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Excessive Innovation – Making Choices About The Value We Create

March 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

ShoppingCarts_ThumbnailNothing says “success” like wretched excess, or so it would seem. A challenge of innovation today is the overwhelming perception of its strong bias for fostering rampant consumption. The drive to acquire the new and improved has overwhelmed a mid-20th century view of making do an repairing things to extend their useful life. Now new products and services are created and go in search of markets and customers placing burdens on resources, ecosystems, and personal economies. The necessary is trumped by the pretty. The essential is supplanted novel. The vital and nourishing is squeezed out by the unimportant and artificial. To what end?

To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

– John Maynard Keynes

(Quoted in Keynes and Capitalism, Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, History of Political Economy, 2009)

Innovation should be about creating value; not only the short-term value of satisfying basic needs, but addressing long-term complex challenges that require sustained attention and focus. Much of the innovation we acknowledge is focused on a customer, their experience, and the momentary satisfiers at play. Innovation is being wed to the bright and shiny in a shotgun marriage of inconvenience. We need more and should expect more from innovation than something new to buy.

I create nothing. I own.

- Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in Wall Street

As a short-term game innovation without an eye to longevity yields hit and miss return. When it works it might be a tremendous success (think fads, like Crocs – the ugliest shoes on the planet) but often market-focused innovation responds to a surface need and does not address the deep and abiding need present in a customer’s circumstances. Perhaps we need to consider innovation in deeper and more abiding terms and ask ourselves:

  • How might we truly seek to create value?
  • How might we create in a ways that are both additive and generative?
  • How might we practice and foster stewardship in lieu of ownership?

Something tells me that there has to be an innovation-based answer to the issue of rampant and unflagging consumerism. What do you think?

After posting this a link came our way from an interview between Joel Makower, Group Chairman of GreenBiz Group, and Yves Chouinard, the Founder and CEO of Patagonia that is very relevant. The full post is here.

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Filed Under: Blog, Innovation, Social Psychology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Collaborative Innovation – Primed Associates is a Contributing Blogger

October 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Collaborative Innovation site is an editorially independent thought leadership community around Business & Collaborative Innovation.  It is sponsored by Dassault Systèmes and produced by Human 1.0. Primed Associates’ CEO/Principal, Drew Marshall, has been invited to contribute.

Collaborative Innovation, has been defined by the originator of the term, Peter Gloor (a Research Scientist at MIT Sloan’s Center for Collective Intelligence) as “a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by sharing ideas, information, and work.”

It is a topic that is written and talked about around the world and they decided to offer a place where thought leaders could expand the landscape.  The blog, in conjunction with the Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference 2011 (DSCC) aims to drive and deepen the conversation.

Here are links to the series of posts by Primed Associates’, Drew Marshall, at Collaborative Innovation:

A Twofer from a Hurricane: How Transportation Innovation Might Transform the Energy Sector

Too Smart For Our Own Good: Why choosing wisely is critical in innovation

Placing Innovation Bets: 5 Lessons from 5 Big Players

3d Modeling at Scale – From Aircraft to Embroidery

Launching FashionLab – (ad)dressing haute couture, jewelry and beyond

Trends in Retail Pointing to Innovations in Services

Take a look at Drew’s and others’ posts, there’s lots of great food for thought and participate in the conversation.

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Business Innovation Factory – 7 #BIF7 – Live blogging Sept 21

September 21, 2011 By 1 Comment

See Day 1 here. A big thanks to John Werner at Citizen Schools for sharing some of his fantastic photos from BIF-7.

To start the day off I had a great conversation with seat mate and recovering journalist, Helen Walters from Doblin. We covered: Conferences. Curation. Presentation delivery bar being raised. And the Conference Industrial Complex. I love her manner of inquiry.

Saul Kaplan opened the day by reflecting on what the success of the BIF summit means. He noted, “People need to draw their own conclusions because the value is in what you learn as a participant.” Saul also reflected on the fact that innovators, even though they come with deep subject matter expertise, are in constant search for what they are missing. This mindset is something that informs how Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto thinks about innovation and to whom Saul nodded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business, lead the Day 2 presentations by delivering his session live from Pakistan. We talked yesterday about transforming education and healthcare. Haque is focused on transforming the mother of all systems, capitalism.

Haque opened with the fact that Pakistan has ground to a halt due to an outbreak of Denge Fever.

