New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

How Wild Can The Idea Really Be?

In the annals of Television history, Steve Martin and Dan Akroyd in some of the earliest seasons of Saturday Night Live performed a (politically incorrect) bit where they described themselves as wild and crazy.

People have described us that way on occasion. However...

When we were developing our latest set of materials for our Innovation for Results training program that teaches people (among other things) tools and techniques for creative thinking, we had to create some innovative ideas for the purposes of demonstration.  To teach the concept of "forced connections," where one creates a new idea by forcing a connection between the problem and something unrelated, we decided to work on new restaurant concepts as an example.  We created ideas based on the attributes of a coiled metal spring such as:

• Small: restaurant that only seats 5 people.  Restaurant with booths that you can close off for privacy.
• Bouncy: restaurant with really upbeat music, or with really comfortable furniture.
• Spiral: restaurant with many different levels or with many different price levels of food.

The Gator Brained Run From Innovation

We thought you might enjoy the following interview that Bob Eckert recently did with a magazine, "HT Kariyer" in Turkey. It was titled:

The Gator Brained Run from Innovation

Dynamic Turkey should be open to innovation

-What is innovation leadership?
Eckert: Innovation leadership can be viewed at three levels: One, is a particular company growing profit through innovation in comparison to its peers and competitors? Two, are the leaders of an organization setting standards and modeling the behavior of good creativity & innovation skills? Three, are the individuals in the organization taking personal responsibility to be creative and support innovation from their position. Innovative companies can answer “Yes!” to all three of these questions. The most innovative companies are never arrogant about their ability to do this, so are always attempting to improve their innovation culture.

-Everybody talks about ”innovation” lately. What is the business world looking for? Has the “innovation” concept changed recently and means something different than it used to mean?

Innovation and the Paternity Test

So I’m in Istanbul two weeks ago conducting an open enrolment “Innovation for Results” training program with our partner, Pelin Urgancilar. A young woman from Pfizer says to me with a beautiful smile: “I wanted to meet the father...."As she reaches out to shake my hand.

Now I’ve had some really bad cases of jet lag, but not that bad! She was referring to a policy and procedure in the Pfizer Marketing Department in Turkey.

Rube Goldberg Meets Music Video

Sure, they could have just used spray-paint cans on each other, but for a nearly four minute music video?  That would be boring.  This was much more fun! Also a great example of:

1) Creative Problem Solving (How might we keep people interested for a four minute song?)

2) Creative Marketing (How might we get people to let others know about our music?)

3) What happens when systems get too complex (Don't you feel like some of the internal processes in your organization work like this system? JUST GET OUT THE SPRAY CANS!)

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Thanks to Dave Huntley for the forward!

Thinking in New Ways Gets President Obama's Attention

"Creative thinking" means looking at the same thing everyone else is looking at, and reaching a different conclusion.  If so, the questioner in this video clip is a very creative thinker when it comes to creating economic stimulus (not that his opinions reflect the opinions of this blogger...or likely many others!):

(please excuse the brief ad that precedes the video)

"New and Valuable" beats "New" everytime

Scott Berkun wrote a great opinion piece  in BusinessWeek about the fallacy of chasing innovation just for the sake of innovation.  It's a nice articulation of why, in his words, "'good' beats 'innovative' every time." 

While the argument is solid, I'd argue that his use of terminology is flawed.  Here at N&I, we describe innovation as "introducing something new or novel that is useful (or provides value)."  Merely being "new" (Berkun's definition of innovation) isn't going to cut it.  Nothing new there, but the article articulates it particularly well. 

Oh, and Happy Birthday Bob Eckert!

See the full article at: http://bit.ly/9hHl4l