at Work
The Athlete Mindset: Learn and apply the same creative methods used by professional athletes to succeed in pressure situations
Using TRIZ Lines of Evolution to Predict and Unfuzzy the Fuzzy Front End
Creativity, Innovation, and Global Competitiveness
Innovate On Purpose™
Creative Ways to Recruit a Creative Workforce – A Case Study
The Birth of Novelty: Ensuring New Ideas Get a Fighting Chance
A Study of the Applicability of Idea Generation Techniques
Risk Taking as factor of Creative Thinking
Top Ten Tips for Capitalist Creativity Success
A study of the relationships among gender, group size, personal creativity, and group technological creativity
Trends in Collaborative Creativity & Innovation
Creating an Innovation Commons

Contact Barry Silverberg for special rates for groups of 3 or more from the same organization.
(512) 223-7076
barry@amcreativityassoc.orgwww.amcreativityassoc.org

Tradeshow
ACA's International Conference 2006 takes place at the beautiful Hilton Austin Airport Exhibition dates are: March 22nd through March 25th

We understand that location is everything in business, which is why ACA will place exhibitors in the flow of conference traffic. We want to help you succeed in the creative environment.

How much will it cost me to exhibit during the entire conference?
$500 for a full table $275 for a half table

How big are the tables?
6 foot & draped

Will there be a secure room to store my materials?
Yes. All three days

Can I exhibit without having to staff my table?
Yes.
Additional or substitute promotional set-ups may be arranged so long as they remain contained within the area reserved for the specific exhibitor.

To contract for exhibit space and arrange payment by check or credit card e-mail: exhibit@amcreativityassoc.org

Exhibitors wishing to participate in the conference and/or meal functions, contact: barry@amcreativityassoc.org

Advertising Opportunities
A printed Conference Program will be distributed to all Conference registrants and include resource information that will lead registrants to retain the Program for future reference. Accordingly, advertisers have the opportunity to share their message at and beyond the Conference.

The Conference Program will be printed in black and white on white stock in a 8.5" x 11" portrait format.

Advertising options include:Full page - $750Half page - $500Quarter page - $250

To contract for Conference Program Book advertising, and arrange payment by check or credit card, e-mail confprogram@amcreativityassoc.org

Luddites Revisited

2006-01-19T07:03:00.000-08:00

"I doubt the Luddites would have seen the irony in the situation. On Jan. 19, 1812, in a news item titled "Execution of the Luddites at York," the London Times reported: "Precisely at eleven o'clock, on Saturday, the following persons suffered the sentence of the law due to their crimes: John Hill, Joseph Crowther, Nathan Hoyle, Jonathon Dean, John Ogden, Thomas Brook, and John Walker."

The Luddites were a group of 19th-century weavers whose name is now synonymous with opposition to technology, and the irony lies in the precise timing of the execution. A mechanical clock or watch was doubtless used for the occasion. So the Luddites -- who had destroyed the new weaving machinery that threatened their employment and whose protests had led to riots, assault, and murder -- ended their lives following the precise mechanisms of a machine.
At the trial, the judge gave a long speech in which he insisted on the "excellence of our machinery." Yet, in preferring the machines and what they represented, he showed little sensitivity to the human costs of new technology.

It is easy, I believe, to dismiss historical opposition to machines as being mindless or simply irrelevant because the events happened a long time ago. But when we consider the ways in which computer technology is used in education, particularly in developments such as virtual schools, it is useful to consider past examples of how people's lives have been affected by machines."

Virtual Schools: What Role Should Online Learning Play in the Future of Schooling?, Glen Russell (www.electronic-school.com)

Row Your Boat

2006-01-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the children's nursery rhyme and round "Row Your Boat"?
For some reason I thought of that poem a few weeks ago. Perhaps it floated into my mind because of the New Year. Perhaps because I just read the Urban Shaman by Serge Kahili King in which he focus on the premise that life is a dream. (Read the book review at http://illuminatedinnovant.blogspot.com/2005/12/urban-shaman.html.)

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

What a wonderful piece of wisdom that's been hidden right before our eyes.

I decided to search the Internet to find the source of this wisdom. First, I found that the poem is anonymous. Intuitive Connections Network (www.intuitive-connections.net/2002/opinion.html) states that "this round is from an ancient text of unknown origin. The Great Songs Thesaurus says the earliest found publication of these words was in 1852; the music was added in 1881."

I was amused to find that there are hundreds of essays on and references to this poem with titles like "Forming Your Opinion About Life", "Row Your Boat Mantra: A Buddhist Commentary", "A Guide for Living Life in the Divine Flow" and many others.
What I saw in the poem is slightly different.

William Crews' book Four Causes of Reality (Philosophical Library, 1969) builds on Aristotle's philosophy of the four causes of reality. Crews develops the four causes:

First Cause - Material Cause
Second Cause - Formal Cause
Third Cause - Efficient Cause
Fourth Cause - Final Cause

The basic idea behind this construct is that all reality has four causes, i.e. necessary elements of its existence.

The material cause can be considered to be what the reality is composed of. In the case of a house, it's all the building materials. The formal cause shapes or gives form to the reality that is becoming. In the case of a house, it's the plans. The efficient cause describes the action. In the case of a house, it's the construction. The final cause is the reality's manifestation. In the case of a house, it is the home.

In "Row Your Boat", the first phrase could be interpreted to say that the building blocks of life are actions. Row is repeated three times, forming a trinity, maybe in this case like past, present and future. The wisdom in this poem suggests that drifting is not an option. You're going to have to work.

The second phrase, and second cause, or formal cause is "gently down the stream." The wisdom doesn't encourage fighting the current, or even attempting to cross the stream. It suggests finding the currents in the stream and rowing to the currents and then in the currents. A whirling stream with eddies and many different currents is probably not a bad metaphor for the future. Out role, and what should shape our lives, according to this wisdom is to search for the shifting currents, find them and exploit them gently.

The third phrase, and efficient cause, is "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily." To be merry is to be joyous in disposition or spirit. Good advice under any circumstances. "Merrily" is repeated four times. It may have been repeated for emphasis. Or, it may have been to remind us of the fractal nature of the four causes. For each cause there are four causes, and so on, and so on. If this was the case, the poet wanted to make sure that we got it. Joyousness was the key to the efficient cause of the reality you were creating, and the material through final cause of that efficient cause was in itself joyousness.

The fourth and final cause is in the fourth phrase "life is but a dream." We make reality up as we go. Our limited sensory capabilities provide information on our environment that we integrate in our minds with assumptions, prior history and paradigms to construct our reality. As this all occurs in our head, it is no different than a dream.

Happy New Year! May you row your boat gently down the stream joyously for life is but a dream.

Ode to a Toad

2005-12-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

Serge Kahili King
Urban Shaman

Grunt and gurgle, little toad
Down there in your mud abode.
Do you ever think of us?
Do we make you fret and fuss
With our wars and waste and greed,
Our rush toward death with reckless speed?
Do you wonder at our fate,
Who preach of love and practice hate;
Who distrust and fear those not like we,
Though they live next door or across the sea?
Do you laugh and laugh at how we talk
Of peace, while one hand holds a rock
Ready to bash our neighbor's head,
Because he's yellow, black, or red?
And at those who cry,
"We must disarm!
Our enemies will ne'er do us harm.
When they see we've no weapons or means of defense,
They'll be happy to stay on their side of the fence."
Or at those who say, "Attack and fight!
We'll show them all that might is right.
Who cares about nuclear radiation?
It's important we prove we're the strongest nation!"

Ah, men say this and men say that,
And some change sides and some stand pat.
And some merely glory in tromping on toes,
But few see beyond the thick end of their nose.
They rant and rave with fiery speech,
And preach, and preach, and preach, and preach.
So what is achieved by a thousand words?
And where are the footprints of flying birds?
For words can't grow crops or clothe the poor,
Or find a disease's elusive cure.
They can't feed children or heal the sick,
Or build a dam or wield a pick.
Oh, they have their place, that I concede.
But a word can never replace a deed.

Yes, it's action that counts, not what we say.
We must act and do and lead the way
By DEEDS! if we hope to live at all
In a world without hate, or revenge, or a Wall.
Do we truly believe in the Rights of Man,
Be he black or white, yellow or tan?
Do we honestly think we can live without war,
In trust and peace forevermore?
That there needn't be hunger or sickness or fear;
That death for so many need not be so near?
If we do then let's ACT! and make this old Earth
A place where real joy will attend every birth.

And what if we don't?
If we just sit and wait
Till the bombs start to fall and we know it's too late?
These are questions I ask myself, too, little toad,
As I sit at my desk or drive down the road.
If we drop our terrible, monster bomb,
Will you sit there serene, patient, and calm?
Or will you just chuckle, thinking of when
The Earth will no more be troubled by men?
If instead we recognize Earth as our Mother,
And all of her creatures as sister and brother,
The land and the sea and the sky as a friend,
Ourselves as gardeners whose role is to tend,
Then maybe, with love, in an ACTION mode,
We might make it work after all, little toad.

To read a review of King's book Urban Shaman go to The Illuminated Innovant.

Creativity and Boxes

2005-12-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure when or where the phrase "think outside the box" originated. As I remember, my first exposure came with the introduction of the nine-dot puzzle. The idea was to draw no more than four lines without lifting your pencil that crossed through all nine dots. Most people stopped the lines on a dot, With that restriction, the problem is impossible to solve. But, if you extend the lines beyond the dots, the problem can be solved. Thus, in order to solve the problem you had to think outside the box. (By the way, there are many other creative solutions to the puzzle without thinking outside the box.)

I must admit that I used this example in the 1980s in training. However, I quickly realized that thinking outside the box wasn't the challenge. The real challenge, especially to business, is thinking creatively inside the box. That's where most of the real work gets done, and the most productive innovation.

There is something about the tension of a closed system and creativity. An artist painting a picture has the two-dimensional surface that is framed. Writers start with a blank slate and the limitations of the language. Sculptors start with a piece of stone or clay.

The Roman's use of the square in battle was innovative and almost impenetrable for many years. Fortresses are almost always rectangular. Forming a circle for defense, as in "Circle the wagons". What happened inside the circle or rectangle was essential to survival.

I wonder why the phrase was not "Think outside the circle". Circles have been around for a very long time. And, we're finding that a circle of people still has enormous power.

What I'm discovering is that it's not the network of people or the links between people that is key. I'm finding that it is the space between that's important. But, more about that later.

The seminar on Systematic Idea Generation by Mark Fox puts a different twist on things; what he calls thinking in another box. You can think outside the box, inside the box or in another box. Thinking in another box is a very appropriate metaphor for business. It will probably result in distinctive innovation, a source of great wealth.

I've attended Mark's seminar twice and found that I learned things both times. He has a unique way of looking at creativity with a fresh new set of techniques.

The Tribe of the Ambiguous and Living in the Question

2005-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

I've been having a lot of conversations around "Where are we?" and "Where are we going?" lately.

After two conversations in one day, I finished reading a book by Christian Baldwin, Storycatcher. Within the last chapter there was this:

"The renewed life we long for is already residing in the hearts and minds of people all over the world; it's just waiting for us to believe in our capacity to live it.

Yet hope is tricky; like joy, it must include and befriend ambiguity. To live in denial, to proceed with false cheerfulness, avoiding the seriousness of our situation, will quickly dash any hope built on such a flimsy foundation.

As I travel around speaking and listening to the Tribe of the Ambiguous, a story-based role is becoming clear: storycatchers can serve not only as carriers of hopeful thought-provoking tales, but also receivers of confused and heartrending accounts of personal awakening. The movement aspect of storycatching is about creating interpersonal space in which we can hold story with each other. Like the circle of listening that frames Chapter 2, we need to practice being in the now; we need a readiness to notice, to volunteer to listen and respond to each other while we speak our way into holding the complexity of the world."

Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher, New World Library, 2005

(I will write a full review of the book in a few weeks. Look for it in www.illuminatedinnovant.blogspot.com)

In an article Donna Prestwood and I wrote for The Futurist in 1997, we outlined the results of over a year's worth of research, interviews and countless conversations about the nature of the future and how to lead in that future in seven principles:

Know who you are
Let go of what you've got hold of
Understand your purpose
Live in the question
Learn the art of barn raising
Give it away
Let the magic happen

As I look at these now eight years later, I still see a lot of wisdom in them.

I love Baldwin's term - The Tribe of Ambiguity. But I also like our admonishment - Live in the Question. Whatever the term, we are awakening to the fact that we are living in a question and struggling trying to find out what the question is.

I keep coming back in my mind to Flip Wilson, one of the comics of the 70's (http://www.tvparty.com/flip.html). He was one of the funniest people ever on TV with his outrageous characters like Geraldine and Reverend LeRoy. Reverend LeRoy founded a church - The Church of What's Happenin' Now. I feel we are all members of the "church". Except maybe, we should change the name to "What's Happenin' Now?"

McLuhan's Ghost

2005-11-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Author's Note: This story was written to introduce a workshop on story telling.

Marshall McLuhan has haunted me for 41 years. Ever since reading Understanding Media in 1964 and Culture is Our Business in 1970, McLuhan's insights and diabolic turns of phrase have lain dormant in my brain, occasionally surfacing to interrupt a train of thought. Like a virus whose genetic structure takes over it's host's, McLuhan's memes have infected my brain, flitting around like ghosts, multiplying and modifying the way I perceive and think.

"The medium is the message."

"Media are the extensions of man."

"Hot and Cool media."

I think I am possessed.

My infection was dormant. Why now has it developed into a full-fledged haunting?

The short answer is that I was called.

The Wizard of Ads sent the first call. No, really, he's an honest to goodness wizard who practices his wizardry on a hill between Austin and Buda in his castle. He pretends to be a normal human who goes by the name of Roy Williams, but he is a wizard never-the-less.

His wizard-o-gram arrived mysteriously on my computer on November 22, 2004. Its title was "Marketing Without Media", an insightful piece about the declining effectiveness of mass media advertising. McLuhan's ghost started to stir.

The second call came from a guru, friend of mind. He asked me to call the Wizard of Ads. Nick G., also a friend and colleague of the Wizard, had spoken to the Wizard about me and the Wizard would like to talk with me.

In our telephone conversation, the Wizard mentioned an e-mail that he had gotten from someone who had also read his wizard-o-gram and commented that McLuhan had predicted that media technology always reverses itself. The Wizard asked if I knew what that meant. I said no. The challenge was given. The haunting started.

The last call came from a most unexpected source. A Wiccan brought me an article written by Norman Mailer published in, of all places, Parade, in January 2005. Donna P. knew that I was on this quest, and thought I should read it. Mailer's article, "One Idea", outlined his concern about the impact of television, and the increase of advertising, on the attention span of children and their declining ability to read. All the forty-year-old McLuhan memes were activated. This didn't sound right to me and I wrote back to Mailer telling him so. I was committed.

And, I was possessed.

I read and reread all of the books by McLuhan that are still in print. I began to write and talk about what I was learning. I am now beginning to understand what I knew 40 years ago. And, I still have a lot more to integrate and understand.

If this sounds like a mythological quest, it is. I'm not a hero, but this true story, follows all of the major elements of Campbell's "Heroes Journey" in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

When called on a quest, the hero has many choices. The mythological quest is really a journey into the self, the subconscious. Having accepted the call, and acting upon that call, if you reach the true understanding, your choice is whether to stay there (and become a shaman) or to travel back (and become a teacher) and teach others what you have learned. My quest is the latter.

McLuhan began to warn us over fifty year's ago in his first book, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man, that we were transitioning from the literate to the post-literate age. He called the post-literate age "acoustic" as he struggled to explain what he was perceiving.

As the Wizard of Ads has been saying, "A picture is not worth a thousand words. A word is worth a thousand pictures."

The post literate age has many similarities with the pre-literate age, including the power of the spoken word, and mimesis. Like the preliterate age that was filled with mystery and things that went bump in the night, our world is incomprehensible, and equally frightening. And, as pre-literate peoples gathered around a fire* in the dark of night and told stories that explained life's mysteries, so do we now gather. We live in a mosaic world of events for which there is no apparent cause and no apparent meaning. Stories provide the meaning.

* Author's note: This was not planned. Unknown to me, the facilitators arranged the workshop in a semicircle around a large candle.

Innovation as Alchemy?

2005-10-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

Innovation is the way of transforming the resources of an enterprise through the creativity of people into new resources and wealth.

Paul Schumann

Building an Innovative Enterprise

The proto-science of alchemy sought, among other things, a process to change "base metals" into gold. The tool thought to be the key to this process was called the "Philosopher's Stone."

In my new definition of innovation given above, it is innovation that transforms resources into new resources and wealth, and the equivalent of the "Philosopher's Stone" is the creativity of people.

The resources of an enterprise include people, capital, knowledge, strategic partners, equipment and tools, facilities and land and natural resources. And, an innovative enterprise, in pursuit of future opportunities or avoidance of future threats, uses the creativity of people, who are enabled with resources, to convert those resources into wealth. At the same time, the quest for innovation creates new resources.

Innovation does more than just make money for the innovators. Innovation creates true wealth. In the sense of the roots of the word, innovation improves the common weal. Everyone within the market, as well as society in general benefit from innovation. As a matter of fact, economists state that the social rate of return from innovation is greater than the private rate of return.

Innovation within an enterprise not only makes money for the enterprise, its employees and owners, it raises the level of economic prosperity in the community within which it operates.

Einstein's equation relating energy and mass is familiar to all, E=MC². His theory, subsequently proven many times, provides the fundamental relationship between energy and mass with speed of light squared providing the linkage. This simple, but profound equation provided one of the steps to the alchemists' goals. It also provided the basis for nuclear fission and nuclear fusion as means for releasing vast amounts of energy.

By making the analogy I'm about to make, I'm not suggesting that this new definition of innovation is in any way close to the significance of Einstein's equation, but there are some similarities. The definition could be written W~RC_i². That is, wealth is proportional to the resources times the square of the creativity index of the enterprise. Now, I don't know for a fact that it is the square of the creativity. I do have the sense that creativity within an enterprise multiplies. Creativity begats more creativity.

Carrying the analogy one step further, like nuclear energy, innovation can come from fusion or fission (synthesis or analysis). And, while both create energy in nuclear processes, it is fusion that creates much, much, more energy (H-bomb vs. A-bomb). In my experience, synthesis creates more wealth than analysis.

An innovative enterprise creates a "virtuous cycle". A virtuous cycle is a condition in which a favorable circumstance or result gives rise to another that subsequently supports the first - in other words, a positive feedback system. In economics there is an assumption that a complex system will tend to a state of equilibrium. In non-equilibrium condition two cycles can be present - a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. A vicious cycle leads to decline and failure. A virtuous cycle leads to growth and wealth. The difference in an enterprise between a vicious and virtuous cycle is determined by the initial conditions, the innovation success rate and the percentage of resources reinvested in the creation of more innovation.

ACA Call for Presenters

2005-09-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

The American Creativity Association is holding it's 2006 International Conference on March 22 - 24, 2006 in Austin, Texas at the Austin-Bergstrom Airport Hilton. The call for presenters as well as other information about the conference is available on their web site (www.amcreativityassoc.org). Proposals must be submitted before October 31, 2005. Linda Shafer & Barry Silverberg are Conference co-Chairs. Contact Barry Silverberg at barry@amcreativityassoc.org with questions or suggestions.