What the religious fundamentalists haven’t been able to achieve in two decades, the mosquitoes have accomplished in two months in Lahore. – Umair Haque

He stated that Pakistan is a functional economy against which he compared the aspirational economy of India. By way of framing his approach to capitalism, Haque quoted from Joseph Shcumpeter’s work, “Can Capitalism Survive?” Schumpeter’s assessment was that no, capitalism cannot survive because the range of needs of human beings is endless and that it will collapse under its own weight. Haque’s additional framing is to offer the concept of the opulent economy and its attendant ills: dumbification, inequity, social unrest, abject poverty. The quest for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now is going to fade.

In the place of opulence, Haque offers up a model of capitalism based on fitter, smarter, tougher, closer, and wiser. The term he uses is eudaimonia which is founded in “human flourishing.” This transition will take years, if not a decade according to Haque. However the range of change required is transformational

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The artist, screenwriter, and author behind “The Polar Express” and many other books, Chris Van Allsburg came to the stage next. He shared a story about Annie Edson Taylor, the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. [It should be mentioned I have a relative who self-selected from the gene pull by swimming the river that feeds these Falls, Captain Webb who was a British dare devil.] Van Allsburg’s book is called, “Queen of the Falls”

In sharing his journey to creating this book, Van Allsburg talked about the narrative choices he made in conjunction with the illustrative choices, such as superimposing a building into the Falls to illustrate their size. He also discussed how he fleshed out her life’s story and how he captured her journey to the moment she decided to go over the Falls in a barrel. She had no experience in barrel-making or dare-devilry and yet, like most innovators, she had a persistent belief in her own vision and the will to drive it to successful completion.

This presentation offered a glimpse into both the subject of Van Allsburg’s heroine as well as the author artist’s role in capturing her journey in a meaningful and accessible manner. To see and hear how he pulled together the elements of his book into a cohesive whole was intriguing. It was a wonderful and revealing view of the care required to construct meaning.

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Alexander Osterwalder was a pinch-hitter due to the schedule shift on Day 1 with Erin Mote being called away by Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to go to the West Bank. Alex is the lead author/editor of the book, “Business Model Generation”  which was essentially co-created with a large number of practitioners.

This book arose from Alex’s doctoral thesis which contained the word ontology, which Alex noted is the word that enables you to earn a Ph.D! The first time the book was able to be held by Alex was actually at BIF5 two years ago. And with book in hand Alex found that he struggled to define himself when asked by people – author?, entrepreneur?, public speaker?, academic? None of which seemed to fit. Instead he says he is,

I’m somebody who likes to *break* the rules and make stuff.

Alex provided some statistics to create context for the environment into which his book might be delivered. 1,000,000 books published in English in a year. 11,000 of those are business books. Cumulatively there are 250,000 business books competing for shelf-space. Business books sell 250 copies on average. A highly challenging environment in which to launch a new book.

He identified some of the challenges of business books which sounded like an offshoot of the Goldilocks tale: too heavy, too light, to wordy, to impractical. To break this paradigm Alex and the wider team looked at a very broad range of works for inspiration and sought to cerate a book that they would love to buy. The first step was to hire a designer and assemble a broader team to create and build the ecosystem around the development of the book. The end result is a highly visual book with white space and different ways of laying out the book to engage and attract to ensure the book had a high degree of utility.

The book became the co-created work of 470 people around the world. They also charged for participation and raised the price of the book time and time again from $24 to $81. The last chance payment was $250 in order to have your name in the book before publication. What was the reason for the attractiveness of the value proposition? Being first. Being a part of something bigger. An opportunity to learn from each other.

Instead of a marketing budget, the book project had a built in community of people who were proud advocates for the book in the marketplace. The backbone for bringing the book to light was the internet. There was a freemium offer of a third of the book. Then came the challenge of managing the logistics of dealing with shipping all over the way. The initial approach with a Dutch company was an abject failure and then they went back to Amazon for fulfillment. The initial success attracted a large publisher, Wiley.

The book is available around the world and it has been scheduled to be translated into 22 other languages. The ideas are available around the world and are tearing down the barriers to business everywhere.

This was a great example of building a community to launch a book to the heights of success.

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The Co-Founder of Futurlogic, Jon Cropper next came up to talk about seduction a distillation of 15 years of his life into 15 minutes. And he survived being tortured by P-Diddy running his company for a year. He shared nine elements that drive seduction:

Self awareness – know yourself

Environmental – the conditions and context of performance

Design – aesthetics matter (the fusion of a simple exterior with a complex interior – “simplexity”)

Understanding – listening and compassion

Communication – the power of great storytelling

Trust – in others and delivering on your promise

Inspiration – create an educational, inspirational operating philosophy

Open – generosity feeds the soul

New – rejuvenation, repetition and constant renewal

Cropper offered a series of personal anecdotes and observations that revealed those things that resonate most deeply with him about the power of seduction within innovation.

