Fascinating article in Fortune -- The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy -- says current technology empowers amateur tinkerers in ways that were just not possible not so very long ago, breaking down the user/maker divide. Featuring this quote from Eric von Hippel:
"What’s happened is a tremendous change in awareness," says Eric von Hippel... "Conventional wisdom is so strong [in business] about find-a-need-and-fill-it: ‘We’re the manufacturers; we design products; we ask users what they need; we do it.’ That has begun to crack."
People have always invented things. But, the article points out, now there are blogs where inventors can solicit real-time feedback on their designs and plans, and web-fueled hookups between basement inventors and Chinese factories that will manufacture their products. Even Microsoft is getting in on this market with Visual Studio Express ("designed to bring coding to the masses").
Also cited in the article -- new Make magazine, which has a very cool blog that reads like a rolling catalog of project ideas, project successes, and odd combos such as bracelets made of sterling silver and beer cans, and a real, playable harpsichord made of Legos. Make just launched as a quarterly and was expected to garner about 10,000 subs. After four months it has 25,000.
Amateurs are mostly inventing for the love of it -- says one in the Fortune article, ""My main goal is not to lose my house....You put it on the line and you want to be rewarded. But when it comes down to it, I just don’t want to go broke."
Some amateurs may not have big-time economic aspirations, but good ideas executed well have a way of coming to the attention of people/companies who do. I predict that it won't be long before savvy companies will start hanging round the Make blog and other such sources, looking for the next big thing or inspiration that might lead them to it.
So where are the blogs that cover amateur tinkering, or blogs by amateur tinkerers? Send me links if you know of any. I'm enthusiastic about this distributed-creativity trend, and I'll make a list and post it.
This past Monday the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life released the study Artists, Musicians and the Internet. This study received significant coverage in the media, specifically from the Washington Post and Wired, coverage that was focused primarily on one finding: Most artists don't view unauthorized swapping of music and movies as a threat to their livelihood, even if many think it should be illegal.
The Pew folks should be lauded for making the first-ever effort at what obviously needed to be done to further the discussion about copyrights and file-sharing – ask actual creatives what they thought about these issues. Yet there is much, much more in the study results. If you’re interested in finding out how creative Americans practice their creativity, it would be worth your while to download the entire 50-page .PDF (it’s free).
Some highlights:
Most fascinating to me, especially in light of the stuff I posted recently on copying and innovation, was the finding that artists and musicians have by and large embraced the Internet as a tool that helps them create, as well as helps them promote and sell what they’ve created.
And, “artists and musicians are more likely to say that the Internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use.”
According to the Pew report, 57% of Americans – 114 million – study, practice, or do some type of artistic activity, such as play musical instruments, sing, do creative writing, draw, paint, dance, act, make films, etc. A smaller group of 32 million Americans consider themselves artists, and about 10 million of them get some kind of compensation for their creations and performances. This is a huge number of people out there creating.
And more than 50% of the artists surveyed said they get ideas and inspiration for their work form searching online. Two-thirds of the musicians said that the Internet is very important in helping them create their music. Most of the artists and musicians also said they used the Internet for creative collaboration and for participating in the creative community.
Half of the artists and musicians said that copyright regulations benefit purveyors of creative work more than they benefit the original creators. Many of the musicians said decisions over peer-to-peer file-sharing and digital distribution should be made by the artist, not the label.
I found it surprising that the artists who responded to the study were split over what constitutes “fair use” of digital material. I would guess they probably have a better handle on what fair use is in situations when it’s their work in question. Yet if even the creatives don’t understand fair use….it’s definitely time to rethink the notion of copyright altogether.
Wanted to get this comment out of the comments section and over here where we could all see it and act on it....
Don The Idea Guy says,
Glad to see word spreading of Hugh's work.
Doesn't he simply kick ass?
By the way -- he's up for "Fast 50" status at Fast Company magazine. Why not go add a vote and comment to his page?
http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_05/profile/?macleod403
Somewhere along the way I subscribed to a site called ChangeThis and then promptly forgot about it (you never do that, do you?!)....but then this morning a ChangeThis newsletter showed up in my email inbox. ChangeThis bills itself as a "new kind of media" that will "challenge and change the way ideas are spread." They do this essentially by publishing manifestos for free.
So I looked through this email of manifestoes, and shortly thereafter got an email from Stowe Boyd pointing me toward the one that had already caught my eye: How To Be Creative, by Hugh MacLeod. Sat down with a printout of the PDF and promptly pushed everything else on my desk aside, regardless of deadline, until I finished reading it. It's fun. It's good. It's more than good. My favorite quote of many:
"Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted.Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it."
Innovation often causes imbalance of power because innovation by default kicks over the status quo, whether it is in an industry, a business, a team or a relationship. Getting your idea -- or even the need for innovation in the first place -- accepted is perhaps more important than having a good idea.