Paul Schumann (www.theinnovationroadmap.com) is organizing a focus on advances in the understanding of innovation in organizations. The desire is to have seminars, workshops and panel discussions on new systems and knowledge of organizational innovation, especially open, collaborative ones. Topics of interest are developing insights in a complex future, discovering opportunities and threats, attracting collaborators and leading collaborations, open systems for innovation, issues of recognition and reward in open collaborations, the microeconomics of innovation and measurement systems. Anyone interested in this special focus on innovation should contact Paul Schumann (512.302.1935) before submitting a proposal on the ACA web site.

The Future of Strategy

2005-09-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

This is a 47 minute telephone interview of Paul Schumann by Tom Carroll.

All of the files listed are mp3.

1. What is corporate strategy? (1.6 mb, 2:09)

2. What does it mean for an organization to have an effective strategy? (.6 mb, :49)

3. What are some of the best practices for developing an effective corporate strategy? (.9 mb, 1:16)

4. What should an effective corporate strategy include? (1.8 mb, 2:32)

5. Who should be involved in strategy formation? (1.4 mb, 1:56)

6. What do you mean by the term "knowable future" and how does that relate to business strategy development? (4.5 mb, 6:16)

7. What sort of new strategy development methodologies do you see emerging? (1.5 mb, 2:03)

8. Presently, are there some recent global trends that you believe are important to consider when developing business strategies? (9.7 mb, 13:30)

9. Were you surprised on finding that technology develops slowly? (4 mb, 5:30)

10. Are there any companies who really have gotten strategy development down to a fine art? (4.2 mb, 5:48)

11. What are some first steps a company can take to begin formulating an effective corporate strategy? (2.6 mb, 3:36)

12. How can people contact you? (1.1 mb, 1:36)

What is an Innovation Commons?

2005-08-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

An innovation commons is a space (physical or virtual) that enables innovation through the mutual and interdependent creativity of its members. It has the following characteristics:

Open system (bounded)
Everyone contributes
Everyone can use the results
Members who don’t contribute are excluded
Fluid & flexible
An abundant resource system

Other names that people have used to describe this type of system are open source, open innovation, democratic innovation, inclusive innovation, peer to peer (P2P), smart mobs and free agent collaboration. I think that the innovation commons concept, whatever it ends up being named, is one of the most important developments in how people work together.

Some attempts at creating an innovation commons have been successful, but most have failed. Why? What are principles of a successful innovation commons?

Currently I am conducting a survey of the values of a successful innovation commons. This survey requires thought and will take you 20 to 30 minutes to complete. I ask you to rank 125 values of a successful innovation commons. You'll find the values themselves and the process of rating the values interesting and useful. The values are general and can be applied to any organizational use. In addition, if you provide me your name and e-mail address when you take the survey, I will send you a copy of the final results. In addition, if you join the Innovation Commons Network, you'll be able to participate in all of the activities and benefits of the network including the free web conference.

To take the survey click here.

To join the network, send me an e-mail requesting to join.

2005-05-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

Building an Innovative Enterprise

Innovation is the lifeblood of an enterprise. It courses through a vital organization spawning new markets, enlarging existing markets, increasing market share or swelling profits.

Innovation is the way of transforming the resources of an enterprise through the creativity of people into new resources and wealth.

And, in today's environment, that requires the creation of an innovation commons.

Innovation can also reduce costs and increase profitability.

However, I have to be honest with you, innovation is risky. Most innovations fail.

On the other hand, to stay competitive you must innovate.

To reduce the risks of innovation, and to reap its great benefits, it must delight your customers. Innovation that delights anticipates customer needs.

It flows from a strategy that balances the opportunities and threats in a market, the desires of stakeholders, and the capability and capacity of the enterprise for innovation.

Values, derived from the market, drive the development of the enterprise's resources, focus the organizational culture, and align the enterprise's five innovation enablers, inspiring people to be effective and efficient.

Innovation is dynamic. The need for innovation is a moving target that must be continuously forecast as far into the future as it will take the enterprise to respond.

Your foresight has to be greater than your ability to innovate.

Building an innovative enterprise can be your most significant accomplishment for it can live beyond your tenure or even your life.

Paul Schumann

2005-04-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Through the Looking Glass

Fascinated by the reflection of her own world in the looking glass, Alice stepped across the boundary into the unknown and saw things she'd never imagined. When she returned from her adventures, Alice had new perspectives on the familiar world around her.

Our own world of technology blinds us to how the technology actually influences us. We become confined to the familiar and the secure. We see only mirror images of our long-held views instead of looking beyond, as through a window. To simply reflect the accepted is to become myopic, and the looking glass frame may soon define a world too small for comfort.

To step through the looking glass, to see the world in fresh light, should be a goal of everyone. Technologies are extensions of us. They alter how we perceive the world and think about the world. As McLuhan wrote, "We shape our tools and our tools shape us."

Do you have the courage to step through the looking glass? Now's the time. Or, you may get left behind.

2005-01-28T11:25:00.000-08:00

One Idea by Norman Mailer*

The premise of Mailer's condemnation of advertising on TV is that the constant interruption of 30 second commercials, that in total now add to 33% of the air time, is the cause of short attention spans in children. I disagree with this premise. It is true that children have shorter attention spans now but I believe that we have to look elsewhere for the cause.
Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind blames our philosophies. And he bemoans the loss of literacy in the college students he sees. This unfortunately has become the rally cry for the conservative return to traditional values. This is also not a workable solution.
Marshal McLuhan predicted that we had entered a post literate age. This he believed was the result of our physics and our media. He coined the phrase, "the medium is the message", that real effects of media, which are the extensions of man, are not ordinarily perceptible to man. Television itself, along with all of the other "electric" media (McLuhan's term) are the root cause of our post literacy.

Literacy, with its Western alphabet, fundamentally changed our perceptions of time and space from preliterate times. Euclidean geometry and linear time go hand in hand with literacy. The reading of sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books train the mind for long attention spans.
All our perceptions of time and space and how we think about them are being changed again as we move into the post literate age.

Television required a new type of mental processing as the visual image we "see" really is never there. It is a mosaic of flashing lights (pixels), that like speech, exists only in the present. The mind puts everything together. And, the data provided to us can be nearly instantaneous.
I believe that it wouldn't matter what the content of television was, the impact on us would have been the same, even if it were all PBS like programming. As a matter of fact, look at Sesame Street. Observe how they have to make it so fast paced in order to keep children interested.
I have even observed some teenagers with a remote control clicking back and forth between two or even three programs at the same time increasing the fragmentation of the messages they receive.

Mailer's solution is the call for commercial free television. To a certain extent we have that already in public television, some cable television, pay per view, and DVDs. Look how quickly advertising has crept into these forms as well.

The unifying religion of our society is the consumer driven open market. This is what we export to other countries that so appall some. Since our Declaration of Independence we have been in "pursuit of happiness." We are on the journey to happiness, but never seem to arrive. Advertising exists because it works. Otherwise, it would have disappeared long ago. It is one of the linchpins of our consumer driven economy.

Our now almost complete worship of the free and open market as the arbitrator of what's good in our society puts ever increasing pressures on business to make larger and larger profits. Since ads work and can lead to increased profits, the value of advertising increases and the time allocated to advertising gets larger.

This paradigm is not easily changed.

"Bad news engages the viewer's participation in what McLuhan recognized as a collective surge of intense consciousness (a 'process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary') and sets him up for the good news, which is more expensively produced" notes Lewis Lapham in his introduction to the MIT Press Edition of McLuhan's Understanding Media. (Remember, in McLuhan's terms, TV is a cool medium, i.e. it engages the viewer to participate.) The lesson plan:

* the bad news
* the smiling anchor person
* the good news

What do we learn: Things are bad, but if you use these products or services your life will be better.

Unfortunately we need the good news in our life. It fills our need in pursuit of happiness.

Paul Schumann

* Norman Mialer, "One Idea", Parade Magazine, 1/23/05 and
Roy Williams, Voices of Dissent, 1/24/05, www.wizardofads.com

2004-12-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Paradigms

"You never feel safe when you have to navigate in waters which are completely blank." Lieutenant Maxwell Member, Bering's Second Polar Expedition

"Rae obtained from the Eskimo spoons and other articles that were found to have belonged to Franklin's expedition." This cryptic note in Encyclopedia Americana regarding the fate of the infamous Franklin Arctic expedition demands explanation. Several years after the Rae search, McClintock, leading the last search party, found that they had carried more than spoons. They had a great deal of silverware-place settings. If I were in the Arctic trying to survive by walking out from a shipwreck, what would I want with spoons? What would possess men - hungry, ship crushed by ice, senses numbed by the cold, 1,000 miles from nearest help, and sick - to drag ornate silverware over the jagged ice on their futile attempt to walk out? The answer, although taken from the history of the 1800's, is relevant to you, and to us collectively, today.

Sir John Franklin, born in England in 1786, was a naval officer, an explorer, and a hero, of sorts. He entered the Navy at 14 as a midshipman and fought in the battles of Trafalgar and New Orleans. He was promoted to Captain after three explorations. A member of a class of British naval officers - rich, war-tested, sporting, restless, seeking excitement - he was thoroughly imbedded in the British cultural tradition of duty, honor, and dogged persistence.

Sir John became a public figure after his Arctic expeditions, publishing a book each time describing his adventures. He was knighted in 1829 and became Lieutenant Governor of the penal colony in Van Dieman's Land, now known as Tasmania. After seven year; he returned to England to find that the British Navy was preparing what was hoped to be the last exploration of the Arctic for a Northwest Passage.

The search for the Northwest Passage began in the 1500's. Searches were made numerous times for a sea route north of continental Canada and Alaska which was to link the Atlantic and the Pacific. By the 19th century, the search had largely become a project of the Royal Navy. Various expeditions had charted all but a few hundred miles of what was believed would prove to be the passage. The search had become academic. There was no commercial value. Britain had the resources and wanted to be credited with the discovery to provide glory to the nation and display the power and expertise of the Navy. One final massive effort was planned to provide the last pieces of the puzzle.

Sir Franklin had become a hero, not because of his brilliance but because of his courage and endurance of incredible hardships. In his previous exploits he had been wounded in battle, shipwrecked on Australia's Barrier Reef, and, on his Arctic expedition, abandoned on the frozen waters without supplies. All but three died on that journey. He was only a few days from death when rescued.

In those days it was common practice for an exploration of the Arctic to last for three years. Two winters were spent locked in by the ice. Sailing could only be done during the few weeks that the water was navigable. During the winter, land explorations were made.

The last Franklin expedition began in May 1845. Two 300-ton plus bark-rigged sailing ships, with the formidable names of Erebus and Terror, were outfitted for the journey. With the sporting interests of the British Navy, staffing the ships with 129 volunteer officers and men was easy. The ships were even outfitted with an innovation to help with the ice. Coal fueled locomotive steam engines delivering 20 hp were provided. The ships also had an unheard of luxury - heated cabins. They sailed and were last seen on July 26 by a Scottish whaler. All men and equipment were lost - the greatest single disaster in the annals of Arctic exploration.
What happened? John Rae, Hudson's Bay Company, discovered some clues 12 years later. While very little is known of the actual events, McClintock later found some of the bodies and notes. The ships were never located. They survived the first winter but the end of the second winter found them permanently beset by ice. Many died on the ship. The survivors left the ship after the third winter and tried to reach safety overland, a trip of over 1,000 miles. None made it.

The key to the disaster lies in the preparation for the expedition. Although the ships had two auxiliary steam engines, they only had a 12-day supply of coal. Instead, each ship had a 1,200 volume library, a hand organ playing 50 tunes, china place settings for officers and men, cut glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware.

The flatware deserves more attention because it was found with the bodies of the men who tried to walk out over 1,000 miles of wilderness. The silverware was of an ornate Victorian design, with richly patterned heavy handles, each bearing the officer's initials and family crest.

They had no special clothing, only the standard uniforms of the Navy. A skeleton of one of the officers later found was described wearing a uniform, trousers and jacket, of fine blue cloth edged with silk braid. The sleeves of the jacket were slashed and decorated with five covered buttons each. Over the uniforms he wore a blue great coat and a black silk neckerchief.

This is a tragic example of a paradigm. A paradigm is a pattern of rules, values, experiences, and beliefs that govern behavior. Franklin was deeply embedded in the "good old boy" British Navy paradigm that made exploration a sporting event, but one in which he didn't want to miss the amenities of his life. It cost all their lives.

Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first introduced the concept of paradigms in relation to creative breakthroughs in science. Since then, the concept has been usefully applied to engineering, the arts, and normal problem solving. Breaking with the old paradigm and establishing a new one is a creative act. It allows new problems to be solved. Solving problems within the old paradigm is puzzle solving-using the rules in established ways. When problems cannot be solved using the rules of the old paradigm, they are set aside. When enough have collected or a destructive anomaly has surfaced, someone's attention is attracted. A new paradigm is developed which solves the open problems and provides future problem solving capability.

The study of the currently accepted paradigm is what prepares someone for acceptance into the community being joined. Since members of the community learn the same values, they will seldom disagree on fundamentals. This acculturation process applies to many areas of life. But what happens when the world around you changes? If you cannot change your paradigm, you may not survive.

We are in a period of rapid social and technological change. Are we, like Franklin, driven by improper forces? Have repeated excursions into danger inured us, as they did Franklin, from those dangers because we were lucky? Do we have the equivalent of the Franklin paradigm in the business world? Are we ready to survive the rigors of the Arctic winter equivalent? Will we take new technology and innovations along with us but not utilize their full potential? Or will we carry our initialed, crested silver spoons to our demise in an environment for which there is no need for spoons?

References:
Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 2, 1971

Encyclopedia Britannica Micropedia. Vol. IV, 1974

"A Frozen Sailor Summons Up a Tale of Heroism" by Bit
Gilbert, Smithsonian, 6/85, p.116

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard, Harper Colophon
Books, 1983

The Structure of Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn,
University of Chicago Press, 1970

The Poles, Willy Ley Time-Life Books, 1971

2004-11-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Tradition

We all love to stay with tradition. The more we experience in life, the more likely we are to fall back on tried and true methods to accomplish our goals in our business or personal life. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has become our motto. Children who have no history of success or failure are much more likely to experiment with the new. They may even play with what the experienced people call fire.

"Tradition!" exclaimed Tevea in "Fiddler On the Roof" as he fought to hold onto what he knew worked, what provided him with a sense of purpose in life. His three girls were bent on change, and the environment around the family was crumbling due to other forces at work. In the end, he changed up to a point in order to accommodate his daughters. Beyond that point, he was afraid that he would break. The environment changed and swept him and his family up in it. How much can we change before we break? How do you know when things need changing even if they don't appear "broke?"

It's amazing how easily traditions get started in a family. All you have to do is do something the same way a few times, and it becomes the accepted way, especially if it is a pleasurable experience. You may even have a hard time remembering how they got started.
My mother used to cook pork roast and potato dumplings. The dumplings were big, heavy like cannon balls, with a flavor and consistency I admired. They were cooked with the pork roast in the gravy. Can you imagine the calories and cholesterol? As a big, fast-growing, athletic teenager, I relished the meal when it was infrequently prepared. The recipe had been handed down for several generations. The dumplings each had a small piece of the crust of bread in the center. I asked mom once why the crust was there. She said that she didn't know. That was just what Grandma Schumann said had to be there.

I was struck by an article I read about a tradition that defies explanation. The small town of Pandhurna, India, population 45,000, has an annual event called the Gotmaar Festival. No one really knows why the festival exists; some older members of the community say that it goes back at least three centuries. All the Pandhurnans know is that once per year, on the day of the new moon in the Hindu month of Sharawan, the drums begin beating along the river Jam, and the time has come for another time of madness.

Within minutes, thousands of males divide into two groups, gather huge piles of stones on opposite sides of the river, and for the next 6-1/2 hours, try to kill, maim or mangle as many of their fellow townsfolk as they can. A tree is positioned in the center of the river and the object is to chop down the tree with an axe without getting stoned to death in the process. In one event, four young boys were killed and 612 people injured. Explains one of the residents, "We all know it is barbaric. It is a kind of madness. And it has no reason at all. But it has been with us since day one, and, on that day every year, we just cannot help ourselves."

It's been over a hundred years since the Hatfield and McCoy feud ended when a jury sentenced eight Hatfield clan members to life in prison and ordered a ninth hanged for the slaying of five McCoys. The trial ended the blood feud that killed 10 to 20 people. We no longer even know the cause of the feud, yet the names Hatfield and McCoy represent traditional views carried to the extreme.

A woman was once asked why she had just cut off the end of a ham she was preparing to roast. "It's because my mother told me to," she explained. When the mother was asked, she said it was because her mother told her to. The grandmother, who was still alive, told them that it was because the hams had always been too big for her roaster, so she had to cut a piece off.
Tradition is not limited to people. Animals can exhibit the same type of behavior. Processionary caterpillars follow each other in a line. In an experiment, a ring of the caterpillars was formed. Each marched around, following the one ahead of it. But, since they were in a ring, no progress was made. Food was placed in the center of the ring, but the caterpillars continued to follow each other, ignoring the environment around them.

People who follow only tradition are like the caterpillars. They are unaware of the opportunities around them. They cannot see the environment, changes in the environment, or opportunities such changes might afford them.

Milnes' books about Winnie the Pooh were some of my favorites as a child and some of my favorites as an adult that I read to my children. In one episode Piglet comes upon Winnie the Pooh walking with his head down as he follows tracks. Piglet asks what he is doing. Pooh explains that he is hunting a Woozle whose tracks he is following. Piglet joins with Pooh and they continue to walk. Soon they notice that the Woozle has been joined by other Woozles. As they continue to walk, they become more and more concerned as the number of tracks continues to grow. Frightened, they call off the hunt. Christopher Robin has been watching this in amazement from a perch high above in a tree. Pooh and Piglet have been walking in a circle. They were following their own tracks and became frightened by their own activity.

Not only can we get into ruts following someone else but we also can get into ruts following ourselves, and then confusing our tracks for sure signs that we are on to something big.
Escher in some of his prints catches the humor in this. In his design for the impossible building, where monks walk a square path up and down steps that are really all at the same level, an observer like Christopher Robin watches in amazement. It is difficult for someone to observe the predicament inside the tradition. It is rare that someone can. It is best observed from the outside. Yet if we don't communicate with the outside, how will we ever know? It's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar.

We cannot blame those that went before us whom we follow, or even blame ourselves for previous decisions we have made. We, and those whom we have followed, in all likelihood made good decisions based on the environment of the time. Now, the environment has changed. It requires different actions. Some of the leaders in Eastern Europe understood this point well. Va'clav Havel, when he was the new President of Czechoslovakia, stated in a New Year's Day address, "We cannot lay all the blame on those who ruled us before, not only because this would not be true but also because it would detract from the responsibility each of us now faces - the
responsibility to act on our own initiatives, freely, sensibly, quickly."

We must be fiddlers on the roof. From that vantage point we can have a different view of what is really happening. And, like a fiddler on the roof, we must carefully balance so that we don't fall off. We must balance between tradition and change. Like fiddlers on the roof, we are just trying to scratch out a simple tune without breaking our necks.

2004-11-11T08:47:00.000-08:00

Innovation Commons Collaboration

Why do some collaborative efforts succeed and others fail? What's required to create successful efforts time and time again? What role does software play? If these questions interest you then you may want to participate in a collaborative effort to develop some of the principles of a successful "innovation commons".