Generosity and appreciation create the optimal output performance of your heart.

***

And we’re back from our first morning session and ready for our pre-lunch immersion. The first speaker up  is Andy van Dam. He earned the second computer science degree in the world and is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He is interested in exploring the intersection between art and computer science. His focus in this session was using the computer to access traditional artwork that would be otherwise inaccessible.

He examined the special problems of especially large artworks. With a graduate student driving he explored several large scale pieces of art including: a fresco of Egyptian art (an essential form of storytelling), the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Garibaldi Panorama (which was digitized by Brown University.) The scroll was the popular form of entertainment in its day. Measuring 4½ feet high and 273 feet long, the Garibaldi Panorama is one of the longest paintings in the world. The work depicts the life story of Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, who played a major role in the unification of Italy. The late Dr. James Walter Smith donated the relic to Brown in 2005.

In summer 2007, special funding enabled library staff and technicians from Boston Photo, a leading museum reprographics company, to fashion a makeshift photo studio in the central gallery of the Annmary Brown Memorial. They slowly and surely unrolled the panorama — six feet at a time — in order to take 91 digital photographs. The photographs will now be melded into a continuous image online. The genius of this digitization was the arrival of the Microsoft Surface operating system which had a deep zoom technology allowing an incredible level of accessibility and little instruction required to be able to view and explore the artwork.

There are two modes of access – the walk-up or the viewer mode. The walk-up mode provdes image-only view where the viewer mode introduces additional contextual information, including Ken Burns’-style image inclusion of external data and embedded video. The legibility of the artwork and the additional materials is supported by high definition capture. Additional Photoshop-like tools enable elemental image color manipulation.

The end goal is to create a platform that can be used by museums and galleries to quickly produce similar art work tours. The Tour Authoring Tool itself is like a basic asynchronous editing suite for video, which enables the addition of multiple digital assets. The tool itself is produced by the Brown Center for Digital Initiatives. They are working with the Forbidden City in Beijing on the Ching Ming Festival Scroll as well as other institutes around the world.

Display technology is going to be replaced by organic light-emitting diodes which means all surfaces around us will be interactive for display and immersion purposes. The only question is, “What won’t we be able to do?!”

***

Byron Reeves is a Professor at Stanford University; a Behavioral Scientist, Author, and proponent of Interactive Gaming & Virtual Worlds in the Workplace. He came to share his thoughts about gamification and the social implications of the impact of gaming in everyday life and social system change. Reeves is an expert on the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses, and has published over 100 scientific papers about media and psychology.

He noted that most people who study TV as academics profess a disdain for the medium. He, however, professed his love for it. (My wife, Jo, and Professor Reeves have this in common!) To illustrate the impact of captivation and engagement he shared a picture of himself in front of a TV and then showed the complete transformation of immersion via the game experience – in World of Warcraft. This captivation triggered the question about what else you could use this kind of captivation for?

In supporting his children at their swim meets he had a fortuitous encounter with J. Leighton Read. And Read asked, “Byron, what’s cool in your lab right now?” Which he did. He described the impact of captivation as represented by gaming. When Reeves asked Read the same question, Read described his exploration of the world of work and the chaos of not knowing how to measure what success looked like until the quarterly (or annual) review. Based on this conversation they decided to collaborate.

How might we wire-up the world of work so that it more closely represented a community-based, collaborative game environment with an epic narrative?

First they needed to address the stereotyping that pervades the conversation around games. The generation that is growing up in the world of games have integrated them into their lives. The addition of narratives and participation within the context of gaming and their integration with work have the potential to transform the business world.

The work that gaming prepares you for is complex. Learning through games, arbitrary information, becomes everyday food for thought and becomes a part of its own reward. Engagement at work is a huge issue and Reeves notes that people will make mistakes. But the amount of work in games is only going to increase. Cisco sales reps play a “Closer” game. IBM teams meeting as avatars on projects. The range of examples Reeves shared was incredibly broad and rich and all of them were supported by huge amounts of information technology.

Reeves noted the danger associated with this effort. The impact of over-engagement and OSHA implications as people develop repetitive strain injuries. Or tax laws given the location of work.

Reeves left us with the question, “What would it be like if work and play were a little more alike?”

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Mari Kurashi is the co-founder and president of Global Giving which connects individual and institutional donors directly to social, economic development, and environmental projects around the world. Mari is doing work on the social entrepreneur front to bring problems into alignment with the available range of solutions.