That reminds me -- Squirrel Inc. author Steve Denning did a great presentation at Innovation Convergence last September about how to use storytelling to convince people to innovate. His site's worth looking at too.
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.
Courtesy of Hylton:
The IEEE 2003 International Engineering Management Conference will be held November 2-4 in Albany, NY. The IEEE-IEMC 2002 was one of the most useful conferences I attended last year, and I'm expecting another great conference this year.
Speakers include Dr. Rolf Smith speaking on "Diffferent Thinking for Diffferent Results." The conference organizing committee chair is Dr. Lois Peters, one of the authors of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts, a book that both John Wolpert and I found to be extremely useful.
I'll be giving a workshop, "Unleashing Creativity: Creating an Innovation Focus for Engineering Teams." The workshop will include a discussion of an Innovation Framework as well as the use of InnoMediaries, citing work from both John Wolpert ("Breaking Out of the Innovation Box") and Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation).
Talk about convergence!! Lots of our ideas will be coming together here!
What are some of the ways that organizations can foster creativity? There are lots of ingredients; I'll focus on just one in this post. This is one that worked well for me when I was managing a software R&D team many years ago.
I keep a book of logic puzzles on my bookshelf. Two that I recommend are Raymond Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book?, and his more recent The Riddle of Scheherazade: And Other Amazing Puzzles. Smullyan is a logician and set theorist, whose logic books I used in college, and his puzzles provoke some opportunities for clever thinking.
In those informal moments when a few engineers would gather in my office, we would pick up the book and choose a puzzle. We'd consider it as a group for a couple minutes and then go off on our own.
The following day we would discuss each of our solutions. I am very pragmatic, and I would typically find one solution and be done with it. Another person in our group would often return with three solutions and a proof for their correctness! He and I had very different approaches, each of them useful for certain situations.
The results? Over time, we developed a good sense of each others' strengths and ways of approaching problem solving. We had fun. And we developed a strong respect for others' thinking.
And we could solve a lot of logic puzzles!
This is a simple, informal practice that, over time, enhances a group's creative output. There are lots of other such practices. Send me your favorites!
After finding out about this newly discovered link between madness and creativity, I was ready to go have a drink and ponder how close to psychosis I personally might be….maybe just a few IQ points or notches of ability to multi-task and remember! Meanwhile, our ever-steady Corante blog-neighbor Zack Lynch, who’s writing a book on neurotechnology and society, had this to say:
As different aspects of mental health are better understood, more parts of the innovative process will be impacted such as accelerating learning via cogniceuticals to enhancing interpersonal communication with emoticeuticals. As neuroceutical usage spreads across industries it will create a new economic “playing field” wherein individuals who use neuroceuticals will achieve a higher level of productivity than those who don’t.The resulting competitive gap will be substantial. To put this in historical perspective, imagine the competitive advantage that a team living in the year 2003 with the Internet as their information source has over a group living in 1953 that must rely on the local library.
Disruptive innovation, anyone?! Definitely read the whole thing.
Whoa! I was gearing up to write some kind of wisdom about disruptive innovation, when this morning Hylton sent me a link to a FuturePundit post that dropped a bomb in my brain: Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto and colleagues at Harvard University have found that decreased latent inhibition of environmental stimuli appears to correlate with greater creativity among people with high IQ.
In a nutshell, this research says that people whose brains are more open to stimuli from the outside environment will either be:
This press release quotes Dr. Peterson: "It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."
There’s also a role played by stress, though it only comes out in the paper (and in the FuturePundit post), not in the press release. Release of the stress hormone corticosterone lowers latent inhibition. So stress sends the brain into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores, thus allowing for the discovery of solutions to the stress-causing problem - solutions that would be ignored in normal and less-stressed circumstances.
Is this why we sometimes feel as though we're more creative under deadline stress (although studies have shown we’re not really more creative under those circumstances)?
Then, of course, stress overload causes information overload and then presumably psychosis starts. Or perhaps this is where depression comes from? A natural response to an overload of problem-solving stimuli, causing pattern-recognition and discernment responses to short-circuit?
So what is the effect of Prozac and the other SSRI drugs on this tendency for decreased latent inhibition? Would these medications decrease creativity by increasing latent inhibition, or would they increase creativity by increasing ability (or at least restoring your natural ability) to handle external stimuli?
I realize I have more questions than answers here, and I promise I’ll share answers with you if I find any. Meanwhile, you can see a .PDF of original paper here. The study was also published in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Juan Enriquez, director of HBS’ Life Science Project held us riveted to our seats during his morning keynote: As The Future Catches You. With slides of images from Felice Frankel’s Envisioning Science, he talked about what kinds of innovations matter.