I am gathering a group of people together to develop a set of principles for a successful "innovation commons". I wrote an article on some of the principles, but I know that this is not complete and would like to engage a group of people together to hold online conversations on the topic. If this interests you, please click here or send me an e-mail (paul@theinnovationroadmap.com) and I will send you a copy of the article and include you in the discussion as soon as I have enough people to make it work.

Thank you!
Paul Schumann
Editor & Publisher
The Innovation Road Map Magazine
http://www.theinnovationroadmap.com/
paul@theinnovationroadmap.com
PO Box 26947
Austin, TX 78755
512.302.1935

2004-11-11T08:42:00.000-08:00

Creative Productivity

The future will be even more full of change than the present. And the present is change filled. This is not just a truism. We have entered a time period wherein technological, economic, and social conditions, together and separately, are driving change at an accelerating rate.

Creativity is one of the keys to the future! The discoveries, inventions, innovations, and improvements that will fuel the next economic expansion will require creativity. Creativity will be needed to overcome our social, political and economic problems, to face ever increasing worldwide competition, and to meet the challenge of a time of rapid innovation.

Creativity, the basis for all innovations. Creativity will also be needed to respond competitively to the innovation of others. And, creativity will be required of you to cope at all levels, personal or professional, with the changes about to be thrust upon you.

To be creative requires a positive future orientation. You must become students of the future so that you may plan to meet the creative challenges.

You must be sensitive to the present so that you may be able to detect those factors that will have a bearing on your future. And, you must be willing to change; to move your interest to that which gives you the highest return for you investment, keeping in mind at all times the broadest definition of your business, career, or self. This is imperative in a time of change for it is only within broad concepts that you can adapt to change.

Von Fange wrote in Professional Creativity, "to make creative contribution, as Einstein indicated, requires that one always search for what is fundamental. Or, to phrase it another way, if buggy whip people had realized that they were not in the business of making high quality buggy whips, but rather in the business, fundamentally, of stimulating further output from the prime mover of the family conveyance, their factories would not now be gaunt skeletons upon the American industrial scene." History does not treat favorably individuals, companies, or industries which do not react to change.

Creativity is inherent in our nature. You are created creative. Unknowingly, you choose to not exercise all of your creative talents because of the limits imposed by the processes of communication, socialization, and education. To be creative requires that you break through these limitations. Anyone can be creative. To profess that you cannot create is to set a goal you will certainly achieve. You are in control. But the very processes of communication, socialization, and education that limit creative ability, enable progress to be made. Humans require a purpose, a goal, and a paradigm for their life and career. Their establishment enables rapid progress to be made. But, as soon as they are established, they limit what can be accomplished. Progress, technical or social, is made by the establishment of a purpose and a paradigm. When maximum utilization has been-made of these, a revolution in thought occurs, and a new paradigm or purpose is established. This is creativity.

Creativity results in something new being brought into being; an attempt at immortality for that new creative may live beyond the creator. Rollo May in his book The Courage to Create captured the thought this way: "Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle-out of the rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death." Yet immortality through creativity does not come easy. Edgar Lee Masters has one of the characters in Spoon River Anthology say "Immortality is not a gift. Immortality must be earned."

Creativity requires courage. Picasso stated, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." Creativity implies change and change implies abandonment of the old. It requires courage to face the new. "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster" observed Jonathan Swift. You must be courageous to face the critics of change. You must be courageous to face the anxiety produced by changes in our own thoughts. You must be courageous to face the struggle which is a part of the creative act. Von Oech in A Kick in the Seat of the Pants defines four roles of a creative person-explorer, artist, judge, warrior. A good metaphor, all of these roles require courage.

Creativity also requires thinking. T. J. Watson, in his collection of essays, As A Man Thinks, stated it this way; "Thought begets the will to create." All thinking is mentally directed creativeness. You think only when you wish to achieve a conclusion that, by implication, did not exist before.

You have two facets to your brain, two different ways of perceiving the world. L-mode thinking, characterized by linear temporal, analytical, logical processes, dominates American culture. R-mode thinking is typified by holistic, non-temporal, spatial processes. Creativity is a product of R-mode thinking. Purpose is a product of L-mode thinking. Balanced thinking skills, allowing the sub-dominant R-mode style of thought to surface, fully awaken your creative and cognitive abilities.

Creative productivity is working, or living, smarter, not harder. Repeatedly performing the same operation faster is not the key to improving productivity; creativity is.

Creative productivity in your professional or personal life can be accomplished through an understanding of the mental and physical processes that are in response to real or perceived demands made upon you. Creativity is a state of mind over which you have control.

Paul Schumann

2004-10-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

An Innovation Commons

To make the next step in our organizations and societies, we need to develop cooperation within ever widening systems. And, if we are ever to develop "innovation commons", we must master cooperation and trust. An "innovation commons", calling on the old idea of a common pasture for a town where all the residents could graze their animals, is a place where ideas can exist, like the early molecules in the primeval sea, free to combine and reproduce to create even more complex ideas. A place where the stability of the complex ideas can be tested and their survival gauged. "Innovation commons" will be required to foster the trans-disciplinary innovation necessary for the merging of information, biological and nanometric technologies on our horizon. "Innovation commons" are needed now to handle the sociopolitical, economic and demographic problems we face amidst growing partisanship and yes, even hatreds. And, we must assure that we don’t fall prey to the "failure of the commons" where an individual or entity exploits the commons to the detriment of all others, and eventually themselves.

An article describing some of the principles of an innovation "commons" is available now in the current edition of The Innovation Road Map Magazine. These principles are based on recent findings about our social behavior. You can obtain a copy of the article by subscribing to the magazine ($29.95 per year) or by purchasing the individual article ($4.95 ). Or, if you are interested in participating in some online dialogue about the concept, you can get it for free by sending me an e-mail requesting the article and agreeing to participate in the discussions.

Paul Schumann

2004-09-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

Time Horizons

Time is money. Don't waste time. Time is a source of competitive advantage. Learn how to succeed through speed. Time management is productivity management. Succeed by being a one minute "whatever". Live in the fast lane. He or she is on the fast track.

The pace of our lives and work has speeded up. We are being driven by the very technology that we helped develop. Computers and communications technology that operates at nanosecond speeds are influencing the way we perceive and think.

Machines and timekeeping apparatus worked at human speeds in the past. Humans could experience a year, a month, a week, a day, one hour, one minute, and even one second, the interval between ticks of a clock. I remember as a child using a stopwatch to time how fast I could start and stop it. On long bus rides, as a member of a track team, we would compete to see who could be fastest. You can physically experience a few tenths of a second that way. Now, clocks that time athletic events run to hundredths of a second, even in basketball games. Slow motion video and instant replay capability spread a few tenths of a second over tens of seconds and human judgments are called into question. More than a second's response time from a computer seems an eternity. For the first time in history, our machines run at speeds we can never experience. This is having a profound effect on us and our culture.

The way in which we kept track of time has always affected us and our culture. Learning about the seasons structured farming, and those with the best timekeeping methods had a competitive advantage. Precise mobile timekeeping enabled explorers to roam farther. Structuring the week structured work. Pervasive clocks made daily work schedules possible, enabled central offices and factories to function, and ultimately facilitated the structure of cities.

We are right in the midst of this time change which will probably take many years to complete. It is a stressful time, as all the other fundamental changes were.

The roads leading from Austin west can go many miles through desert or semi-desert. Driving requires a focus on the horizon with peripheral vision alert to movement along the sides of the road. I hurtled along at high speeds in over 2000 pounds of metal, glass, and plastic, essentially out of control. Calmly I talked and sped along.

If a curve appeared on the horizon, I decided long before reaching it whether to slow down or if it was safe to continue at my current speed. I had learned years ago that you never try to brake after entering a curve. As race car drivers know, it is more stable to be accelerating through a curve. So it is essential to slow down before entering a curve.

I noted something as I drove. As long as I kept my vision on the horizon, driving at a high speed was easy, even if the road had many curves. As I brought my focus closer and closer to the car, driving became very difficult. If I tried to focus on the space just in front of the car, I couldn't drive at all. In that condition, I would have to slow the car down to only a few miles per hour.
I noticed that, if I tried to drive by focusing on the road just in front of the car, even if only for a few seconds, I became very anxious. Stress built up quickly.

This is an analogy for what we are experiencing in our lives and work. Things have sped up. Our response has been to shorten our horizon. We look only to the immediate future, what's on the road right in front of us. Then, we have tried to structure the feedback and action loops. Trapped in our perceptions by the technology, we try to use the technology in a brute force way to enable us to survive.

All we really have to do is look up. Look at the horizon for our lives, our work. Have a vision of where we are going, and living becomes easier again.
Paul Schumann

2004-09-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

Puzzles and Paradigms

The jigsaw puzzle lay on the dark wooden card table partially completed. Previous puzzle solvers had established the borders. Some of the interior portions had been completed. But, by and large, the puzzle was incomplete. I stared at the puzzle intrigued by two aspects. I was bemused by the fact that an unfinished puzzle existed to be worked on by a passerby. And, I wanted to try to solve it. It was a challenge.

The table on which the puzzle lay sat in one of the five rooms that constitute the lobby of the Cloister, a hotel on the seacoast of Georgia on Sea Island. Each of the five rooms has its own distinct character.

The jigsaw puzzle is a feature of this hotel. I sat down to work awhile on the puzzle. It was very difficult. The picture represented by the puzzle was a Monet, "The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil," an impressionistic painting. There was little distinction between colors in adjacent areas of the painting. In addition, the puzzle parts seemed to be all the same shape. They were not. But, the shapes were similar. Above and to the left lay a completed puzzle finished by previous guests. I thought as I looked at the completed puzzle, "How easy they had it!" It was a Currier and Ives type of painting, very bold colors, distinct boundaries, and sharply defined pieces.

Kuhn first used paradigms in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to describe how science and technology advances. Operating within a paradigm, scientists, technologists and engineers use a pattern of rules, theories, and beliefs to solve problems. Problem solving within the paradigm becomes puzzle solving, the application of known rules to a problem whose solution is assumed to exist. Motivation for progress of this type is derived from the clever, logical application of the rules.

As in the example of the jigsaw puzzle, a solution is assumed to exist. The parts scattered on the table are assumed to belong to the puzzle. If you cannot find the place for individual puzzle part, you set it aside, saying to yourself, "I will find the place for this later."

The case is similar for technological progress. Pieces of the puzzle that don't fit are set aside awaiting clearer understanding or improved capability through better equipment.

If however, there were two or more jigsaw puzzles mixed together, at some point it will become obvious that all the pieces do not fit into the puzzle being worked out. At this point in technological progress, when anomalies have accumulated, a crisis occurs. It becomes clear that the paradigm in use cannot be used to solve all the problems. If other people have been working on the same puzzle, a clear solution exists and a revolution occurs. The paradigm has been changed.

Revolution is a very creative act. Problem solving is not particularly creative. But recognition that two or more puzzles are involved requires a leap of insight. Puzzle solving is a left brain activity. A revolution, a paradigm change, is a right brain activity.

Failure, a destructive anomaly, can bring progress. The Franklin (Sir John Franklin, 1845) expedition to find a Northwest Passage was the largest single disaster in the annals of arctic exploration with the loss of 128 men. Yet because Franklin was a national hero and because of his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, his failure resulted in progress.

Jane Franklin, an interesting public figure her own right, was rich, beautiful, impressively articulate and assertive. She was a mountain climber who ran wild rivers and penetrated strange cultures and courts. She was the force behind a 10-year search to find her husband. Thirty expeditions were sent to find clues. The last, financed by Lady Jane herself, proved to be successful. She sent them to where she thought her husband would have gone.

In the process of the search for Sir Franklin, both the southern and northern transarctic passages were found. In addition, the British developed technologies adapted to Arctic explorations. It was 60 years later, however, before Roald Amnudsen took a ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Failure can lead to success. We forget that all too often in business. We don't learn from our mistakes. It is culturally improper to diagnose failures. Even worse, our failures are buried in unmarked graves. We need to tolerate our failures. A failure may point to a flaw in our Paradigm. It can be more valuable in the long run than a success.

There is a paradox in all of this. Progress cannot be made without a paradigm. Bacon understood this 300 years ago when he wrote, "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion." Without a set of rules to measure progress, you don't know if you've made progress. Like a river, the banks define the river and allow it to flow. But the banks prohibit the river's course. The more comprehensive the paradigm, the better a measure of activities, yet the more difficult it is to change. The better the paradigm, the better it is at problem solving and the harder to change.

The puzzle was still there the next day. A few more pieces had been put into place. The completed puzzle still glared at any potential problem-solver, the example that proved that puzzles could be solved, that the reward for completion is a beautiful painting. I placed a few more pieces in place.

How like technological progress, or for that matter, any human progress! Our role as we pass by is to put in place the few pieces of the puzzle we can and leave. Progress depends upon many people placing pieces in place until the puzzle is solved or anomalies uncovered and a flash of insight brings a step change in progress.

Paul Schumann

2004-09-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

Arches
The stone walls soared upwards all around me. The shuffle of feet on the dusty stone floor, combined with the low murmur of the steadily moving crowd of visitors, was punctuated by the raised voices of the tour guides leading tourists through the cathedral. Sunlight pierced the dusky interior from windows high in the dome. The vertical lines repeated in the architecture of the walls forced my eyes to move continuously upward to the arches forming the dome and the vaulted ceiling. Smoke from incense being burned near the altar drifted upward, occasionally being snaked by the air currents. The walls, the vertical lines, the vaulted ceiling, the dome, the drifting smoke of the incense, the decorative ceiling were all designed to force me to look upward. Form and function were in agreement in this Gothic cathedral.

I remember being taught somewhere, sometime in my childhood, the details now lost to the inevitable rush of time, that the arch was the true sign of civilization, that modern civilization really began when the arch was invented.

What is an arch? The arch is mechanical invention that transforms a tensile force into a compressive force. Why is that important? It is important because most construction materials, particularly cement, have poor tensile properties, but excellent compressive properties. Most construction materials can stand a lot more force pushing than pulling. Bricks or stones with mortar, or in ancient times without mortar, cannot span any large distance unless an arch is used. The arch transforms the vertical pull of gravity to thrust in the pillars. These thrusts can be transmitted through a series of arches that help hold each other up, but must eventually be relieved on the ends. The flying buttress was the solution used for the Gothic cathedrals.

"The arch never sleeps!" The Egyptians who used the arch in utilitarian buildings coined this phrase. They understood that the balanced forces were always at work within the arch. The arch has been used in some of man's most impressive architectural achievements throughout time. Cathedrals and buildings in both Western and Eastern cultures have made impressive use of the arch. Functional structures such as the Roman aqueduct and bridges are arches.
Implemented in high-technology materials, the arch has beauty of form and function.

Monuments have also displayed arches prominently - The Arch Of Constantine, The Arc de Triumpe, among many others, and most recently the Gateway to the West monument in St. Louis, designed by Saarinen. The Saarinen arch in St. Louis is the most impressive monument I've ever seen. Its simplicity of form and gleaming beauty of execution in stainless steel is awe-inspiring. My eyes were swept upward constantly. The arch hangs in mid-air, defying gravity.

The word "arch" may have had its roots in the Indo-European word arkh that meant "the beginning" or "leader." Incorporated into the word "architecture," the meaning of "arch" is clearly integral to that field. The technological development of the innovation of the arch may have marked the beginning of modem civilization. It is certainly woven throughout it.

I think, though, that I was taught wrong. Termites build arches. Now I know that termites, like ants and bees, have a form of civilization. But is that really equivalent to what we know as our modem civilization? I think not.

Communication among termites is not completely understood. Since they live and work in darkness, they are blind, as we know the term. Smell and touch seem to be the preferred form of communication. Termites build nests from a material that they make with body chemicals and cellulose, wood fiber. Big termite nests, like those found in Africa or Australia, can be several feet high and last decades. A nest may contain millions of individuals. Termites require carefully controlled humidity and temperature conditions inside the nest. The structure and material provide this function. Function and form are in consonance.

Construction of a nest follows a simple procedure. At some point for reasons unknown, and by mechanisms unknown, upon sensing a "signal" of some sort, termite workers start producing the pellets of material they use to construct nests. The termites begin to pile these pellets, each working individually, cementing them together with an adhesive they produce.

At some later time, sensing another "signal," the workers "look" around them. If they see a pile of pellets larger than theirs in the immediate vicinity, they abandon their project and go work on the higher pile. Through this process they select those piles they will work on.

A little while later, sensing still another "signal," the workers "look" around to see if there is a pile of nearly the same height within a specified distance of the pile they are working upon. If not, they abandon their pile and search for two piles that are close together. Again, after time has elapsed, termite workers begin to form the arch at the top. This process is repeated many times until an interlocking web of randomly constructed arches is completed.

In this process there are no high-performing termites. The entire process can be written in the form of a set of simple logical instructions - a program. There is no plan. Randomness plays an important role. The instructions and the responses seem to be genetically programmed into the termite worker. Signals do not seem to be given by anyone. Environmental conditions dictate the start of the process. When it is time to build a nest, a nest is built. The processes can be defined logically, analytically. Time may even play a role in the behavior changes once the building has begun. No one has a vision of the outcome. Everyone follows the rules and the result is functionally correct, but not elegant.

How many instructions like the ones used to build termite nests would it take to build a Gothic cathedral? More than is possible to count! How long would it take for a set of termites to accidentally build a Gothic cathedral? More time than there is in the universe! To build the Gothic cathedral required vision. Vision was required for the St. Louis monument. Yet vision itself is not enough. It is necessary but not sufficient. The vision must be converted into a plan. The vision must be communicated to others to get them to support and work on the vision. The plan must be implemented- follow the plan and holistically, intuitively follow progress and be alert to potential problems.

Arches did not mark the beginning of modem civilization. Whole-brained individuals who saw in the technological innovation of the arch a vision of heretofore unimagined structures began our modem civilization. Social structures run logically, analytically, and rule bound do not produce revolutionary innovation.

Gary Hamel in Leading the Revolution writes, "…how many times have you heard a CEO or divisional vice president say, ’Our real problem is execution’? Or worse, tell people that ‘strategy is the easy part, implementation is the hard part.’ What rubbish! These worthless aphorisms are favored by executives afraid to admit that their strategies are seriously out of date, executive’s who’d prefer their people stop asking awkward questions and get back to work. Strategy is easy if you’re content to have a strategy that is a derivative of someone else’s strategy. Strategy is anything but easy if your goal is to be the author of industry transformation – again and again." How many organizations have you seen that employ the termite approach to creating value? How many people employ the termite approach to their lives?

Do you see a paradox here? We've been busily stripping out levels of management and rule bound bureaucracies in order to let people be free to work individually and in teams. Individuals are left to make choices based on what they perceive is best for themselves with money as the only currency of evaluation. We're rapidly creating "termite mounds". The rules individuals follow in this type of environment may be more complex then termites, but they are nevertheless still rules.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to articulate the vision that captures the full range of capability of your innovation, or an innovation you know of, catalyzing yourself and a group into action. Establish the shared vision! It is not a mission impossible. It is a mission that is both essential and possible.

Paul Schumann

2004-08-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Creativity and the Future
It has been said that mankind is the only specie that can contemplate its future. If that is so, then the study of the future is one of the highest forms of study that one can undertake.
Today, never has the future seemed more threatening. Arthur Clark has observed a number of year's ago talking about nuclear holocaust, "This is the first age that has paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one." Now nuclear holocaust doesn't cause fear as it once did, but terrorism, globalization and the battle for god does.

