I’m going to do a little reporting on Braintrust, a conference on knowledge management I attended last week. My experience of knowledge management as a field is that it seems to take two approaches. The first approach, the one that interests me most, is all about creating knowledge and working collaboratively and sustaining “communities of practice.” The second approach seems to be all about the nuts and bolts of getting knowledge out of the head of employee A and into the head of employee B, via intranets and software models and concepts for collaboration that seem just a short step above the old company suggestion box.
Keynote speaker Nancy Dixon spoke about the conflict between these two approaches in a talk about conversation. “You can’t give someone else your knowledge – every person recreates the knowledge they apply,” said she, and therein lies the conflict. Conversations are a preferred way to get knowledge shared, although they are not always as effective a way to share knowledge, because communication by conversation inherently also creates confusion. But -- along with that confusion, conversations also inherently create new meaning. When the same word means different things to different people; when the listener quickly interprets what’s being said against his or her own unquestioned inferences and worldview; when each mind in the conversation creates its own knowledge that’s slightly different from what the other minds involved in the conversation are understanding and creating -- these factors make sharing existing knowledge difficult. But they also lead to the creation of new knowledge.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Dixon’s talk was that her suggestion for making knowledge-sharing through conversation easier is also a suggestion that will make creating new knowledge through conversation easier as well. Her suggestion: Ask the "powerful question." Assume the other person has a reason for their conclusion that makes sense to them, because the knowledge that you want is not their conclusion but the reasoning for their conclusion. So you ask a “powerful question” meant to discover that reasoning.
Said Dixon: “The powerful question is, 'Help me understand your thinking, how did you reach that conclusion?' Each time the question is asked the language is slightly different, but what is the same is that you are asking for the other to let you in on the connections that exist in his/her own mind. What is so powerful is that it is the thinking behind other's conclusions that provide the needed in-depth understanding.”
Why is the “powerful question” also a useful concept for knowledge creation as well as sharing? Because it uncovers the connections that the other person has made that led them to create the knowledge they are sharing with you. Assuming you do the same and share your connections, then the pool of information from which connections can be made grows, including what I’d call “meta-connection” information – information about the logical framework from which connections can be made. All of this in turn increases the chances of inventive recombination.
Social networking and innovation is the subject of a Stanford Business School study that says "disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation." Study author Martin Ruef says weak ties "allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources...." His research shows that "entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties...are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network."
You may recall I posted before about how creative people have brains that are more open to outside stimuli (and are able to handle it, otherwise they would be creative but driven insane by the stimuli). So I'm not surprised to see this information.
I'm also reminded of a conversation I had with Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen. Hargadon calls 'innovation...a phenomenon of networks connected by 'technology brokers' - people or organizations that link isolated groups and industries to integrate previously unrelated viewpoints and technologies to resolve new problems."
It makes sense that innovative, entrepreneurial people would be those who see the value of weak social ties as a means of gathering, evaluating and sorting information about the world. This information, these social connections generate the stuff out of which inventive recombination happens.
Is there a social networking site out there yet that really taps into this? I've done Ryze, been invited to Friendster, been invited to orkut...but I haven't studied any of them all that closely. It would be interesting to see if there are specific features on any of these sites that make it possible for this kind of weak-tie networking, without pushing the social tie into a more explicit strong tie that's not as useful for entrepreneurship and innovation.
One absolutely fascinating talk was by Phil Fawcett, who’s a Technology Transfer Agent at Microsoft. Phil, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft (one assumes he probably doesn’t have to work anymore!) created this job and has grown it to the point where there’s a small staff of people helping him. His goal: Get research and product people to talk to each other. Right now, half of Microsoft ideas get into release. He’d like to increase that percentage so that the $7 billion Microsoft will invest in R&D in fiscal 2004 will be best used.
Phil says technoloy transfer is a fundamentally social process for managing key technology assets, and it’s a process that requires trust. Trust and risk must be balanced using communication processes. And this is where Phil comes in. Much of his talk was about how he fosters communication among his constituencies (researchers, product groups, senior management) to create a development environment suited to product-ready research.
One point that’s a little beside the point but still interesting: Phil says that for Microsoft researchers, failure isn’t fatal. At Microsoft, the real failure is not to document what you’ve learned from a failure.