Says he: Maps matter. You don’t have to have an accurate map, just a better map than your neighbor’s. And codes matter. Executing the right code matters even more. Literacy in and the ability to map the right code matters a lot. Early maps of the world and the new code of the 26-letter alphabet were once the highest standards of maps and codes. Now the genome map and the DNA code are the ones that matter. Enriquez talked of the "merger between food, drink, biotech and pharma" that will change all of our lives.
It was hard to know whether to be inspired after this or go off in despair because I personally don’t know how to read either the genome map or the DNA code!
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.
This Waypath Buzzmaker is way cool...you put in up to five search terms, and get back a graphical representation of the number of links each term has generated on blogs over the past 10 weeks. Below is the result for the terms "creativity" and "innovation." Click on the image and you get the search result links. Thanks to Dave Pollard for the pointer.
You may have seen this Business Week interview with Ed Felten, professor and writer of the Freedom To Tinker blog, on the “collision between creativity and protecting intellectual property.” A number of people sent the link to me, including Andy Hargadon. It also relates directly to an issue Leslie brought up here last week.
Here’s an excerpt:
I can’t help but notice that there are more questions than answers here. I also can’t help but notice that the Copyright Wars seem mostly to be about the way this issue is being framed: “Creativity and innovation will die with too much empahsis on intellectual property laws” says one side, while the other says "Creativity and innovation will die if ideas can't be protected by IP laws." It seems to me that if someone could come up with a better way to frame the overall issue, it might be easier to find solutions. Not to suggest this will be easy - I certainly don't have the answer! I'm still adrift in the sea of questions on this issue.
I'm very happy to welcome Leslie Martinich, our newest group-blogger. If you missed her first post on Innovation and Trust, you should go read it now. Then come back.
Leslie's question, "What are the infrastructure ingredients that foster innovation?" reminds me a little of some discussions we've already has here on how/when/in what ways creativity and innovation intersect and mix. I'd say that this very big question leads directly into what I've called before the "creativity of innovation." If there was ever a question that required some creative thought, this would be it.
And that leads me to something interesting and new I've found: The Belgian TRIZ and innovation consultancy Creax has come up with a great creativity self-assessment tool. When you finish you get a “radar plot” that compares your score with an average score on eight different “modules” or components of creativity: abstraction, connection, perspective, curiosity, boldness, paradox, complexity and persistence.
Apparently, for a limited time anyone can take this online evaluation for free, and you’ll get that nice little radar plot diagram. If you actually pay to take it (through your company, it looks like), you’ll also get to go through training on the modules on which you didn’t score so highly, which of course makes the exercise diagnostic as opposed to merely evaluative.
The supposition behind having everyone in a company or on a team tested for creativity skills is not to see whether they are creative – Creax, like me, believes everyone has some level of creativity – but to find out where their creative strengths and weaknesses lie. That information could be useful in putting teams together, in hiring, or in making training-related decisions.
Even though I know this is not what Leslie had in mind, I'm thinking this creativity assessment/diagnostic tool could also be useful in helping to create on a corporate level an infrastructure that fosters creativity. Acknowledging the need for creative and innovative thinking, then testing for it, training to fill skills gaps, and strategically placing those naturally gifted at it, is a good start in building a good innovation infrastructure on the corporate level.
We had an ideation session the other night and had great success with a new creativity technique that we developed ourselves (pats on the back all around, here!). The technique is based on some concepts of visual thinking I learned this summer at CPSI from Jon Pearson:
This last is particularly true when using visual thinking or drawing to spur ideas. The point of the underlying process is to spur analogical, metaphorical thinking. We’re finding this particularly useful in our name-generation projects, because many powerful names are rooted in metaphors that evoke various emotions and images associated with the product.
Anyway, the technique we created is called “The Showing,” and this is how it goes: First you need some points of departure to work with. These can be words that come from language or images associated with the subject/problem/project/product, or can come from brainstorming or other similar processes conducted on the subject/problem/project/product. Diverge to list lots of words and/or phrases and then converge again on four words and/or phrases that will be the points of departure.
Give everyone in the group an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper and markers or pens to write with. Ask them to mark off a grid on the paper such that they have four lines of three squares across each.
Assume for illustration purposes that one of the point-of-departure words is “acceptance.” Ask the participants to draw in the first square on the first line an image that says “acceptance” to them. Give them 25 seconds to do this. Then ask them to do it again, different image this time, in the next square, again with 25 seconds to draw. And again on the third square. Repeat for the next three lines of squares, with a different point-of-departure word for each line.
After the last picture is drawn, ask the participants to exchange papers with someone else in the group. Give them a couple of minutes to look at the pictures they now have and ask any questions they want of the person who drew them. Then ask each person in the group to name the pictures on the paper they have, using names that are different from each other. It is OK to ask questions of the person who originally drew it.
Capture each name and you’ll end up with a list of words and/or phrases that should spur further metaphorical associations. In our case, the resulting list spurred us in lots of new directions for the product names we were creating.
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