We all are interested in the future and have a view of the future whether we admit it or not. As Charles Kettering, one of America's greatest inventors said, "My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there." Every decision we make is based upon a personal view of the future.

What does the future hold in store for us? A lot of change. Economists and futurists who have studied economic and innovation have been able to-discern trends. From these trends they have been able to develop models that can be used to predict future events. These models predict that we are entering a period of the most profound social and technological change in modern history. The surge of innovative activity will provide us with significant opportunity and challenge.

Creativity will provide the discoveries, inventions, innovations, and improvements that will fuel global economic growth. Creativity will be needed by us to overcome the national economic problems that we find ourselves in, to face ever increasing worldwide competition, and to meet the challenge of a time of rapid innovation. We must become students of the future so that we may plan to meet these challenges. We must be sensitive to the present so that we may be able to detect those factors that will have a bearing on our future. And we must be willing to change; to move our interests to that which gives us the highest return for our investment, keeping in mind at all times the broadest definition of ourselves. This is imperative in a time of change for it is only within broad concepts that we can adapt to change.

Von Fange wrote in Professional Creativity, "to make creative contributions, as Einstein indicated, requires that one always search for what is fundamental. Or, to phrase it another way, if buggy-whip people had realized that they were not in the business of making high quality buggy whips, but rather in the business, fundamentally, of stimulating further output from the prime mover of the family conveyance, their factories would not now be gaunt skeletons upon the American industrial scene." History is full of examples of companies and industries, which did not react to change. No stage coach company became a railroad company. No buggy producer succeeded in the auto business. No railroad or bus company entered the airline business.

Creativity seems to be inherent in our nature. We are created creative. We lose some of our creative talents as we age due to the boundaries that society puts around us or that we put around ourselves. To be creative sometimes requires that we breakdown these boundaries. Anyone can be creative. To profess that you cannot create is to set a goal you will certainly achieve. Creativity is elemental to all change whether it be discovery, invention, innovation, or improvement.

Creativity is bringing something new into being; an attempt at immortality for that new creation may live beyond the creator. Rollo May in The Courage to Create captured the thought this way: "Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle - out of the rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death." Yet immortality through creativity does not come easy. Edgar Lee Masters has one of the characters in Spoon River Anthology say, "Immortality is not a gift. Immortality must be earned."

Creativity requires courage. Picasso stated, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." Creativity implies change and change implies abandonment of the old. It requires courage to break barriers. It requires courage to face the new. Jonathan Swift observed, "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster." It requires courage to face the critics of change. It requires courage to face the anxiety produced by changes in our own thoughts. It requires courage to face the struggle, which is a part of the creative act.

In one of the Greek myths of the creation of mankind, Epimetheus, whose name means afterthought, a scatterbrained Titan who invariably followed his first impulse and then changed his mind, was given the job of populating earth. Before making men he gave all the best gifts to the animals, strength, swiftness, fur, feathers, wings, shells, claws, etc. until nothing good was left for man. At this point Prometheus, whose name means forethought, took over the job and he fashioned men upright, and went to the sun where he lit a torch and brought fire to man. And from fire, man learned many things that separated him from the animals. However, Zeus became angry with Prometheus, for giving man too much, and for having too much wisdom. Zeus had Prometheus bound to a rock where each day an eagle came and ate out his liver only to have it grow again the next day.

How many times have you felt the drain of creative energy thinking that it is gone, only to find it renewed after a day's rest? Creativity requires courage. Creativity also requires thinking. T. J, Watson in his collection of essays, As A Man Thinks stated it this way. "Thought begets the will to create." All thinking is mentally directed creativeness. We think only when we wish to achieve a conclusion that, by implication, did not exist before.

We do not do enough thinking. In a study of American businessmen it was found that they spent less than 3 percent of their time thinking. George Bernard Shaw observed, "Few people think more than two or three times a year. I've made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

What is thinking? To think is to exercise the powers of judgment, conception, or inference; to reflect for the purpose of reaching a conclusion. We must learn to exercise these mental powers. We must also learn use the right side of our brain. Researchers have found that while the left side is used for logic and speech, it is the right side that is connected with the insight associated with the creative act. Unfortunately the left side dominates our thinking and communication, and its methods dominate social convention and business.

In the final analysis, the ability to create is in each of us. We must find the way to unlock that creativeness. Quoting Krishnamurti, "In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself."

Paul Schumann

2004-08-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Fear of Failure

I was tired. It was night, and I was driving back from the airport after my third successive week of travel to teach and lecture. The classes had been particularly draining. The students had been demanding in the positive sense; they were hungry for knowledge that could provide them. I was drained and anxious to get home.

As I drove, I remember that the street I was on - and that very stretch of road - was where (less than a year ago) I had gotten my only speeding ticket in more than 30 years.
I looked down at my speedometer. The speed limit is 35 MPH on this section of road. In a few blocks, it became a more reasonable 45 MPH. I couldn't see the speedometer. Inadvertently, I must have dimmed the dash lights. I reached down to turn up the lights so I could see, but I couldn't find the light switch. Angered by my ineptness, I looked down through my wonderfully new bifocals and still couldn't find it.

I glanced back at the road only to find I was heading directly for a sign in the road median as I neared an intersection. I jerked the wheel and swerved to the left. The car hit the curb with the two right wheels. As the car rebounded to the left, I pulled to the right, taking note of a car in the left-hand lane coming up behind me. I careened back to the right into my lane. Sometime during this process, I had put on the brakes, because I realized that I had slowed down.
The tires on the right side of the car were flat. I drove slowly, bumping along, trying to get to a place to pull off the road. Consciously I starting thinking about the event that had just transpired, all the rest of the actions had been beneath the conscious level, at a speed far faster than that of logical thought.

That little excursion, that lack of conscious attention to direction, that attempt to avoid failing as I had when I got the speeding ticket cost me two hours of time waiting for a wrecker and a taxi ride home, and it cost me money, too.

Focusing on previous failures increases the possibility of future failures. It has been said that a cat, once burned by sitting on a hot skillet, will never sit on a hot skillet again. This is true, but the cat also will never sit on a cold skillet!

Our organizational cultures dictate that once we have failed, we will never fail that way again. We put in place tests, procedures, and practices to prevent that particular failure from recurring. This tendency to set up preventive measures often leads to a burgeoning complex of bureaucracy that is easy to add to, but hard to subtract from.

Karl Wallenda, one of the greatest tightrope walkers of all time, fell to his death two weeks after discussing with his wife, for the first time, his fear of falling. After the discussion, he became preoccupied with safety precautions, something he had never worried about before. Fear of failure leads to failure. We should focus our energies on success assurance rather than failure avoidance.

Eleanor McCulley pointed out to me that it is impossible for a person to visualize a negative. That's why, for example, when you tell a child, "Don't jump on the sofa!" that the child jumps on the sofa. Mentioning what not to do draws subconscious attention to the very behavior you don't want.

John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, had a wonderfully funny and insightful talk on the power of making mistakes. He pointed out that a self guided missile makes thousands of small mistakes along its path to delivering its payload. Small mistakes are made and corrected in order to not make the big mistake of missing its target.

Isn't that what you try to do in raising children? Don't you let them have a little rope and learn from small mistakes rather than controlling them so tightly that when they do get free, which they always will, they make a big mistake that is life altering? And, isn't that they way that you mentor leaders? Give them assignments with ever increasing risks and complexity?

We're all working hard. I sense that we're tired and that some are at the point of despair. We are reminded constantly of things we shouldn't or can't do, and we are taught that failure is unacceptable. Our attention to failure avoidance commands much of our energies.

Where is the positive vision of success that enables us and that admits that learning through failure is an acceptable outcome? What are you doing to help establish that vision? What is your vision for yourself and your organization?

Paul Schumann

2004-08-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

Anticipating and Integrating Change

My great grandfather traveled from Germany to Galveston, Texas as a teenager. Alone, but with the skills of a carpenter, he found his niche in Galveston. As you know, Galveston is an island and any water wells driven into the island always produce at best, brackish water. In the late 1800's Galveston was growing fast. People needed water. He used his skills and applied them to the production of cisterns. Cisterns are like large barrels, in this case made out of cypress wood. Residents collected rainwater in them from their roofs. Making cisterns was a growth business. My grandfather also made cisterns. But eventually technology developed that allowed a water well to be drilled inland and a pipe laid under the bay that brought fresh water to homes. No longer any need for cisterns. However, I still remember as a kid that cistern water was preferred and my grandfather's house had a cistern until it finally rotted out.

The business created by my great grandfather and carried on by my grandfather died. Change forced him to change himself and he joined a fast growing industry - trains. He became an engineer for the Santa Fe and drove passenger trains for awhile. When I knew him, he was working only in the switch yards, no longer on the long runs.

My father entered the railroad industry as well. He went to work for the Pullman Company as an electrician and mechanic. The Pullman car was the premier way to travel during the golden age of the railroads. It was high quality, first class all the way. We moved to Houston and he climbed up in the company as far as an uneducated man could in those days.

He had a midlife crisis, one brought on by technological change. Airplanes starting substituting for trains. The decline was relentless. He was out of work and no longer had a career. It crushed him and he started a gradual decline until illness disabled him for the rest of his life.

As a teenager, I was aware of this history and cognizant of what was happening to my father. I vowed that I would never let anything like that happen to me. So I joined IBM and went into the semiconductor industry. Guess what happened?

Well, I anticipated that change and after spending about ten years in the field I moved off into another field - the integration of computers, instrumentation, application knowledge and software to create the first independent business unit in IBM. But after about ten years in this field, I anticipated change again and moved to another field. Actually, it wasn't change I anticipated but the lack thereof within IBM. We were trying to do things differently in our innovative endeavor. I could see that the types of changes we were promoting were actually needed by the whole company. However, the culture was too strong and the changes weren't sticking, much less diffusing.

So I spent the next ten years working on cultural change. I had a successful cultural change program, but the change process was too slow. The world was changing faster than the change inside IBM. So I took retirement to try another path. I became a consultant.

Many others, as well as I, anticipated the profound change we're experiencing now some ten to fifteen years ago. It was called the "post (or trans-) industrial" age by many, the "information age" by some and we called it the "interactive age".

However, it is one thing to anticipate the change and quite another thing to integrate that change into the way one lives and works. This change is seismic. It is rattling the foundations of everything and it is affecting everything and will affect everyone.

Some jobs are gone forever - no longer needed or outsourced to other countries. Many skills are obsolete (some would say most). Knowledge is transitory. Social contracts have changed. The very nature of work is changing. The calculus of "pay" and "work" is shifting beneath our feet.

Change can be ignored, but it's not a pleasant path to follow. It's a path of decline and obsolescence. There are three ways to integrate change into our lives and work - adapt, exploit or deflect. To adapt to change is to go with the flow. To exploit change is to search for the undiscovered opportunities that are always present in change and find ways to take advantage of them through innovation. To deflect change means to not like the future you see and to try to stop that future from happening. This is not advised and will be unsuccessful unless you are sure that the driving forces for change support your preferred future. Present day fundamentalists are tying to prevent the change that is occurring through a wide array of political, military, religious and violent tools.

Ah love, could you and I with fate conspire and remake the future nearer to the hearts desire, might be the modern lament of Omar Khayyam

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." This advice has been attributed to Yogi Berra, but I'm not sure he actually said that. Regardless, it is good advice. We are at a fork in the road, and we must take it.

Paul Schumann

2004-07-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Startegy

No that's not a typo. Well, really it is, but this one is intentional. Let me explain.

I don't think I'm dyslexic, but my fingers are. I never learned to type properly, and I've developed my own hybrid system of "touch" and one finger "hunt and peck" typing. It's fast, but inaccurate. Thank goodness for spell check. What I often do is reverse letters or get all the letters in the word but scrambled. I type the word strategy quite often and unless I really slow down and concentrate I will invariably type startegy.

The other day I did it again and I was very frustrated with my inability to correct this often made mistake. I sat there looking at the word and it occurred to me. "Am I sending myself a subliminal message?"

I'm a very intuitive person so strategies, scenarios and systems constantly swirl in my head. In Myers-Briggs parlance that's an "N" type. However, there is my opposite, the "S" type (Sensing). Sensing types don't see the big picture; they see the details. They like lists, to-do-lists and the like.

So maybe the message of startegy is to remember to consider the starting point of a strategy. Like any journey of exploration, as a strategy is, the journey has to begin somewhere.

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" Confucius

So the next time you write a strategy, don't forget to also write a startegy. Where do you put your foot for that first step?

Paul Schumann

2004-07-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

Innovation Strategy

“An innovation strategy is only good for a finite amount of time. One of the worst mistakes an organization can make is to assume that because an innovation strategy has been successful it will always be successful. In reality, the environment shifts – customers’ needs change, competition gets smarter, technologies improve and the organization itself evolves – and over time the strategy becomes obsolete.” writes Donna Prestwood and Paul Schumann in an article in the latest edition of The Innovation Road Map Magazine (Vol. 1 No. 2).

The article goes on to trace the innovation history of the automobile industry to make their point. In doing so, they introduce and describe the concept of the innovation profile to characterize the pattern of innovation within and industry or company. They identify the following time periods of innovation in the industry:

1. Experimenters and hobbyists – the earlier days
2. Search and learn – the development of the model T
3. A car for everyone – exploiting the model T
4. From rural utility vehicle to living room on wheels – GM’s response
5. Synthesizing market demands – development of Toyota
6. Life style on wheels

To read the complete article, visit The Innovation Road Map Magazine and request free access to the magazine.

Paul Schumann

2004-07-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

Idea Richness

Mark Turrell writes in Deep Dive: Idea Richness, The Innovation Road Map Magazine (Vol. 1 No. 2), about differentiating a good idea from a bad idea within a business. He describes the concept of “idea richness” to help in the decision making process. “Idea richness is the extent to which an idea is described so that it is understandable to others…” he writes. He identifies five considerations for richness:

1. Understandability
2. Completeness
3. Questioning (How much extra work will be required of the evaluators to determine the potential of the idea.)
4. Longevity
5. Intuitive fit

To read the complete article, visit The Innovation Road Map Magazine and request free access to the magazine.

Paul Schumann

2004-07-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

Raising the Spirit

Anne Durrum Robinson, nonagenarian, and creativity consultant, is a joy to those who know her and have seen her work her magic. Anne has fans all over the world, but this article is not just for her fans. Read Mike Bown, Tom Carroll and Paul Schumann’s article "Raising the Spirit: An Interview with Anne Durrum Robinson" in the current edition of The Innovation Road Map Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 2), and you too may become a fan. At the very least you’ll get a chuckle from her stories and have your spirit raised.

Anne’s goal is to raise the spirit of everyone she interacts with regardless of the situation, even those in a hospital with her. And, as a trainer, she is sensitive to the spirit of the group and when to do something to raise it.

Read the article and learn about the four principles of raising the spirit:

1. Your experience, stories, anecdotes and facts
2. Flow
3. Humor
4. Purpose

To read the complete article, visit The Innovation Road Map Magazine and request free access to the magazine.

Paul Schumann

2004-06-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

Defining Innovation

Innovation, innovate, innovator, innovant, innovative, innovatory, renovate, novation, these are but a few forms of the central concept within innovation - nova. Nova is Latin but it originates from the Indo-European neuos. Neuos meant new or now. Nova was a word that referred to "a star that bursts upon the sight" according to Shipley in The Origins of English Words. In Origins, Partridge uses the phrase, "a temporarily new star". Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary goes one step further in defining nova - "A star that suddenly becomes thousands of times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity." This is of course true for innovations as well. Innovations have a life cycle.

Innovation has a prefix and a suffix. The prefix in- has its roots in the Indo-European word en. En meant in, within or into. My guess is that its use in innovation implies that what is shining comes from within. The suffix -ion is used to note action or condition. This may be the root of one of the confusions about the use of the word innovation. It refers to both result and the result's way of becoming, how it came into existence.

Roget's International Thesaurus provides a structure for words in the English language, a system of inter-linked concepts. The concepts for innovation that they list are change, departure, novelty and originality. All forms of innovation are change, result in change, or take advantage of change, and may be the result of change within the person or organization. Originality seems to me to refer to what we call breakthrough change. Novelty seems to refer to what I call distinctive change. And, departure seems to refer to incremental change.

Innovation and creativity are often confused, and probably for good reason. Creativity comes from the Indo-European root ker, a prolific root. Shipley lists seven major groups of words that come from ker taking seven and one half pages to describe. He states that creativity comes from he sixth group in which ker means to grow. The Greek word khorus comes from that root meaning youth. And, the Latin goddess of growth was Ceres. Derivatives in this root have the implication of “springing forth”. Cereal, increment, and creature also follow this root. Three of the other seven groups have related meanings – bend, move, turn around; cut, pluck, gather; and harm, destroy.

Picasso understood the later concept when he wrote, “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.” We grow physically only by the destruction of other living things (Joseph Campbell calls this the original sin.) We convert one form of living thing into another allowing us to grow.

Partridge leans heavily on the Latin root creare – to produce, cause to grow, to come into existence. He also points out that this same root leads through procreare to procreation, the physical acts of conception and birth, hence creature.

Dictionary definitions and common usage confuse the issue even more, especially in art, as a work of art is created – not only the idea but the implementation.

Another related concept is ingenuity. It come from the very prolific Indo-European root gn. This root goes right to the core issue, the generative. It has come to mean clever, original, inventive, and resourceful.

Shipley states that gn (or gen) has two meanings that are intertwined – to beget and to know. Words like generate, genitals, generation, gender, and pregnant have to do with begetting. Through the Greek, gn became gnosis, knowledge, and our congnition, prognosis, diagnosis. Through Latin we get ignore, ignorance. Through the Germanic gn became kn and ken from which we get kin that are the result of kindling, and of course knowledge.

Shipley writes, “The association of these two sets of meanings in the one root shows the early sense of their essential unity: knowledge is power; to know how; to produce; to ken, to kindle. Savoir pour prevoir pour pouvoir is the neat French wording: to know, to figure ahead, to function. One may speculate that the notion of ‘knowing,’ the self examination it involves, and the need for a word to name it arose in human consciousness at about the same time men grew aware of the tie between copulation and conception. (conception and conceive, in later Latin, took the same dual application, genital and mental) I think therefore I am. I know, therefore I can. Again from the French (Paul Claudel): Naitre, pour tout, c’est connaitre. Tout naissance est un connaissance: To be born is to come to know. All birth is wakening to knowledge.”

Information is perceived and judged by humans in four forms – noise, data, knowledge or wisdom. To extract data from noise requires human creativity. To interpret, synthesize, analyze, summarize, and otherwise give meaning to data, i.e. turn the data into something of value that is actionable, produces knowledge, a process that also requires creativity. Wisdom results for the creative assimilation of knowledge gained from years of experience gained personally and from others.

Innovation at its core is all about information, usually data or knowledge. And, we have four methods of innovating – discover, invent, adapt, and adopt. We can adopt an innovation in a new setting where it becomes new again. We can adapt an existing innovation into a new application. We can invent, which strictly means combining existing information to new ways. Or, we can discover new information through searching deliberately. Sometimes in our deliberate search we uncover information of importance to another innovation. Explorers discovered new lands and peoples, and in the process discovered much additional information.

Often the connation for creativity is the creation of something that never existed before. This is unfortunate because in reality all purposeful human creativity, and thus innovation, is based on existing information. At the time of the creation of the universe, by what ever model you ascribe, the information clock starting running and the information gets more complex with the passage of time. We build on the information that has been discovered, invented, adapted or adopted before us.