Just in case you’re curious, here are some of the Nerd Herder Methods Phil says he uses at Microsoft:
More on Convergence: I’m going to write now about a session I didn’t actually attend (there were tough choices to make!), but I heard great feedback on it from several conference attendees. Also, the subject was trust, a topic crucial to innovation, and one we’ve discussed here before.
Jim Mikula and Ruth Ann Hattori led this session, and most of my comments here are based on their white paper, "Collaboration, Trust and Innovative Change," which was part of the session handouts. If you are concerned about the need for setting up a relationship of trust for a collaborative innovation venture, it’s well worth reading.
Basically, Mikula and Hattori spell out these four attributes of trust:
Individuals or companies are said to be “highly invested” if all four attributes of trust are present in their relationship. And, “this highly invested state is one necessary precondition for collaborative innovation.” Of course, whether or not these trust attributes are present in the relationship, or could be developed, is a matter of opinion. Mikula and Hattori are simply offering the suggestion that this opinion should be based on a careful assessment rather than gut instinct, and their framework offers a structure with which to make this assessment.
Another good point regarding trust assessments: they are domain-specific. Their example: You may trust your organization’s controller with finances but you may not trust him or her to create an outstanding training class.
The theme of Convergence may have been innovation, but that’s not to say that everyone there was up on the latest innovations. Not only had many people I spoke to not heard of IdeaFlow, most had never heard of blogging, either!
But there was at least one other blogger there besides me and Joyce – Tom Asacker, author of The Four Sides of Sandbox Wisdom: Building Relationships In An Age of Chaos, Complexity, and Change, who was the Monday lunch keynote speaker. Tom’s blogged Convergence impressions, including photos (none of me!), are here.
“Innovation is how well you flow around the obstacles,” Tom told us, which reminded me of something I heard folksinger Chuck Pyle (best-known as the writer of “Jaded Lover”) say in a recent concert: “Life is short, but wide.”
UPDATE: I just found out that Imaginatik, featured in my first Convergence installment, has a blog too. Anybody else who was at Convergence have one? Let me know!
More conference notes and ruminations, this time on the talk “Innovating Space Using Innovation Space” by Jason Heredia of Turnstone (a division of Steelcase) and Tom Mulhern of Conifer Research, a Chicago-based ethnographic research company.
Steelcase’s research, some done in conjunction with Conifer, asks these questions: What kind of spaces enhance innovation, and what kind of space detracts from innovation? And, even better: Where does innovation live [in the workplace]? Answer: In the linkages between people.
And yes, this is the very territory that the social networking folks are working on. One way to look at social software would be, does the software allow for the right kind of linkages between people, the right kind of access to the space where innovation lives? In their talk, Tom and Jason set forth some “Principles of Innovation Space, and I include them here because I wonder if these same principles would apply to the “space” that a group creates/accesses by using social software, or if the entire model would be different. Here are the principles:
It seems to me that these would be excellent principles to apply to social software. But that’s not my field, so I’m totally open to comments there. And of course, if you talk about social software in terms of disruptive innovations, then at some point (perhaps already bubbling up now) there’ll be some kind of software that allows us to interact and work together in ways that we can’t even imagine yet. If it’s really disruptive, it will allow us to work together in ways that even its creator(s) didn’t imagine.
One other interesting thing I found out during Tom and Jason’s presentation: The material that’s best for group projects is actually that stuff I’ve always thought was called foam core but is really (so Tom says) fome cor. It’s better than easel pads or tacking things up on walls, because it allows you both to work in large format and to save your work while still in the large format.
So can a group accomplish with a wiki and a groupblog (such as this one) what they could accomplish with some fome cor/foam core and colored markers?
Finally, either Tom or Jason, I forget who, mentioned that the Steelcase site has a lot of information on space, design and workplace issues. They weren’t kidding. There I found an excellent Steelcase Workplace Report titled: "HotHouse Environments: Fostering Breakthrough Innovation," which presents the findings of two years of surveying more than 1,500 corporate executives, facilities managers, and design professionals from various industries on these questions: How can the workplace affect the way people work… and how satisfied they are? What keeps them from sharing information and being collaborative?” Steelcase also has an e-zine called 360, where I found this article based on the HotHouse research: "Unleashing Hidden Creativity: Does Place Matter?". Both are worth reading.
Let’s just get this straight upfront: I am not a real-time conference-blogging demon! For that reason I’m just now getting around to blogging my notes from last week’s Innovation Convergence. But what I lack in speed I hope to make up for in value! I’ve got lots of notes and impressions to share.