The questions that Mari is asked are usually framed as “Did you know…?” And her response is that she didn’t have a clue that she would have this kind of impact on the world. To help us understand her journey she recounted her childhood and high school attendance in West Germany and a day trip to see the Berlin Wall. The biggest impact was the way in which the East Germans on the other side of the Wall didn’t turn to look at the people who were looking at them. She was intrigued by this and wanted to understand how a social system could create behavior that was so counter to biological drive.

She became focused on studying and learning about the Soviet Union (primarily to avoid becoming an “O.L.” and Office Lady in Japan as her visa was in doubt.) In the middle of her Ph.D. studies the Soviet Union began to fall apart and she was dismayed by the fact that political science couldn’t predict this outcome. She went to work at the World Bank (a job that she got “on a fluke”) without any idea what the institution did and what economic development entailed. She was one of three people out of one hundred who could actually speak Russian. She was in the right place at the right time.

Her passion for wanting to reverse the regime of communism in the Soviet Union was something that Mari was focused on but her time at the World Bank came to an end – in a last chance innovation program. They created a marketplace inside the World Bank in 2000 which essentially used elements of crowdsourcing. The success of this program was hampered by the inability of the World Bank to focus o this. In this realization Mari decided to leave the World Bank to pursue this concept for addressing global poverty.

The compelling thread that runs through Mari’s narrative is the notion of personal risk. Time and time again she made huge life shifts with little understanding of what she knew or didn’t know. And by approaching her life’s work with beginner’s mind (and what she sees as incredible luck) she made her way in the world.

Mari brought her presentation back to eudaimonia and the notion of how a virtuous, life well lived fits together. She said, you must decide and practice and choose how best to fit these virtues together. Eudaimonia is a deliberate practice for integration of new options that make sense to you over time.

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A long-time BIF attendee and presenter Dennis Littky, Co-founder and Director of The Big Picture Company, began with the words, “Highschools suck.” Littky talked about how the current state of our schools and colleges impacts the least prepared the most. The poor, the disenfranchised, the economically disenfranchised suffer the most from education systems that are inflexible and immovable.

Dennis had one of the students who had participated in The Big Picture Company talked about her personal journey and the power of hands-on learning. She described her education journey interviewing people at BIF and her world travels too. A remarkable perspective on what education might become, if only we have the vision to realize that the tools we need are already at hand. Our minds must change to accommodate new ways of seeing and creating the world.

Littky shared a sobering statistic – every 12 seconds a child drops out of schools. In our time at BIF7 that was 9600 children. A criminal failure of the highest order.

Littky shared his work and his focus on fighting to transform the urban school experience as a way of combating this appalling drop-out rate. His work focuses on connecting with kids, finding out about the, finding their passions, and helping them design education experiences that meet their learning needs. Drop-outs lowered to single digits (from 46% in the Providence, RI school district0 and 100% of students who stayed went onto college. As a result the Gates Foundation sponsored a massive expansion of the program worldwide.

His recent focus was the drop-out rate at the college level. 89% of first generation college attendees drop out. His work is now focused on creating a college that uses the same model of community-based learning and engagement that has been deployed in the secondary schools program. The end result is that the first class of students is graduating this year.

Next up Littky is going to focus on adult education. What a dynamo he is.

He is looking for adult mentors; consider connecting with Dennis via Twitter if you think you have something to offer.

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This ended my sojourn at BIF7.

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Innovating Event Participation through Social Media: expanding the impact of SXSW, World Innovation Forum & more

August 26, 2011 By 4 Comments

Over the last two years I have had the good fortune to be drawn into the world of live-blogging at events. I came into this as a result of trying to figure out how to maximize the value I was gaining from using Twitter. To be perfectly honest, when I first saw Twitter and the kinds of messages people were posting, I thought: “Great. Another platform for the terminally self-involved and ego-centric to shout, ‘Look at me!’” But after exploring it some more, and heeding the advice of folks like Chris Brogan, who advocated the use of Twitter as a tool for keeping connected with subjects that were of interest and importance to you, I found my way to #innochat.

For those of you who don’t know, #innochat is a weekly Twitter chat held at noon (USA Eastern Standard/Daylight Time) every Thursday. Each week a topic is determined, a framing post is created in support of the topic with links to appropriate resources, and some key questions are identified to prompt and guide discussion. Usually the person who identified the topic also writes the framing post and moderates the chat on that day. Between 50 to 150 people “show up” to wrestle with a core concept each week. In the space of an hour we may have nearly 1,000 tweets. In short, it is a great online event which rarely disappoints in terms of engagement, energy, and enthusiasm.

What does this have to do with event participation? Good question.