Now the exception to the above is an accident. In genetics, we have the fortunate, and sometimes unfortunate, circumstance that genetic accidents occur. If the genetic accident is favorable, it may get integrated into the information that generates that life, i.e. DNA, and hence gets propagated through generations. The same thing can happen with creativity and innovation.

This is the hundred monkey parable – a hundred monkeys in a room with keyboards, eventually something useful is typed. Even if you did this, it would still take a human to read everything until something useful was discovered. The information produced in this fashion looks like noise.

This is not a useful methodology for innovation, although some use it as an argument against funding innovation – it’s unpredictable both as to significance and timing. In most cases however, the observation about innovation is correct – its timing and significance is unpredictable. But this is not caused by the hundred monkeys’ random touches of a keyboard. It is in fact a consequence of the nature of nonequilibrium conditions in complex situations.

A classic example of a complex, nonequilibrium situation is an earthquake. The complex network of forces that give rise to an earthquake is not in equilibrium. We can know that there will in all likelihood be an earthquake, but we can’t predict when or how large it will be. We do know that the probability of a given magnitude of earthquake decreases with the square of the intensity. This inverse square law holds for a lot of complex situations where nonequilibrium exists. Does it hold for innovation? We don’t know.

The remaining concept in this essay on defining innovation is what the innovation results in. For years we’ve had product and process innovations. We’ve found it useful to consider procedure innovations as well. In our lexicon, procedure describes the way people interact with other people. Process describes the way people interact with things. And, product describes the way things interact with things.

In Novations: Strategies for Career Management, Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson, define novation in the following way: “The word ‘novation’ is a legal term with a long history in English and American jurisprudence. It is unfamiliar to most people outside the legal profession, but better than any other word in the English language; the word ‘novation’ describes the complex process that provides the key to understanding the way individual careers unfold in today's organizations. The dictionary defines the term as ‘ . . . the substitution of a new obligation or contract for an old one by the mutual agreement of all parties concerned.’ We found that changing relationships are critical in moving from one stage to the next. But to make such a move, individuals must renegotiate a new set of obligations and expectations with all those around them. Delicate as these mutual negotiations are, they are compounded by the need to make psychological shifts with new self perceptions, new self expectations, and adjustments to new pressures. Novations proceed with such seeming naturalness for some people that few people around them even take note of the changes. But the majority of professionals have a very different experience. They often feel stymied and frustrated in their careers. These are the ones who fail to understand and successfully carry out novations.”

While this may be a useful term for a very specific form of procedure innovation, I do not see it useful in general.

Another term that is in use is business concept or business model innovation. Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, doesn’t specifically define business concept innovation, but he does give us some of its characteristics. “The goal of business concept innovation is to introduce more strategic variety into an industry or competitive domain. When this happens, and when customers value that variety, the distribution of wealth-creating often shifts dramatically in favor of the innovator.” Later he writes, “Business concept innovation is meta-innovation, in that it changes the very basis for competition within an industry or domain.” Still later, “Business concept innovation starts from the premise that the only way to escape the squeeze of hyper competition, even temporarily is to build a business model so unlike what has come before that traditional competitors are left scrambling.”

To me a business concept innovation is a collection of product, process and procedure innovations with the right mix of incremental, distinctive and breakthrough change. If it is the right mix, i.e. the mix creates unusual value for the customer, then a shift of wealth occurs.

So if innovation creates value for customers, it can create wealth. And, this is the ultimate effect of innovation, especially if you consider wealth in its old context – the common weal – well-being, prosperity and happiness for society.

Paul Schumann

2004-06-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Innovation 2004
An ambitious initiative is underway that you should be aware of. Joyce Wycoff, The Innovation Network, has launched an initiative to:

- Create a collaborative learning process that gathers the collective experience, thinking and wisdom of a cross-section of innovation practitioners, consultants and academics in the emerging discipline of innovation.

- Synthesize the collective wisdom into an easy to use and understand report.

- Distribute the report as widely as possible through various associations and publications, which focus on organizational innovation.

The breadth of the initiative as well as the response to this initiate has been impressive. A web site, blog, wiki and survey have already been created. Numerous people have already contributed some of their expertise to the effort.

If you're interested in innovation, you not only need to be aware of this project, you should join it. Go to the Innovation 2004 web site. There you can explore the project, the results to date and determine how you would like to get involved.

Paul Schumann

2004-06-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

Innovative Search Engine

Want to try an innovative search engine? Then try KartOO. KartOO is a meta search engine with a graphical interface. KartOO launches your query to the most relevant set of search engines, gathers the results and compiles them in series of interactive maps.

KartOO uses a set of symbols to represent the type of source found, i.e. web page, home page, sponsored content, PDF, etc. The size of the symbol represents the significance to the search term. The graphical interfaces display the results in relation to each other. It displays the linkages and the key words that link them. When you move your cursor over a selection, the screen lights up illuminating the connections. At the same time, in a column on the left side of the screen, the description of the found content is displayed. Clicking on the site opens another page and the web page is displayed. Clicking on the key words modifies the search to include that key word. If you highlight the keyword just by moving your cursor to it and then move to the right column, there is a function to remove that keyword form your search.

As the results of the search are displayed, the left hand column displays the subjects contained on the page that are related to the search term. The colors represent a characterization of the subject, i.e. subject found in descriptions of several sites. A click on one of those subjects produces a search for that subject.

In the right column, the web site addresses that are on the page are displayed. Sponsored sites are shown there as well as KartOO commands.

The search box can accept many logical instructions. Look at the help page to find them. Some are different than other search engines. The search box can also except natural language questions, but make sure to include the question mark.

KartOO has some very powerful features. But, like any new tool, it requires learning. Try it on some difficult searches where you may be unsure about the search words. I have found it particularly useful in those situations.

Go to KartOO and give it a try. But don't just try it once. Go back several times until you get used to its difference.

Paul Schumann

2004-06-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Netwar & Smart Mobs

Bruce Hoffman writes about Netwar in his article, "Plan of Attack" in the July/August 2004 edition of Atlantic Monthly. "Insurgents in Iraq are forging improbable alliances to fight what some analysts call a 'netwar'", he writes. "The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader (or leadership), no ambition to seize and actually hold territory (except ephemerally, as in the recent cases of Fallujah and Najaf), no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization. Rather what we find in Iraq is the closest manifestation yet of 'netwar', a concept defined in 1992 by RAND analyst John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt as unconventional warfare involving flat, segmented networks instead of hierarchies and command-and-control systems (no matter how primitive) that have governed traditional insurgent organizations. The insurgency in Iraq is taking place in an ambiguous and constantly shifting environment, with constellations of cells and individuals gravitating toward one another - to carry out armed attacks, exchange intelligence, trade weapons and engage in joint training - and then dispersing never to operate together again."

This sounds an awful lot like what author Howard Rheingold calls "smart mobs". In his book, Smart Mobs (2002) he writes, "Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before. An unanticipated convergence of technologies is suggesting new responses to civilization's founding question, How can competing individuals learn to work cooperatively?" Rheingold defines smart mobs: “Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in their environment…”

I've not heard about the Iraqi insurgents' use of technology. Rheingold describes a number of instances where smart mobs engaged in a form of netwar:

- Overthrow of President Estrada in the Philippines (2001)
- The Battle of Seattle (WTO) (1999)
- Gasoline price protest in Britain (2000)
- Violent political demonstration in Toronto
- Critical mass demonstrations in San Francisco

If technology is not driving the insurgency of Iraq, then due to the situation they are in, they were forced to adopt or invent a procedure innovation. And, that means that maybe this new way of working together collectively with others is "in the air", ready to be caught by any group.

Look for an extensive book review of Smart Mobs in the next edition of The Innovation Road Map Magazine.

2004-06-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

Strategic Thinking

In the latest edition of The Innovation Road Map Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 2) Gregg Edwards describes the four abilities that develop the capability of strategic thinking:

1. Visionary time frame, or the ability to see the true potential of ever-larger new enterprises and then tenaciously actualize that truth.
2. Perspective, or the ability to cull from ordinary impressions the most consequential patterns of events and to evaluate their significance from many perspectives.
3. Comprehension, or the ability to quickly assemble all salient factors into strategies and to understand their implications at many levels.
4. Flexibility, or the ability to strategically organize both action and learning – to take advantage of and be responsive to unknowns as they become known.

However, as Edwards points out, it is not just these four abilities, but the four taken together as a whole that creates strategic thought. The synergy of the four, taken together, when actualized create results that appear to many as “magic”. The four abilities are not sequential but simultaneous and strategic thinkers constantly interplay the results of the four types of thinking with each other, almost in real time.

Edwards describes the development and application of strategic thinking to businesses, economic development and nonprofits.

To read the article, visit The Innovation Road Map Magazine and request free access to the magazine.

Paul Schumann

2004-05-27T07:11:00.001-07:00

Going to Abilene and the Wizard of Oz

"We're off to seethe Wizard! The wonderful Wizard of Oz!"

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most enduring, and endearing, of the modem children's stories. But is it really a children's story? It is, but it's not limited to that function.

I have seen the Wizard of Oz movie on TV more times than I can remember, watching it each year, when it was repeated, with my children. Each time I enjoyed it. And even though my children are now grown, I relish an excuse to watch it again with my grandchildren. Adults are not supposed to enjoy fairy tales like that, you see. So, we need an excuse, like children or grandchildren.

I believe that the Wizard of Oz succeeds because it achieves some things on three levels. First, obviously it is well crafted. The acting, characterization, singing, and dancing are all good. It even makes dramatic use of the then relatively new technology, color, by starting the movie in black and white, then switching to color when Dorothy arrives at Oz.

Characterizations, performance, photography, special effects, and music all come together for an entertainment experience, excellent for its time. And, like all other excellence it transcends time.

On the second level, it's a moral story. Home is really wonderful although the grass looks greener elsewhere. Your problems are at least your problems at home and manageable. You have it within yourself to be happy. It's always there and you hold the key. No one but you has the key or the door. You must open it yourself. Everyone has courage. The only difference is, some have been recognized for their courage. You have a brain. It's just that some have a diploma. Everyone has a heart. All you have to do is care to activate it. In other words, you are what you are.

On the third, and deepest level, it's an allegory about the gold standard for currency. The yellow brick road (gold) leads to the emerald city (paper money) in the land of Oz (ounces). Dorothy comes from Kansas and represents middle America's "everyman." The Strawman who has no brains represents the farmers who in the eyes of the author, Frank Baum, aren't able to analyze the effects of change of the gold standard.

The Tinman who has no heart is American industry which is technology-driven and has no concern for people. The Cowardly Lion is the politicians who talk big but who are afraid to fight. The Wizard of Oz is the person behind the whole facade, who literally is pulling the strings and turning the knobs to control the illusion of stability and power. Drugged by the narcotic of the good life, represented by the poppy field, Dorothy almost doesn't make it to the Emerald City. She and her band are awakened by cold reality, the snow, just in time and successfully complete their journey. The Land of Oz is populated by Munchkins, the little people or the silent majority. The good and wicked witches represent the author's perception of which section of the country is beneficial or harmful.

When the troupe arrives at the Emerald City, they are denied access to the Wizard. They take risks and defeat the wicked witch; only then do they find that the Wizard is a sham. Exposed by the dog, Toto, (a tot?) who child like, not having been trained to be awed by the trappings, gets right to the heart of the matter. Only then do they realize they have had the power within themselves all the time to make change and grow. The Wizard is truly wise, but his image has prohibited him from acting as he was capable. It is the nature of human culture, as we entrust more and more power to a position or individual, to accompany that power with an image and protocol that isolates the person from the people. The more power, the more isolation, and the harder it is to lead.

The Wizard of Oz is not just a simple story, but a complex narrative on three levels. It's the depth of the story with the excellence of its articulation that creates an almost timeless classic. I believe the same is true of all great literature and movies. Look at the latest super popular movies. You'll find that they too operate on several levels. And pleasure results when there is harmony in the communication.

Charles Smiley described a different kind of journey in his story - The Abilene Paradox (Managing Agreement: The Abilene Paradox, Charles W Smiley, Community Development Journal, Vol. 17, #1, 1982).

It was July in Coleman, Texas. The summer heat was brutal, 105 in the shade. The relentless West Texas wind was blowing fine grained topsoil through the air. However, the afternoon was bearable, even potentially enjoyable. The air-conditioning was work-ing. There was cold lemonade and beer, and a baseball game on television. It had the makings of an agreeable day.

Then my father-in-law suddenly said, "Let's get in the car, and go to Abilene. We can have dinner at the new restaurant." My first thought was, "Why? It's over 50 miles to Abilene. It's insane to drive in this dust and heat. His car doesn't have air conditioning."

However, my wife chimed in with, "Great idea. I'd like to go. How about you, Chuck?" Since my own desires were obviously out of step I replied, "Sounds good to me," and then I added, "I hope your mother wants to go." "Of course I want to go," said my mother-in-law. "I haven't been to Abilene in weeks."

We proceeded to get into my father-in-law's car, and drive to Abilene, My first and worst thoughts were confirmed. The heat was death in the afternoon. We were soon covered with a fine layer of dust that was, in turn, covered with a layer of sweat. The food was atrocious and the service terrible.

Four hours later we returned to Coleman; hot, exhausted and miserable. We sat in the front room for a long time in silence. Then, to be sociable, and break the silence, I said, "Great trip, wasn't it?" The three of them stared at me with hostility. Finally, with considerable irritation, my mother-in-law said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I hated the trip. I went along because the three of you. seemed so enthusiastic. I would have stayed home if you hadn't pressured me into going."

My wife looked shocked. "Don't blame me. I went along to be accommodating. We were crazy to leave the house in this heat." My father-in-law entered the conversation abruptly: "Listen, I never wanted to go to Abilene. I thought you might be bored. You visit so seldom I wanted you to enjoy yourself. I usually watch the ball game."

After this outburst of honesty and recrimination we all sat back in silence. Here we were, four intelligent people, who, by choice, had taken a 100-mile trip across a forsaken desert in a furnace-like temperature through a cloud-like dust storm to eat unpalatable food at a second-rate restaurant. None of us had wanted to go. It didn't make any sense.

The Abilene paradox occurs in organizations as well as families. It occurs when organizations take action that is in contradiction to what the individuals in the organization really want collectively to do. This action usually defeats the goals the organization is trying to achieve. The Abilene paradox results from the inability to manage agreement.

Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tinman, and the Strawman came together for a purpose. There was no paradox here. They all wanted to go to the Wizard of Oz. They each wanted to improve themselves. Banding together with common purpose, they accomplished their objective. They reached the Wizard. However, it was the process of the collaborative, purposeful effort that proved to be enlightening. Through the adventure they learned about themselves. So they accomplished their goals not in the manner they thought but through the process of pursuing a shared vision.

This is a metaphor for organizational progress. Without the shared vision, the common purpose, the organization falters. With it, progress is made. But, progress made is not always by the path envisioned.

As Yogi Berra said, "If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else." This is true. It is also true that even if you know where you are going, you might end up there by a different route.

Individuals play a vital role in managing agreement. If anyone had had the courage to speak up, Smiley and his family might not have ended up going to Abilene. Let's not go to Abilene! Let's go visit the Emerald City!

And, doesn't that take a road map, maybe an innovation road map...

Paul Schumann

2004-05-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

Blinded by Our Expertise

A wonderful bird is a pelican
His bill will hold more than his belican.
Dixon Lanier Merritt

Gliding only inches above the water, a group of pelicans sped past me as I walked the beach. It was near sunrise. Three layers of clouds provided the color for the sunrise over the ocean. The high clouds were already white with the full rays of the sun. The middle clouds were turning pink and orange, catching the first rays over their horizon. The lower clouds were still dark and ominous since they were not yet illuminated. Like the past, present, and future, the clouds provided a changing perspective of the sunrise. The past brightly lit for anyone to see. The present is rapidly changing. And, the future only poorly outlined. As if to amplify on this observation, the waves breaking along the shore, due to the tide, broke behind me first, alongside me next, and in front of me last. A cascade of sound coupled with the visual image.

The sun emerged over the clear ocean horizon. It was as though a ball of fire was plucked from a fiery cauldron of liquid. It seemed to emerge, change shape, and drip some of its fire back into the ocean. As the last edge of the sun cleared the horizon, an elongated drop seemed to form, due no doubt to reflection and refraction, adding to the effect of a cauldron source. It's no wonder that myths started the way they did. Our world is marvelous and not easily explainable if we only observe it, really see it, and not let symbols get in our way.

The pelicans rode what looked like a "ground effect," a compression of the air between the wings and the surface of the water. Without beating their wings, they sailed along in the troughs of the waves for long periods. Then they seemed to ride up the face of a wave, giving them a push higher into the air where they flapped their wings a few times and resumed gliding, skimming the surface of the water. What a marvel of perfection! The pelicans were exercising the skills that they had been given. Highly specialized and adapted to their environment, they seemed to revel in their abilities.

The brown pelican that inhabits the Florida coast where I observed them is a very large bird. It can have wingspans of up to 7.5 feet and flies with long wing strokes, alternating with glides. It commutes to work. Because of its flying skills, it has been known to fly for hundreds of kilometers between its nesting area and feeding area. I observed them every morning going to fish and every evening returning. The pelican prefers to nest in areas that are undisturbed. As a result of this and because of its susceptibility to DDT (making its eggshells too thin), it is becoming a rare bird. The pelican has been known to exhibit altruistic behavior, caring for its disabled. Groups have been known to provide food for a blind member no longer able to fish. In Europe, the pelican has been used as a symbol for man's altruistic activities.

The brown pelicans' manner of fishing is extraordinary.

They fly at heights up to 70 feet and with very specialized vision spot a fish swimming in the water below. The pelican sets its body into a dive, folds its wings, and plummets headfirst into the water, scooping up the fish in its bill. They are spectacular to watch: a marvel of skill and specialization carried out to perfection.

A common disability among the brown pelicans is blindness. Repeated diving with the tremendous impacts on the head damages the eyes and blindness results. The very practice of the skill so carefully perfected damages the pelican's vision, one of its highly developed abilities, necessary for the use of its other skills.

This is also what happens to people. We become so highly specialized and efficient at the practice of a skill that its repeated use blinds us to change and opportunity.

The development of a paradigm both enables progress to be made and hinders change - a paradox.

History has recorded many cases of experts making bad predictions. They were not sensitive to events occurring around them. They were not able to see what was really happening:

"For a century, as you know, steam has been the principal railroad motive power. It still is and, in my view, will continue to be."W.C. Dickerman, President American Locomotive Co.

"The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. `Knife' and `pain' are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory exacerbation we shall have to adjust ourselves."Dr. Alfred Velpeau (l839)

"Nothing has come along that can beat the horse and buggy."Chauncey Depew, U. S. businessman

"I cannot imagine any condition which could cause this ship to flounder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modem shipbuilding has gone beyond that."E. J. Smith, Captain of the Titanic

"The bow is a simple weapon, firearms an very complicated things which get out of order in many ways, a very heavy weapon tires out soldiers on the march. Whereas a bowman can left off six armed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one it two minutes."Colonel Sir John Smythe (1591)

"That is the biggest fool thing we have eve r done. The [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."Admiral William D. Leahy (1945)

I continued my walk along the beach, watching several more groups of pelicans play with the air and the water. There was no one else in sight but there were numerous footprints in the loose sand piled high by tides and the actions of the waves. It was just past high ride and the water had receded somewhat. Walking was tough in the trek over the sand. I moved down closer to the water's edge where there were no footprints. The walking was easier, but I had to keep my eyes open to avoid getting my feet wet by an occasional high-performer wave.