First, my overall main impression was that Capital I-Innovation has arrived. Last year’s Convergence had just 70 attendees. This year there were 220, and new conferences on the subject are springing up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm, including this December’s Return on Innovation, at which IdeaFlow contributors Joyce Wycoff and John Wolpert will both be speakers.
Convergence’s very first keynote speaker, Mark Turrell of Imaginatik, referenced a famous (in innovation circles, anyway) Gary Hamel quote that seems to be on its way to becoming reality: “Innovation must become what quality was 20 years ago.”
Turrell sounded another common theme in his keynote, “Measuring the Financial Impact of Innovation: Calculating Your Innovation Gap.” That common theme was to make a differentiation between innovation and creativity, and pretty much every speaker I heard did this. Boiled down to the basics, the difference seemed to be that innovation is a process and creativity is not. Devotees of a process approach to creativity might beg to differ, but for the purposes of this conference, the distinction allowed most speakers a productive platform from which to dive into their take on the innovation process.
My notes on Turrell’s innovation/creativity definitions: Innovation’s a much more corporate thing than creativity, much more of a process. People who don’t get creativity are the ones who control the budgets, the ones you must convince to fund innovation.
Innovation is the process of handling new things; creativity is a one-off, invention is a one-off. Invention and creativity are part of the innovation process.
The main point of his talk was to expound on IOI, or the financial Impact of Innovation. He defined this as the proportion of current and future revenue and profit that is dependent on the company’s ability to innovate, and defined IOI components as revenue growth, revenue protection, productivity, and disruptive change (unplanned activities, or risk).
He then said the innovation gap is the difference between the target level of innovation (IOI) and the current innovation capacity, which is based on the ability of a firm to handle new things.
Idea management is important, because too many new ideas block the pipeline. You could expect him to say that, since Imaginatik is in the idea-management business, but this was another theme that was sounded by many speakers, including the other opening-day keynote, Dr. George Land of the Farsight Group.
First, Land's innovation/creativity definitions: At the beginning of his talk, “A Systems Process for Innovation,” he defined innovation as “organized creativity.”
Land’s Advanced Innovation Method is a process for bringing innovation to a corporation. Most important is the first part, determining what strategic innovation would be for the company. Seventy percent of time and budget should go to the first three steps, he says, which doesn’t even get you to the generating concepts stage. The important first three steps encompass alignment, an innovation audit, and a determination of an innovation strategy. A big part of this is determining internal and external customers’ “deep needs” – what does the customer really want or need in the future? Land says his company actually puts a large number of resources into training a client company’s customers in creativity to get them to articulate their needs. I of course found this fascinating in light of our own consumer-based approach, which has been discussed here recently.
And, connecting to another discussion we’ve been having here lately, this time on the Copyright Wars, Land dropped something of a bombshell early on in his speech by declaring that “product innovations are very easy to copy, and patents are an invitation to a lawsuit.” Sure enough, the first question in the following Q&A was about this assertion. Land explained further: Patents are very easy to go around. The issue is a flow of innovation, and what’s in the pipeline to develop after what you’ve got now has been copied. Always assume you’re going to get copied, and try to discover where you can innovate that it will be invisible. Developing intellectual assets – documented current and past knowledge that can lead to the creation of new knowledge through systematic innovation -- is better than developing IP, which he defined as “knowledge with legal ownership.”
According to Land, only 15% of corporate innovation comes from R&D departments, so that’s not the most important place to be innovative in a corporation. The companies most successful at innovation are stealthily innovating their process, distribution, or some other aspect that’s hard for competitors to grasp and copy.
But in any case, he echoed Turrell by saying, “don’t bust the dam of ideas until you’ve got somewhere for the water to go. Innovation efforts must be targeted or they create chaos. It’s a duty and an obligation NOT to collect too many ideas, to be ruthless with idea management.”
Finally, and this is another theme that was echoed over and over again: The CEO must drive innovation, and financial gap analysis is essential on the front end. You must arm yourself with the facts. Land also felt that a company should have an EVP or C-level innovation executive heading an innovation department that would integrate all functions – marketing, technology, business development, etc. And a company’s biggest barriers to innovation, in his view, are lack of leadership to drive innovation, and lack of strategic alignment regarding innovation.
And this was just the first part of the first day!!! More to come.
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