Walking over other people's tracks is always difficult and uninteresting. For a team of horses pulling a wagon, the scenery only changes for the lead horse. In addition, it's easier to get confused by other people's tracks. In Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne, Pooh goes hunting for a Woozle. Joined by Piglet, they continue their search, following a set of tracks. As they walk, the number of tracks increases. They become frightened by the alarming number of Woozles that they are following and quit. Only then do they find that they have walked in circles and followed their own footprints.

When you walk along the water's edge on sand recently uncovered by a receding tide, you explore new areas not seen before. Your footprints clearly mark your path and will last until another tide washes them away.

There are cycles in innovation. There are time periods when bursts of innovative activity occur. We are in one of those time periods now.

Those who wish to make technological progress will dance with the tides of change, using multiple expert skills. Those who dare to deviate from the paths of others, who risk getting their feet wet, will develop innovations, like footprints, that will last until the tide returns 50 to 60 years from now.

Don't be blinded by your specialization. Don't be frightened by all the tracks in front of you. Many of them are yours. Move away from the footprints of the others and dance with the tides of change.

Paul Schumann

2004-05-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Complexity, Stress and Strategy

I have been told that Australian Aborigines hunt kangaroo in a manner that has lessons for the modem workplace. The Aborigines know that they are not as fast as the kangaroo. If they try to outrun it, the kangaroo will leave hem in the dust. Even if they try outlasting the kangaroo, they can't. The kangaroo, ideally suited for the outback, can both outrun and outlast the Aborigine. So, over the years, the Aborigines have developed a method, which is perhaps intuitive, whereby they use patience and knowledge of stress to hunt the kangaroo.

When the Aborigines hunt kangaroo and spot a likely candidate, they start on a course of relentless pursuit. They run after the kangaroo at a pace that they can sustain for long periods of time. The kangaroo, frightened by the humans, runs away at a high speed. When the kangaroo feels that it is far enough away, it stops to rest. Soon the Aborigines catch up, and once again, the frightened kangaroo runs away at a high speed. Again, the kangaroo rests, and again the Aborigines catch up.

This scenario is repeated over and over again. The result is that the kangaroo begins to experience great stress from running, resting, and then running again. The Aborigines study the kangaroo very carefully. When it appears that the kangaroo has been stressed enough, they move closer, but not close enough to frighten the kangaroo. Then they stop.

The kangaroo relaxes, thinking that it is safe. It may even go to sleep. Then the Aborigines attack. The kangaroo, relaxed and secure, cannot respond in time and is killed.

Is this not a metaphor for the stress of the work world? We constantly are being pursued by our competitors, by our co-workers, or by ourselves. We are called upon time and time again to respond with bursts of adrenaline, to respond quickly, and to move ahead. Because we experience stress in our work lives, as well as in our increasingly complex personal lives, we become harried like the kangaroo. And we become vulnerable.

The Japanese Samurai have understood since the 16th century how to cope with stress. Miyamoto Musashi, one of Japan's greatest Samurai, wrote about this in his book, The Book of Five Rings. One of Musashi's teachings was the strategy of Releasing Four Hands. When you and your opponent are locked in a struggle, and no one can seem to gain an advantage, learn to release the four hands - to break off the combat cleanly by releasing both of your lands and those of the opponent. Then you can try a different approach that is strategically to your advantage. The one who breaks off the combat for an instant clearly has the advantage of having thought ahead as to what he was going to do. He can then take a positive action to gain an advantage. Many believe that Japanese businesses still have the roots of their strategies in these lessons from the Samurai.

Like the Samurai, the Aborigines break off the contest for a while. The kangaroo, which relaxes and thus gives away its advantage, suffers the consequences.

We live in an age of constant complexity, in which change is endemic and chaos is commonplace. Constant innovation is necessary for survival. A commitment to constant personal renewal is essential if we are to stay ahead of the changes. How can we do it all?

Remembering the strategies practiced by the Aborigines and the Samurai, we find two things that we can do. We have to be able to think ahead and be better strategic thinkers. We must be aware of the total environment within which we work and live and be able to read the signals of impending change long before they affect us. And we must be able to integrate many signals of change to reach a basic understanding of the driving forces behind the changes. We can also pace ourselves better. Instead of having to exert a burst of energy, in a panic mode, to get ahead, with resulting stress on our minds and bodies, we can pace ourselves. With the knowledge of where our opponents are headed, we can run at an even pace to stay ahead.

We must be able to live creatively productive lives. In order to do this we have to understand, among many other things, the nature of stress on our body, the effects of what we eat and drink, and those things that are effective to each of us individually to manage stress.

Armed with the knowledge of the driving forces, what strategies our opponents are using, we will know when we can relax, and when we must he alert. We can then integrate stress management practices into our lives, to allow us to reach baseline often. This will fuel us with the almost boundless energy that is natural to us, and enable us to face these times of chaos, complexity, and change each day without tearing ourselves down.

Paul Schumann

2004-04-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Innovation's Journey

Innovation is a journey. Every innovation has a history and a future. It also has a present and our role is to help innovation have the brightest future it can, depending upon its history and the ever shifting market and organizational environments.

There are seven stages in the development of innovation. Most innovations falter somewhere on the journey from ideation to social or economic impact. At any moment in time on this journey there are two road maps that must be developed. The first is the market road map for innovation - what are the alternate paths to take advantage of the opportunities (and avoid the threats) created by the demographic, sociopolitical, technological and economic driving forces for change, delight customers, satisfy stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage thereby increasing profitability. The second is the organizational development road map for innovation - the alternate paths that the organization could take to be able to produce the innovations required by the market road map. The combination is the innovation road map. The engine that drives this journey is the interaction of creativity, strategy and leadership.

Paul Schumann

2004-04-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

Business Model Innovation

In my expereince I have found that it is the profile of innovations that determines how successful an innovative product or service will be. That profile is determined by the mix of class of innovations (incremental, distinctive and breakthrough) coupled with the nature of the innovations (product, process and procedure). Rarely will an innovative product succeed with only one the nine different types of innovation present. I think it is this pattern of innovation, as indicated it the innovation profile, that constitutes a business model.

Ernesto Sirolli speaks about his experiences in Esperance, Australia in helping would be entrepreneurs succeed. Two of his early experiences make this point about business models and innovation.

Esperance, a small rural town in Australia, was economically devastated at the time of Sirolli's work. An out of work fisherman had developed a new way to smoke fish in his garage. People liked the taste but the amount of business he was generating was too small to support him. With financing and marketing support, his business became successful. In terms of the innovation profile, he had a distinctive product innovation that is made with a distinctive process innovation. But the business was not successful until incremental procedure innovations were included. His business model for this product launch was then complete and the business was on its way.

In the second case, Sirolli describes the plight of other fishermen in the town. They had been salmon fishers, but the market was depressed for salmon. They found that they could catch tuna, but they had no distribution or marketing system. Sirolli provided these and not only was the business launched but it became a very successful ongoing business with significant economic impact to the town. Again, in terms of the innovation profile, the fishermen had a distinctive product innovation. It became successful when paired with a distinctive process innovation and a breakthrough procedure innovations. An innovative business model was complete.

I will write more about this in a review of Sirolli's book, Ripples from the Zambezi, the July 2004 edition of the Innovation Road Map Magazine.

Paul Schumann

2004-04-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

Leather Apron Club (The Junto)

Benjamin Franklin created the first workingman-networking club in America. In Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, the author describes Benjamin Franklin's approach to networking. A modern version of this would work well in today's environment.

Isaacson writes, "Franklin was the consummate networker. He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life." The Junto, formed in 1727, was a group of tradesmen and artisans, not the elite that frequented fancier gentleman's clubs. "The tone set for Junto meetings was earnest. Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breast, and answer properly four questions: Do you have any disrespect for any current member? Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions or mode of worship? Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?" A Socratic style of conversation was employed.

"Discussions were to be conducted without fondness for dispute or desire of victory. Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least fain) naive curiosity to avoid contradicting people in a manner that would give offense." He urged this style on the Constitutional Convention later.

The topics ranged from the social to the scientific and metaphysical. Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. Some of them were (there were 24 in all):

"1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read remarkable or suited to be communicated to the Junto?
2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
4. Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving well, and by what means?
5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?
6. Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? Of imprudence? Of passion? Or of any other vice or folly?
12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting that you heard of and what have you heard of his character or merits? And whether you think it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him or encourage him as he deserves?
14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment?
15. Have you lately observed any encroachments on the just liberties of the people?
16. Has anybody attacked your reputation lately, and what can the Junto do toward securing it?
17. Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you?
20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them assist you in any of your honorable designs?"

According to the Innovation Profile definitions, the Junto would be a breakthrough procedure innovation.

The next edition (to be published this month) of the Innovation Road Map Magazine has a book review and an article on the innovation profile of the innovations of Benjamin Franklin.

Paul Schumann

2004-04-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

Cool Tools for Change

I attended a one day conference last week entitled "Cool Tools for Change"(www.cooltoolsforchange.org). It covered some inexpensive (many are free) ways to help community organizations run more smoothly while strengthening social networks. There has been a proliferation of the information and networking, hardware and software, tools for social innovation. This has happened because of the convergence of two driving forces - Open Source and the driving force for participatory democracy. Open source is itself a "democratic" process for the development of very important software systems and modules. Cool Tools for Change is a project of students and faculty, the Community Informatics Team, at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

CommunityNetworking.org, also a project of the Community Informatics Team, is a resource and news site for organizations that need to use computers and the Internet, but which have to work with low budgets. New technologies and techniques are emerging that allow low-budget, community-based organizations to improve their use of information technologies and still stay within their financial means. Examples include Open Source software, new wireless networks and low-cost computers. This Web site is a way for people who work for low-budget organizations—such as nonprofits, schools, libraries, and small governmental units—to stay abreast of what's happening in the field of computer networking, and to learn more about what might be affordable.

The cool tools web sites mentioned above are under development, so if you don't see what you need now, come back in a few months and check again.

David Pearce Snyder, a consulting futurist, has been writing and saying for years that the Open Source methodology of developing software will become the way innovation is going to be developed in the future. He was right, as he often has been. These tools are innovations that are being developed with an Open Source model. For more information, read David's article, "Compexipacity", in the forthcoming edition (April 2004) of the Innovation Road Map Magazine.

deanspace was discussed several times as a prime example of how these tools can be used in grass root political developments. Even though the candidate has dropped out, the deanspace effort will live on in a new form. The development of this application using Open Source methology and tools, and the way it was used, is an innovation worth studying. It may give some clues into how organizations might operate in the future.

The biggest source of these Open Source software applications and software modules is SourceForge.net. There are many variations of the "Forge" concept as you can readily find out by searching on "open source forge". A brand new, early stage version of the "Forge" concept is OrgForge.org. It is a Wiki. A Wiki is a collaborative web site that can be edited by anyone. According to OrgForge.net, "Wikis are great for building up a wealth of information about a subject by pooling substantial resources in the community. A Wiki can be used to help generate new ideas or document existing ones." The OrgForge Wiki is being developed to create the nonprofit analogue of the Open Source web sites for software. Its goal is to pool community experience in nonprofit organizations and to build an Open Source of that information.

All of this is about self-organizing systems, a topic of great importance to innovation and our future.

Paul Schumann

2004-03-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Innovation & Job Outsourcing

Several days ago I saw the end of an interview on PBS of Jack Welch, former head of GE. The part of the discussion I heard was Welch waxing eloquently about how good it is for business and the economy that the outsourcing of jobs was occurring. The arguments were standard, the type you’ve heard before, but then he added, “US companies need to innovate, innovate, innovate!”

Let’s look quickly at what some of the other pundits are saying about the subject:

Gartner estimates that one out of every ten jobs at US technology vendors or service providers will move overseas by the end of this year. By 2008, 25% of all traditional information technology jobs will be in emerging market nations. “These dislocations can be substantial. Work can move offshore very quickly, and it remains to be seen how quickly we can innovate to replace those jobs” states Michael Fleisher, chairman of Gartner. The industries hardest hit will be those with a high concentration of knowledge workers such as banking, health care and insurance.

Jonathan Krim, Washington Post, reports that more than 500,000 technology jobs were lost from mid 2001 to mid 2003.

“Software and technology service businesses are under siege by countries taking advantage of cheap labor costs and strong incentives for new financial investments” says Andrew Grove, Intel Chairman. “More ominously, the software and services industries – strong drivers of US economic growth for nearly two decades – show signs of emulating the struggles of the US steel and semiconductor industries.” He said that he is torn between his responsibility to shareholders to cut costs and improve profits, and to US workers who helped build the nation’s technology industry but who are now being replaced by cheaper labor.

Forrester Research predicts the loss of 3.3 million jobs in the US by 2015 due to outsourcing.

Forbes ominously warned, “Your job could be next. Among the outsourced are computer programmers, engineers, accountants and financial analysts, not to mention the thousands of less skilled workers who answer phones at call centers. Critics decry the job migration as shortsighted bottom feeding.” Later in the article, “Now, skilled workers are finding that education isn’t enough, not when an Indian worker is just as educated and is willing to do the same job for a fraction of the pay. A microchip designer or financial analyst makes $7,000 a month in the US. The same worker in India earns $1,000 a month, Business Week reported this year.”

“I think overall, long term, the US economy can take it. But there’s going to be a huge amount of restructuring pain,” said Rafiq Dossani, Stanford.

“What’s making the loss of jobs all the more scary for tech workers is the speed with which companies can now send jobs overseas because of today’s sophisticated communications technology. Thousands of jobs can literally be moved to India overnight,” said Arvinder Loomer, San Jose State.

“Indeed, say economists and historians, tech jobs seem to be moving to India faster that manufacturing jobs moved overseas in decades past,” reports Aaron Davis and Margaret Steen, Mercury News. Later in their article, they state, “The key to the valley’s (Silicon Valley) future, experts say, is a new wave of innovation, maybe in nanotechnology, biotech or something else.”

“Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy said increased productivity at many high-tech companies means they’re able to post stronger earnings without hiring new people. We are in a turnaround, but it’s not strong enough to generate strong job growth, Levy said, I don’t expect substantial job growth in the near future.” Chris O’Brien, Mercury News

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Fox News, reports, “Courtney (WashTech) estimates that 600,000 US jobs have moved abroad. Global Insight international economic forecasting and data providers, figure the number closer to 300,000 white-collar jobs including less-skilled call center and telecommunications positions. But warns that the number could swell to 3.3 million by 2015.”

Thomas Friedman, New York Times, discusses what he calls “global work-flow platforms." “These work-flow platforms can chop up any service job – accounting, radiology, consulting, software engineering – into different functions and then, thanks to scanning and digitization, outsource each function to teams of skilled knowledge workers around the globe, based on which team can do each function with the highest skill at the lowest price. Then the project is reassembled back at headquarters into a finished product.” He sees this giving rise to a Darwinian environment where knowledge workers will be under increasing pressure to upgrade their skills.

Friedman also writes about the “Zippies” – “the huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from Socialism and dived headfirst into the world’s service center. With 54% of India under the age of 25 – that's’ 555 million people – six out of every ten Indian households have at least one Zippy.”

Friedman reports, “We created a worldwide network which connected all the resource pools on the planet, and suddenly we changed the rules of the game”, said Nandan Nilekani, CEO of the Indian software giant Infosys – which last year received nearly one million applications from Indian techies for 9,000 software jobs. “You cannot wish away this new era of globalization," he added. “It will not go away.”

Friedman concludes, “As long as America maintains its ability to do cutting-edge innovation, the long run should be fine. Saving money by outsourcing basic jobs to Zippies, so we can invest in more high-end innovation, makes sense.”

Friedman confesses that he missed the revolution. “I was totally focused on 9/11 and Iraq. But now having spent 10 days in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, I realize that while I was sleeping, the world entered the third great era of globalization.”

Globalization 1.0 – late 1800s to WW I, driven by decreasing transportation costs
Globalization 2.0 – 1980s to 2000, falling telecom costs and PC
Globalization 3.0 – undersea fiber optic cable, diffusion of PCs around the world, convergence of a variety of software applications

Globalization 1.0 shrunk the world from a large size to a size medium. 2.0 shrank the world from a medium to a size small. And, 3.0 shrank the world from small to a size tiny, according to Friedman.

We’ve gone through great transitions before in the US. In 1870, we were an agricultural economy. In that year 45% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. By 1880, the number began to fall and has continued to fall until the present day. Now only about 3% of the US workforce are employed in agriculture. This decrease was driven by productivity improvements made possible by innovations in equipment, pesticides, herbicides, genetics and workflow processes. There was dislocation, an enormous amount of it, as people streamed into the cities. But, at the same time, industrialization was taking hold and people could be trained to work in the factories that drove the industrial revolution in the US. People working in industry reached a peak of about 38% in 1950. From there on there has been a continual decline in the number of people working in industry. By 2010, BLS forecasts that about 15% of US workforce will be in industry. This time the decrease was due to innovation, automation and improved production technique and designs. But it was also due to offshore manufacturing. First plants were built by US companies abroad. Later, manufacturing was contracted out to vendors able to provide parts, subassemblies or the entire product. Then offshore companies competed directly in the US market. Where did those people go? They went to a large extent into service sector. For awhile, this was puzzling. How can an economy work with “everyone doing each other’s laundry?

In 1920, about 20% of the US workforce were employed in the service sector. By 1950, this had grown to 50%. By 1990, the service sector employed 80% of the US workforce. To help understand the issue, economists separated the service sector into two components – consumer services and producer services. Consumer services are those like the fast food industry and personal services. Producer services are those created by the information age, the knowledge workers.

Consumer services has varied between 15% and 25% of the US workforce since 1860. It seems to act as a buffer absorbing jobs during transitions.

The producer service sector grew from less than 5% in 1870 to almost 55% in 2000. It surpassed consumer service in 1902, agriculture in 1930 and industry in 1960. It is now the largest sector of the US workforce and this is what’s being outsourced.

However, there is a difference. In this transition, at least so far, we don’t see what the people being replaced by outsourcing are going to do.

Many suggest that these people need to be retrained to do other jobs. The health care industry is a growing market in the US. Should they be trained for a career in that field? But, we already know that many of those jobs are already subject to outsourcing. Besides, according to Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon, job training is a farce and gives false hope to unemployed Americans.

Lafer writes, “Whatever the problem. It seems job training is the answer. The trouble is, it doesn’t work, and the government knows it. The most comprehensive evaluation of training programs, conducted by the Department of Labor, followed 20,000 people over four years. For the vast majority, the government concluded that that training made no difference whatsoever.”

Are we going to ignore the problem? Many are suggesting already that the terms "outsourcing" and "global" are too hot. Businesses and politicians are adopting the terms "sourcing" and "worldwide" as potentially cooler terms in the hope that we will forget what actually is happening.

Are they going to go into the consumer service sector? If they do, it'll be a real step down in salary and potentially the creation of a two class society with the diminishment of the middle class and an accumulation of wealth at the top.

Shoshana Zuboff & James Maxim, in their book The Support Economy, envision a scenario in our future where technology enables the development of a new sector - the support economy - that they claim is the next episode of capitalism. They write, "History suggests that the next great era of commercial innovation will require more than the production or exploitation of new technologies, however creative the undertaking may be. The next revolution in wealth creation will draw life, first and foremost, from a profound grasp of the new society of individuals and its expression in a new kind of consumption. Only the full force of this understanding can ignite the entrepreneurial innovation capable of leading such a revolution and paving the way toward a support economy and a new episode of capitalism."

Willis Harman, a futurist, saw some of these changes coming. In the mid 1990s he wrote, “The far more attractive alternative involves a burgeoning of the third sector of voluntary and non-profit nongovernmental organizations. Since neither the commercial sector nor the public sector is capable of satisfying people’s needs and solving social problems, the public has little choice but to begin looking out for itself by establishing viable communities as a buffer against both impersonal forces of the global market and increasingly weak and ineffectual governmental authorities.” Should there be a transition from economic production, as Harman suggests, into community building? It might pay little or nothing, but job satisfaction has the potential of being high.

Are they going to go to high-end innovation as some suggest? Well, in my crystal ball, the next major innovations coming our way will probably be in the convergence of infomatics, genetics and nanotechnology. To participate meaningfully in this revolution is going to require multidisciplinary approaches. People will have to have a high degree of education in more than one of these fields. The problem is that this revolution is still a number of years away. Technology takes a long time to develop. Look at the technologies that have come tougher to create the productivity improvements that have led to our current situation. They're all 30 to 60 years old!

It will probably be some combination of these factors. And, I wholly support getting our children better educated in the physical sciences so that they can help produce the innovations of the nano-bio-info revolution. But, as you know, growing children into educated adults takes a long time. It seems to me that we can’t wait for the nano-bio-info tech revolution. The process of globalization is going on too fast. It seems to me that we need innovations now that increase the productivity on US knowledge workers ten fold so that they can compete globally and still make enough money to buy the products they make. We need innovations in the way we look at corporations, the nature of work and how we organize ourselves. We need innovations in how we fund business and reward workers. And, we need innovations in the way we measure success - corporate and personal.

I don't even want to pretend that I have the answers. I do think that the answers exist in innovation but what the nature and class of those innovations need to be, I'm not at all sure. I do know that we need a lot of attention, research and conversations on this topic. Our future depends upon that.

Mark Landler, New York Times, encapsulated the magnitude of the problem with this observation: "The fears are intensified by the rise of China, one of the prime destinations for jobs moving out of the United States and Europe. Goldman, Sachs issued a study here predicting that China's economy would overtake that of Germany within a decade, and surpass the American economy by 2014. Zu Min, an economic advisor to the president of China, was met with silence at a dinner last week when he asked Americans at the conference how their country planned to finance its economy when both blue-collar and white-collar service jobs were going elsewhere."

Paul Schumann

2004-03-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Innovation Profile Survey

We’ve just recently opened up a survey to examine the innovation profiles of organizations. This tool is one that we have used in our consulting and training for a number of years. I just wanted to share some of the very early results from this free survey. Click here to download a PDF file showing the innovation profiles from the first six organizations that responded. Each of the six is in different industries and the results demonstrate that the survey tool is discerning differences. No two innovation profiles are the same.

It is far too early in the survey to ascertain any trends. However, we did expect different industries to exhibit different innovation profiles. Not only that, but we expect within an industry group to also see differences. It is the innovation profile that can determine competitive advantage. The innovation profile of an industry changes over time as well.

The innovation profile should reflect the interaction of customer needs, technological changes and competitive responses while embedded in an environment steered by overarching driving forces for change.

Come join us in this study. It’s free. And, if you include your name and e-mail address, we will send you the innovation profile calculated from your response. In addition you will receive a copy of the results of the completed survey.

Go here to take the survey.

Paul Schumann

2004-03-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

Push, Pull and Clash

In determining an appropriate innovation profile for an organization, the first place to get information is in the market. In our view, the market is composed of three elements – customers, competition and technology. Customers provide the “pull” in the market, technology provides the “push” and competition provides the “clash”. All three of these elements need to be taken into consideration to determine an appropriate innovation profile for the organization.

If it is an existing market, there are already existing customers, and if your organization is already in the market, then you have existing customers. We find it useful to consider three types of customers – existing, known potential and unknown potential. In almost all cases, your organization has to meet the needs of its existing customers. In general, those needs are incremental in nature, although sometimes existing customers will identify needs for distinctive innovations. (See previous blog entry for discussion of the types of innovation). Known potential customers are those that are buying your competitors’ products or services. They generally will not be persuaded to change unless you offer something distinctly different (a distinctive innovations). Unknown potential customers are those who are not presently customers in the market, but could be. They might be swayed to purchase something in the market if a breakthrough innovation, or possibly a distinctive innovation, becomes available.

Technology within the market usually provides the “push”. It can be used to satisfy existing needs of customers, create new needs, expand the market or create a new market. We like to consider three types of technology within the market – embodied, supportive and enabling. Embodied technology is integrated into the product. Supportive technology is used to assist in the development, manufacturing, sales and distribution of the product. Enabling technologies are those that expand the capability of existing embodied and supportive technologies. Quite often, the embodied technologies result in product innovations, supportive result in process innovations and enabling result in procedure innovations. This is not a hard and fast rule, but only a tendency.

Competition provides the “clash” in the market. Again, we find it useful to consider three different types of competition – direct, indirect and structural. Direct competitors are providing the same function you do in the same way. Indirect competitors are providing the same function in a different way. And, structural competition is trying to do away with the need for the function you provide. Consider automobiles. There are many different companies providing a plethora of different types of automobiles. These are direct competitors. However, the function being provided, among other things, is transporting people. Airlines, buses, trains and ships also provide that same function but in a different manner. They are indirect competitors. The Internet and videoconferencing sometimes does away with the need for people to travel. They are structural competitors. Structural competitors usually provide breakthrough innovation within the context of the existing market. Indirect competitors are either distinctive of breakthrough innovators, again within the context of the market. And, direct competitors are usually incremental or distinctive innovators.

An organization that has the appropriate innovation profile has probably integrated all of these elements to synthesize a correct market innovation profile. This innovation profile will represent the potential for innovation within the market. To determine the innovation profile appropriate for the organization, the organization must consider its own capability and capacity for innovation.

Furthermore, this market innovation profile is temporal. It will change with time. But, that’s another story.

Paul Schumann

2004-03-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

Innovation Profile

You are invited to participate in a survey of innovation profiles. For your participation, you will receive a free innovation profile for the organization you described and a copy of the overall results of the survey. Go to Innovation Profile Survey.

There are two descriptors of innovation – nature and class. Nature describes what the innovation affects – product, process or procedure. And class describes haw large the departure of the innovation is from what existed before – incremental, distinctive or breakthrough. A product innovation is a change in how things interact with other things. A process innovation is a change in how people interact with things. And, procedure innovations are changes in how people interact with people. A breakthrough innovation is a radical change form the past. A breakthrough innovation changes the paradigm. It can result in the proliferation of many distinctive and incremental innovations. A distinctive innovation is like the breakthrough only different. A distinctive innovation still works within the paradigm created by the breakthrough. Incremental innovations are small changes to distinctive innovations.

When, these two different descriptors of innovation are combined in a matrix, nine different types of innovation can be described from incremental procedure to breakthrough product innovations. The innovation profile is a pattern of these nine different types of innovation. An innovation profile represents the innovation tendencies of an organization. It is not absolute, but relative and it does not describe how many innovations the organization will create.

What does an innovation profile indicate about an organization? If the pattern of innovation indicated in the innovation profile reflects what the market wants, then the organization is likely to be effective. If the pattern of innovation in the innovation profile is sharply focused, i.e., focused on a few of the nine different types of innovation, the organization is likely to be efficient. If it has a broad distribution of innovation types, it is likely to be inefficient. If the market has a broad distribution of innovation requirements, then a strategy of meeting only some of these needs may be more efficient.

If the innovation profile is not what the market requires, then an innovation road map is required, i.e., how to change the organization, the steps to be taken, in order the change the innovation profile.

It is the resources of the organization and the organization’s enablers that determine how innovative the organization can be. But, that’s another story I’ll leave that to later.

In addition to this blog, we will be writing about these aspects of innovation in our web-based magazine – The Innovation Road Map. Send me an e-mail and I’ll send you instructions on how to view the first edition free.

Paul Schumann

2004-02-23T08:46:00.000-08:00

Innovation Road Map

Innovation is a journey. Every innovation has a history and a future. It also has a present and our role is to help innovation have the brightest future it can, depending upon its history and the ever shifting market and organizational environments.

There are seven stages in the development of innovation. Most innovations falter somewhere on the journey from ideation to social or economic impact. At any moment in time on this journey there are two road maps that must be developed. The first is the market road map for innovation - what are the alternate paths to take advantage of the opportunities (and avoid the threats) created by the demographic, sociopolitical, technological and economic driving forces for change, delight customers, satisfy stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage. The second is the organizational development road map for innovation - the alternate paths that the organization could take to be able to produce the innovations required by the market road map. The combination is the innovation road map. The engine that drives this journey is the interaction of creativity, strategy and leadership.

Our new, web based publication, The Innovation Road Map Magazine is a work in progress, as we examine all of the elements described in the above paragraphs from different points of view. Subsequent editions will have more articles and a broader perspective. We welcome your participation in this ongoing conversation by submitting articles, book reviews or comments to me via e-mail. To read the current edition of the magazine, send an e-mail requesting an ID and password.

Paul Schumann

2004-02-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

The Anorexic Organization

It seems to us like the spiral has turned and innovation is once more coming back into people's consciousness.

In truth, after all the lean - mean - fighting machine strategy and the resulting downsizing, cutbacks, budget crunches, retirement binges, out-sourcing and stockholder value manipulations, it's the only thing left to improve productivity. And, guess what, innovation is really hard work.

(Innovation can reduce cost as well without the surgery. It can make people more productive enabling more revenue generating projects.)

Cost reduction (at all costs) without innovation can become almost like a disease - anorexia. Once addicted to it, it's hard to change behavior. And, like the anorexic, if it goes on too long, there is too much damage to the internal organs for recovery. We think many organizations will not make it.

Innovation can create real wealth. Cost cutting temporarily redistributes it.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2004-02-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

How We Invest Our Time

A recent Wall Street Journal article, "Buddy, Can You Spare Some Time?" (WSJ 1/26/04) discussed how Americans spend their time. We spend about 53 hours per week working, 48 hours sleeping, 34 hours per week watching TV, over 18 hours per week listening to radio, about 10 to 12 hours per week each on things like exercise & sports, transit, caring for children & pets, and worship, between 1 and 4 hours per each on things like talking on the phone, listening to recorded music, reading the daily newspaper, reading magazines, reading books, watching videos, playing video games and being on the Internet.

Several observations. First, the total is over 20% more than the total hours per week there is. While, this is probably caused by combining several different and independent studies, it indicates why we may feel there is not enough time. There isn't!

Second, we're spending a lot of time at work and I think in general feeling that we are accomplishing less - certainly less for ourselves.

Third, we still watch a lot of TV - 20% of our total time, 28% of our waking hours and 50% of our non-working non-sleeping time. And, the amount of TV we watch has grown by 13% since 1996. At the same time, our work hours have increased by 10%.

Fourth, we are switching from broadcast to cable & satellite TV. Broadcast TV has dropped by 27% since 1996 while cable & satellite has grown by 73%.

In a separate article published in TV Guide, research by Phase One Communications showed that in the 1980's network TV showed 9.5 minutes of commercials in one hour. In the 1990s, that increased to 12.7. Now, it's 17.3 minutes of commercials per hour - that's almost 30% of the viewing time is spent looking at commercials.

To me these data speak for a need for innovation. How do we innovate at work so that we improve productivity, take less of our time and make work more meaningful? What are we looking for that we spend so much time watching TV? Are there other innovative ways to meet that need that take up less time? Instead of just shouting louder and longer in our commercials, is there a way to innovate that makes them more effective and efficient? Are commercials the most effective and efficient way to drive our consumer driven economy? Or, are there others innovative ways to pay for what we want in entertainment in our homes that is more time and cost effective?

Paul Schumann

2004-01-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

Bird Strategy

The birds compete for the pieces of cracker thrown upon the ground by the Asian family next to me. The pigeons try unsuccessfully to eat the cracker bits. Too big to swallow whole and too tough for their beaks to crack, they pick them up, shake them, and toss them to the ground. Strutting from crumb to crumb, their pretense is haughty, but their actions are pathetic.

A sparrow joins the assemblage. Darting quickly among the slow-moving pigeons, the sparrow deftly seizes the cracker pieces, and with its small sharp beak at one of the corners or along the edges, it breaks the cracker into the small pieces it can eat. In an instant, one cracker piece is disposed of, and the sparrow moves on to the other pieces the pigeons still toss around with no effect. The sparrow with its speed, small beak, and strategy is eating the pigeons' lunch.

The pigeons notice that there are a few crumbs left by the sparrow as it broke the cracker pieces apart. With typical bobbing head motions, the pigeons deftly finish off what the sparrow has left.

A western jay, smaller than the pigeons but bigger than the sparrow and very aggressive, streaks in from nowhere, picks up one of the large pieces, and flies elsewhere to eat. Momentarily, the intruder has disrupted the scenario. But, quickly, the sparrow and pigeons resume their roles.

Leadership in a market does not necessarily mean that you have the largest market share, or
have the highest revenue, although those may follow. Leadership in a market means establishing the "rules of the game" by which competition is "played." Sometimes, it means establishing the shape and size of the playing field.

The crumbs have been thrown upon the ground. The pigeons are only good for cleaning up. The sparrows have been able to develop niche markets, fragmenting and further defining the markets so that they can be attacked.
But, beware the western jays that have also seen the opportunity and are swooping in to take the prizes home.

Who will define your market?

Paul Schumann

2004-01-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

Regarding Apples and Oranges on the Topic of Innovation

'Is there such thing as 'heedless reverence for innovation'?

Chuck Frey at Innovation Tools has provided an excellent review (12/19/03) of Carleen Hawn's article profiling Apple Computer in the December 2003 issue of Fast Company.

Apple's obsession with breakthrough product innovations has led to several product failures and less than stellar market share in their other more successful product lines. Hawn, reviewing Apple, Xerox and Polaroid as examples concludes that not all innovation is beneficial to organizations: "With such examples as Apple in mind a number of skeptics are beginning to ask whether our heedless reverence for innovation is blinding us to its limits, misuse and risk." The article goes on to point out that process and business model innovations have recently produced greater success in the market in some industries.

Innovation has two dimensions -- class and nature. Class is an indicator of the significance of the change -- incremental, distinctive and breakthrough. Nature is an indicator of the where the innovation emanates -- product, process and procedure. The combination of these two dimensions creates a matrix of nine different kinds of innovation. For a given organization, a unique pattern of innovation meets customer needs and provides competitive differentiation. This pattern of innovation also determines the company's profitability and ultimately shareholder value. A business model is a specific pattern of innovation (e.g., class/nature). And, this pattern of innovation is time sensitive. An innovation pattern that is successful today may not be successful tomorrow.

Dell's business model has a small component of product innovation (incremental and distinctive) and a large component of process and procedure innovation (distinctive and breakthrough). On the other hand Apple's business model is largely breakthrough product innovation with little emphasis on process or procedural innovation. Both business models have a role to play in the industry.

If everyone focused on the same kind of business models where would the great new breakthrough products come from? You can no more force Apple to become a Dell (remember they tried!), than force Dell to become an Apple (they did think about it, but backed away). Both are successful innovators in their own way.

Organizations that consistently produce breakthrough innovations provide a useful service to their industry and society. Why must they be criticized and maligned doing what they do?

We are wrongly measuring everything by economic value add, when we don't have any real clue as to what the real value is to a breakthrough product innovation until it has been around a long while. The real issue is how to reward businesses for coming up with the next breakthrough product innovation.

Click here to read Chuck Frey's review

Click here to read Carleen Hawn's article

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2004-01-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

Organizational Beliefs

"IBM sent a holiday chill through its U.S. employees with plans to ship thousands of high-paying white-collar jobs overseas to lower-paid foreign workers."
Bob Herbert, The New York Times

Herbert reports that people in IBM are upset and angry. "They (IBM) acknowledged the danger of political backlash, but said it was essential to step up the practice. 'Our competitors are doing it, and we have to do it,' said Tom Lynch, IBM's director for global employee relations."

"Referring to employees who may be affected by the plans, he (an IBM spokesman) said, 'We deal with them as they need to know.' "

"Mention IBM and the image of a solid corporation comes to mind - a technology pioneer that forged a special bond with its employees who proudly declared themselves 'True Blue'. In the 1970s and 1980s, many of these employees who worked in the so-called 'clean rooms', where they built microchips and hard drives. These were boom times for IBM. Clean rooms ran round the clock, feeding the demands of the computer revolution. But, a few years ago, some clean room veterans noticed that colleagues were coming down with cancers - rare cancers - at surprisingly early ages. One IBM team had a cancer rate of 80 percent. At about the same time, some children born to IBM families were delivered with terrible birth defects. IBM declined an interview with 60 Minutes II. But some IBM workers say that the company's clean rooms were a dirty secret. And what shocks them even more is just how much Big Blue knew."
60 Minutes II
60 Minutes II

"This, then is my thesis: I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next, I believe that the single most important factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And, finally, I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life."
Thomas Watson, Jr.
A Business and its Beliefs

And, what were those beliefs delineated by Thomas Watson, Jr., son of IBM's founder and then Chairman of IBM?

1. Respect for the individual
2. Best possible customer service
3. Superior performance from individuals

I know that these beliefs are long gone from the IBM culture, but I have never had that point driven home to me more that the two articles quoted above. The IBM spokesman quoted in Herbert's article showed a real disrespect to IBM employees who may be affected by IBM's decisions. And, whether IBM knew about the cancer risks without telling its employees or not, the very fact that even the suggestion has surfaced is a clear indication how far IBM has moved from the original belief system.

Watson was writing in 1963, about 48 years after the formation of the company. He remained optimistic, "IBM is still very much the same company it has always been and we intend it shall always be. For while everything else has altered, our beliefs remain unchanged."

Paul Schumann

2004-01-07T11:27:00.000-08:00

Focusing Innovation Programs

Business history is replete with examples of organizations that have expended tremendous efforts on innovation programs that when brought to fruition had little direct value in the marketplace. The failure of Polaroid's "instant movie camera" in competition with video cameras, the limited success of Kodak's disc camera when it had to compete with improved electronic 35mm photography, the ill-fated venture of Exxon into the world of office machines, and Xerox's office automation system illustrate the fact that poorly conceived innovation projects lead to poor results. In fact, the improper focusing of innovation programs can be almost as dangerous to an organization as a "sit still" innovation policy.

Polaroid's instant movie camera was an incorrect response to a correctly understood customer need. Where Polaroid failed was in letting the response be driven by internal capability and not understanding competitive response and technological capability. Since they had instant film technology, it was natural for them to build on it. However, video technology was improving too quickly, and the window of opportunity closed before Polaroid could improve instant movie film technology to the point of customer acceptability.

The failure of Kodak's disc camera was slightly different. Again, the market demand for simple, quality photographs was understood. The failure was in the strategy Kodak chose to take advantage of the opportunity. Kodak's primary business is film. Through the disc camera, they were attempting to develop proprietary film technology that would give them an advantage over competitors like Fuji. They also failed to understand the impact of the integration of electronic circuitry onto chips. This made the automatic 35mm camera a reality, bringing a higher-quality image to the mass market.

Exxon's mid-1970s venture into word processors was doomed by a failure in the understanding of the technology. Exxon correctly identified office automation as a significant opportunity. Also, they correctly understood that they shouldn't attempt to develop a product internally. In purchasing Vydec, they misjudged how fast the technology was going to move and what it would take to stay in the game. In addition, the culture of a petroleum company and that of a word processor company are and need to be vastly different. The cultures were too different for the venture to last.

Xerox's first office automation system effort was based on a misjudgment of the time frame of the opportunity. They correctly understood that office automation was a significant opportunity, but they misjudged how fast the opportunity was going to develop. They became technology and innovation driven. They wanted to be advanced and different. As a result, their concepts and technologies were years ahead of the market; many are now being utilized by successful companies.

On the other hand, many organizations have better understood the overall market and the environmental driving forces and have succeeded by targeting their innovative efforts more effectively. The development of aspartame by the NutraSweet Company, of the Walkman by Sony, and of a truly laptop computer by Compaq illustrate how product innovations can be successful. The commitment of Motorola, Black & Decker, and Ford to improved production processes has provided each with markedly enhanced competitive positions, while the skyrocketing growth of Dell Computers and Wal-Mart shows that new procedural approaches can also produce impressive results.

The point is that innovation effort is valuable if it is properly targeted. Contrary to the emerging opinion that incremental innovation in manufacturing processes is a panacea for all industries, the truth is that there is no innovation strategy that is appropriate for all companies in all situations. What is needed is a method for effectively analyzing the overall environment in which an organization operates, and for developing an innovation program that matches the needs of the customers, the realities of technological progress, the impact of competition, the desires of stakeholders and the capabilities & capacities of the organization.

Innovation in products and services, in processes and in operational procedures is essential to the success of any organization. Whether the innovation is incremental, distinctive, or breakthrough should be determined by the future needs of the market. Effective targeting must include analysis of developing customer needs, emerging technologies, the total competitive environment, internal capabilities, and basic organizational goals. An efficient organization has both formal and informal mechanisms to properly align these elements and convert the analyses into productive innovation programs.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-12-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

Some Thoughts on Innovation

"Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs."
Peter Drucker

Innovation in marketing is also essential. Therefore business has only one basic function - innovation. Innovation is the basis of all competitive advantage: the means by which organizations anticipate and fill customer needs and the method by which organizations utilize people and technology.

Innovation either endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth or creates a new resource. In an organization, resources are capital, people, knowledge, facilities & equipment, and strategic relationships.

Innovation is the process of implementing new ideas, of turning creative concepts into realities. Innovation can manifest itself as new, different or improved:

Products

Processes

Procedures

Innovation can cause change or it can exploit change; systematic innovation which exploits change is generally the most effective.

Systematic, purposeful innovation will create an effective and efficient organization. Systematic, purposeful innovation begins by identifying the changes occurring in a market. This is followed by understanding the opportunities and threats that will result from these changes, developing a strategy to take advantage of the opportunity and avoiding or minimizing threats, assessing the organization's capability to implement the strategy, and developing an organization which can effectively and efficiently innovate.

If this systematic, purposeful innovation process is followed, the organization will benefit by becoming market driven. It will do what is appropriate for the market and it will anticipate the market. As a result, the organization will become more effective and efficient. Society will benefit because the organizations within it that create wealth, create jobs and meet societal needs will be more sharply focused on the proper targets.

The purpose of business is innovation, which, when properly focused, creates wealth as defined in the broadest sense. The creation of wealth benefits all.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-12-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

Innovation Strategy: Creating Competitive Advantage ... for Awhile

An innovation strategy is only good for a finite amount of time. One of the worst mistakes an organization can make is to assume that because an innovation strategy has been successful it will always be successful. In reality, the environment shifts -- customers' needs change, competition gets smarter, technologies improve, and the organization itself evolves -- and over time the strategy becomes obsolete. Time is relative. It depends upon the dynamics of the industry.

An innovation strategy is a complex pattern as represented by the innovation map. There are nine different types of innovation and therefore at least nine different principal foci of strategic intent, and there are even more complex secondary and tertiary patterns. The innovation map is a powerful tool for creating and depicting innovation strategies.

Once an innovation strategy has been selected, there is the establishment of a competitive advantage and an immediate vulnerability. On the competitive battlefield, an innovation strategy is like a decision to attack. Each movement creates the opportunity for a response. Each innovation strategy has included within it the seeds of its own destruction. This implies that strategies should be living concepts that link markets, organizational capabilities, business objectives, and stakeholder desires.

An innovation roadmap is the path an organization takes to move from one pattern of innovation to another. The creation of an innovation roadmap requires the integration of strategy, resources, enablers and culture.

Donna Prestwood & Paul Schumann

2003-11-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

Is Creativity Possible?
(As unlikely as it may seem, this is a true story.)

Is there any hope?

I was forced, once again, to examine this question on my way to the Austin airport. I was traveling to IBM Japan in Yamoto, Tokyo, and Yasu to lecture on creativity, innovation, and professionalism.

The taxi driver, reminiscent of those in large, northeastern seaboard cities, knew everything. He asked me who I worked for and what I did. After I told him that one of the things I did was to teach creativity and innovation, he told me that he thought what I was trying to do wasn't possible.

He said that creativity within a corporation wasn't needed and certainly wasn't wanted; that creativity and control were mutually exclusive capabilities. Numerous cases have proven, he thought, that the creative person can't exist within the bureaucratic structure of a large company. "Steve Jobs, Steinmetz, and Edison," he expounded," would not have been able to create the things they did in a large successful company. Look, even Jobs couldn't exist in his own company after he created it!"

I had been rushing for several days, perhaps even weeks, trying to juggle a hectic travel schedule and many assignments in Austin to complete. Travel for two weeks to Japan, at least for me, is a stressful event, even as pleasant as the lectures may be. There are many things to consider before dropping into an Asian culture 8,400 miles from Austin, even if it has been westernized. The last thing I wanted to do on my way to the airport was to defend my life's work.

"Big businesses thrive in times of stability," the taxi driver continued. "Government has loosened the controls now so that more change is possible. Big companies can't respond to the change! Look at the top one hundred companies of a hundred years ago", he continued, "how many of them are still in the top 100? Even companies of the Fortune 500 of the 1950's haven't fared well." He adjusted his examples as he looked in the rear view mirror and estimated my age. "Even you would remember those companies. You might wonder, vaguely remembering their names, what happened to them?"

I really wasn't interested in engaging in a meaningful conversation but I was beginning to feel intimidated by this taxi driver. I wondered if he had seen my presentation on Integrating Innovation Into Strategic Planning where I begin with exactly the point he was making. "No one is safe", I assert, using the fallout statistics of the Forties 100 and the Fortune 500 companies.

I nodded assent, and agreed with the cab driver's analysis. He continued, not giving me a chance to add anything to the discussion.

"Big companies don't even want creative people," he asserted. "They're too different. They don't fit in. You can tell a creative person by their characteristics," he continued. "Creative people are iconoclasts. If you want to find out if someone is creative or not, look to see how he, or she, spends their leisure time. If they're doing things differently, the unusual twist, then they're probably creative."

Now baited to the point of responding, I told him that there were no characteristics that were deterministic of creative ability. "People are creative in a variety of different ways, and there are no characteristics that enable predetermination," I replied.

He wasn't about to buy this.

"Not everyone is creative," he stated categorically. "It's a characteristic you're born with. It's determined by your genetics and your early experiences in life. Only under extreme duress affecting your basic functions, the lower Maslow levels, like survival, can most people be creative," he stated bluntly.

Now I really began to wonder. Was this a setup? Did someone, knowing that I would call a cab to go to the airport, put this person in my life? I began to think of Candid Camera. Was Allen Funt lurking in the trunk? So contrary to my philosophy and understanding of people, and organization management, were this cab driver's views that I knew it was hopeless, in the remaining minutes or so to get to the airport, to change his views.

Nevertheless I attempted a retort. "Everyone is creative," I said. "They were born that way. It's what distinguishes humans from other animals. Everyone is creative in their own way. We just have to learn to tap the creative ability we have."

The cab driver certainly wasn't buying in to my assertions. He went back to a discussion of how successful, large companies operate. "Small companies create all the new jobs," he explained. "Large companies just keep things the same." "As a matter of fact," he said, "large companies don't really want creative people. They will just reduce the productivity of the bureaucracy. Seems to me," he con-cluded, "that you really can't teach creativity, and even if you could, I can't understand why a company would want it taught."

Mercifully we had arrived at the airport. I paid my fare and rushed to get away from this cab driver. I had to be on time, and produc-tive. I had schedules to meet. People depend-ing upon me. I couldn't take a hike to the west coast, board a freighter for Japan, stop along the way, and work for my passage as the cab driver had suggested a creative person would do. It was 8 a.m. on Thursday, and by 2 p.m. on Friday (actually Thursday because of the date line), I would be in Japan.

Is there any hope? Are we destined to at-tempt to perpetually improve our productivity by efficiencies of scale, control of capital and expense, and reduction of risk? Are we going to continually drop in the eyes of Ameri-can executives? Or, are we going to find ways to be creatively productive? Can we break through the traditions of our thinking that limit the vision of our accomplishments?

Is there any hope? Of course! You are the hope. You are the greatest resource that any organization has.

We are not predestined to anything, suc-cess or failure. We have the future in our hands. If we can, collectively, figure out how to integrate creative productivity into our work and our organizational behavior, we will be ever more successful in the future than we have been in the past.

Is there any hope? Can you be creative and work for an organization? The answer to this question, the answer you have in your mind, the one you believe to be true, will determine your fu-ture and that of our country.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Paul Schumann

2003-11-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

Drowning in a Sea of Information

It seems that two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems estimated that people generated 5 million terabytes of information last year (San Jose Mercury News, 10/29/03). According to their study, that's double the amount generated in 2002. They estimated that in 2002 we created 800 megabytes of information per person, enough to fill 30 books. According to Hal Varian, one of the researchers, "We're drowning in a sea of information. The conclusion from an unnamed wire service reporter was, "The moral of the story? Delete, delete, delete."

It is true that we live in a vast sea of information. And to every generation we're sure it seemed like it was too much to handle. Without context, models and yes, even paradigms, that vast sea of information is just noise. An older person once told one of us that Bach just sounded like noise to her. Yet to us Bach's music is beautiful, sometimes even transcendently so. On the other hand, when we listen to much of youth's popular music of today, it just sounds like noise. It all has to do with context, models, paradigms and values.

Deleting the information is not the answer, at least not the answer that moves us forward. Progress is made by building on the information created by others and combining with our new information.

Information comes in four forms - noise, data, knowledge and wisdom. The goal is to extract data from the noise, transform that data into knowledge and from the knowledge, create wisdom. Each step along the way requires human creativity. This pyramid of information and our human creativity can use some help. We need better tools, models and paradigms of work to enable us to reach the hyper productivity promise of the information technologies. Yet we seem to be stuck, trying to use a hammer on every problem as if the problem was a nail.

Our advice, "Create and elevate."

We'd welcome comments from you about real advances that aid every day work in escalating information from noise to data to knowledge to wisdom (beyond word processors, spread sheets, presentations, data bases etc). Write us at comments@theinnovationroadmap.com.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-11-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

Biotech Bubble

We're blowing another bubble that is almost sure to burst. The media, money, state and city governments are chasing trendy biotech. "Smell the hype in almost every state. Economic development officials are certifiably mad," writes Al Lewis, The Denver Post, in a syndicated column a few days ago.

We remember the dot com bubble only a few years ago when you couldn't get money or media attention unless it was a dot com. It seemed like all the money went into these startups. Now you can't get any money because so much was lost in that bubble and the companies remaining are requiring continued investments to keep them going.

Karen Bernstein, Co-founder of BioCentury Publications is quoted by Lewis as saying "The bigger the bull market, the bigger the bear market that follows. I don't know if there is anyway to escape the cycle." Of course there is but we don't seem to have the patience for it. We can escape this vicious cycle by looking to the future, investing in proportion to the state of development of the technology and making sure that we've got the resources and the culture to support the long-term development.

Technology takes a long time to mature. Look at all the technologies that are driving a part of our economy now - the Internet, computers, telephones, satellites, wireless, fiber optics, etc. They're all more that 40 years old. And, we're still not sure that we're getting the payback at the national economy level for all of our investment in those technologies.

Some economists have suggested that it takes about 75 years for a technology to mature. The first twenty-five years, there is no impact on our productivity. The second twenty-five years, there is actually a negative impact on the economy as we invest in the diffusion of the technology and all the changes that accompany the new technology. It's in the last twenty-five years as technology experiences widespread proliferation that the increases in productivity are felt in the national economy.

To keep away from the bubble, we should adapt a balanced approach. In order to get productivity out of the information technologies, we should be investing and searching for innovations that enhance productive use of information. This requires a broader definition of innovation that just technology. It requires innovation in processes and procedures - the way we work, down to the fundamental definition of what work is.

In order to have technologies for the future, we need to invest in the new technologies now, but in proportion to what can reasonably be expected of them without being guided by short-term gains, or forcing developers to sell commercialization of nascent technologies. "Once the scent of IPOs hits the air, momentum investors and market manipulators will follow" writes Lewis.

If the goal is economic productivity, you have to ask yourself the question "How is biotech going to be the cornerstone of an economy - like steam and electricity was and information technology may be?" It seems to us that if economic productivity is the goal, biotech, nanotech and information technologies have to merge in someway - a formidable challenge.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-11-03T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Evils of EVA
The Myth of Shareholder Value and Its Relationship to Innovation

EVA or Economic Value Added is touted as a measure of the true economic performance of a company and a strategy for creating shareholder wealth. EVA measures the residual wealth of a company when its cost of capital is deducted from its operating profit.

EVA = Net Operating Profit After Taxes (NOPAT) - Cost of Capital

Stern & Shiely, fathers of EVA, in their book The EVA Challenge, describe EVA in the following way. "Economic Value Added is a measure of the true economic performance of a company and a strategy for creating shareholder wealth. It is also a method of changing corporate priorities and behavior throughout a company, right down to the shop floor. Properly implemented, EVA frees the measurement of corporate performance from the vagaries of accounting conventions and aligns the interest of managers with those of shareholders, ending a decades long conflict of interest."

When we first learned about EVA in the mid-1990s, we immediately became alarmed because of its negative impact on innovation and the potential for abuse. A rationalization of a corporation from executives to all employees and the supporting infrastructure, processes and culture on the basis of EVA principles would inherently reduce the emphasis on innovation. EVA based measurements and incentives explicitly discourage risk taking and focus on today's profit while minimizing the capital invested. EVA is not about the future and innovation is always about the future, so the conflict is inherent.

Moreover, innovation in a corporation is not the only thing that suffers when the EVA concepts are embraced and abused. In addition organizations that wholeheartedly applied EVA have not demonstrated long term financial performance gains. In 2001 Marvin Runyon, Postmaster General, stated, "Joel Stern know this subject matter better than anyone. He adapted EVA so that we could use it to incent management at the United States Postal Service to greatly improve performance. We stopped losing billions and started turning profits." Yet, in 2002 ABC News reported that a "newly released federal audit showed the postal service used questionable bookkeeping analysis to change the perception of its performance." The audit showed that 80,000 postal managers received $805 million in bonuses while the service was losing $2 billion over the last two years. ABC News continued, "when it lost $2 billion between 1998 and 2000 officials found it hard to justify bonuses, so postal executives decided to find a way." Using EVA the executives turned the $2 billion loss into a $1.7 billion gain.

Even Coca Cola, an early adopter of EVA, has had difficulties. Responsible Wealth reported that "Although Coca Cola stock lost 22% of its value in 2001 (compared to a 12% loss for the S&P 500), and 6,000 Coca Cola employees (21% of the company's workforce) were laid off just a year earlier, Coca Cola CEO Doug Daft enjoyed a 47% compensation increase in 2001, to more than $74 million."

Al Ehrbar, author of EVA: The Real Key to Creating Wealth, writes "EVA is the framework for complete financial management and incentive compensation system that can guide every decision a company makes ... that can transform corporate culture, that can improve the working lives of everyone in an organization by making them more successful, and can help them produce greater wealth for shareholders, customers, and themselves." As you can see from the previous paragraphs, EVA works in regard to "themselves".

The pressure to conform is tremendous. For example, listen to what C. B. Rogers, Jr., Chairman of Equifax stated in 1996, "At the monthly meetings, (of Equifax's 29 business units), we separate them (business unit managers) into value creators and value destroyers. You don't want to be a value destroyer. Its a terrible term, but that's what you are doing."

EVA focuses on shareholders. Shareholders are only one of the many groups that make up the stakeholders of an organization. We believe that any approach to wealth creation that fails to take into account the entire stakeholder universe of an organization is doomed. Moreover, a organization's strategy for wealth creation must incorporate three other elements: Opportunities/Threats in the Market; the Current Capabilities of the Organization; and its Capacity for Change.

A successful Innovation Roadmap will include all four elements!

Peter Drucker has written, "Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs."

We go even further, to state that innovation in marketing is also essential! Therefore business has only one basic function -- Innovation.

Innovation is the basis of all competitive advantage: the means by which organizations anticipate and fill customer needs and the method by which organizations utilize technology.

Innovation either endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth or it creates a new resource.

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-10-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

Back to the Future of Innovation?

Are we about to go back to innovation as our economic salvation or will we continue our anorexic trends to oblivion?

U. S. corporations are anorexic. They are addicted to cost reduction, because they know it is the one thing they can control. Important to understand are the facts that this cost reduction is not the result of innovation, but rather the results of outsourcing (domestic & foreign), contract work, part-time work, downsizing, delayering, and replacing experienced and well paid employees with inexperienced and lower paid employees. This has resulted in:

- Since July 2000, 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost
- The IEEE reports that the U.S. lost 560,000 high tech jobs in 2001-2002
- New York Times reports that more than half of the manufactured goods that American's buy are made abroad, up from 31% in 1987
- Forbes predicts that by 2015 more than three million white collar jobs will be out sourced to other countries
- New York Times reports that the proportion of U.S. workforce employed in manufacturing has fallen to 11% from 30% in the mid 1960s
- In 2002 almost $1 trillion worth of foreign-produced manufactured goods were imported, much of this manufactured specifically for the U.S. market

Have we forgotten one of the basic tenants of the U.S. economy? That basic tenant is that innovation provided the productivity that allowed workers to be paid enough money to enabled them to purchase the very goods and services produced by the economy. For whatever you can say about Henry Ford, he deeply understood this tenant. His movement to rationalize the manufacturing process was to get the cost of the goods produced (an automobile) down to the point that the very people working on the manufacturing line could afford to purchase it. The successful implementation of a correct pattern of innovation (product, process and procedure; incremental, distinctive and breakthrough) resulted in lower cost, mass market acceptance and higher pay for the workers. That is a very different thought than what is currently driving the manufacturing industry.

Isn't it time we go back to this innovation driven future?

Isn't it the responsibility of a publicly chartered corporation to be responsible to all of its stakeholders not just to its stockholders?

We welcome your thoughts!

comments@theinnovationroadmap.com

Paul Schumann & Donna Prestwood

2003-08-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Innovation Road Map Travelogue. I will soon begin posting to this blog.

Updated weekly, I will attempt to reveal the innovation reality in today’s organizations. If you have comments, suggestions or responses to the comments in this journal, please e-mail me.

Paul Schumann
paul@theinnovationroadmap.com