This chat model is an adjunct to a wider series of Twitter chat and live event integrations which are expanding the impact and engagement of those events beyond participants in a room. One recent example is covered very well by Angela Dunn (aka @blogbrevity) who wrote a series of great posts at Pharmaphorum on “How to make your conference social”. Angela’s most recent post focuses on the establishment of a bloggers’ hub and how to effectively participate in an event as a blogger. You might even see someone you know being interviewed.

Angela Dunn interview with Renee Hopkins & Drew Marshall

The great thing about Angela’s advice is that it is practical and useful no matter what type of event you run. This is drawn directly from her own experience as a blogger at multiple events and this post specifically focuses on the great work of George Levy, VP of Online Marketing for HSM Americas, who created the Blogger’s Hub at the HSM World Innovation Forum three years ago. From a full-blown, multiday conference to a focused internal event for innovators in your organization, integrating social media expands the scope of the conversation and broadens its utility to a much wider audience. The key is to be clear about your objectives for participants both in the room and further afield.

As part of my volunteer work helping to coordinate #innochat sessions, which I fell into, I have also been asked to participate as a live blogger for internal company events. Francois Gossieux, founder of Human 1.0, invited me to participate in one such event for a technology innovation company that incorporated a range of bloggers, the host company, and client participants in the room. By engaging bloggers, the company created a much wider platform for its small event, inviting participation from around the world to share in the experience being generated in a hotel conference room in Orlando, Florida. This event leveraged social media in a way that meant the host company had a broader reach and greater impact than a typical trade show event or internal product launch would ever have had.

Another off-shoot from my #innochat experience was taking the online chat to a live setting at the South By South West Interactive Festival (aka. SXSW) this year. Renee Hopkins, one of the long-time contributors to and hosts of #innochat invited me, Gwen Ishmael, and Jason Sutton to participate in a Core Conversation at SXSW on Business 101—focused on making money as a small enterprise or solo entrepreneur. Now, the way Core Conversations had been designed by the SXSW organizers was to have them be audio-visual-free zones: The rooms were set up in the round (all the chairs facing each other in a large circle) with no AV equipment. Being the innovators we are, the #innochat team on the ground immediately subverted that.

We set up a projector and omni-directional microphone in order to live-stream the conversation in the room. We also had Gwen and Justin cover the #innochat hashtag live while Renee and I integrated comments from inside the room with questions, comments, and suggestions from the wider #innochat community. Our experience at SXSW had been that if audience members were dissatisfied with their in-room experience, they would quite rapidly employ the rule of “two feet” in that they could walk out at any stage. We started with a packed room (over 100 people) and we ended up with people sitting on the floor around the room by the time we finished. The dynamic between the room participants and those following and engaging with the chat stream at #innochat was great.

As people left, some said it was the most engaging session they had been to so far.

How are you maximizing the use of social media to increase the impact of your efforts?

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Motivated to innovate: How an organization’s culture can cultivate or crush

June 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

While motivation is essentially a self-generated state, the organizational culture of a group or individual dedicated to the pursuit of innovation greatly influences their performance. That culture both dominates and mediates, and if it is not positively addressed, competing motivations and needs can come into play. As has been mentioned previously more than once in the Think Primed Blog, innovation requires the introduction of change into inherently stable systems. Because of this, an organizational culture plays a large role in fostering and sustaining motivation.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul.

-       John Muir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

 

To meet those competing needs, an organization must address powerful personal motivators. One of the best models highlighting what’s at stake during this kind of effort is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

So much of organization life takes place at the bottom of this pyramid; the equivalent of “keeping the lights on and the water running.” Which is a great model for an Industrial Age company intent on making an endless succession of the same widgets in a production line. Not many of those companies thriving today, are there?

A step up from physiological needs are the types of organizations that pitch benefits packages addressing the safety and security concerns of their members and, to a certain extent, some esteem needs. Organizations with strong and stable cultures often reinforce the needs associated with love and belonging, yet they have all the fun and dysfunction of families. They’re mostly built for comfort rather than speed, required to respond to changing and dynamic market forces.

The most dynamic and innovative companies seek to work at the highest levels of this model, to get the best from people every day.

 

Price of admission

It’s not enough for an organization culture to provide the equivalent of shelter in a storm, especially not if that same organization wants its members to invest themselves in the success of the enterprise. Prior to the Great Unpleasantness (aka the Great Recession), companies were scrambling to create environments that attracted the best and the brightest. Though many companies today remain focused on that, the majority merely pays it lip service or don’t pursue that practice at all.

These latter companies are minding their reserves and hoarding their resources. This is practice won’t yield significant results at all.

The price of admission to those seeking to create innovation-capable cultures is the same as it has always been: collaborative cultures where people feel safe to share their ideas, where they feel like they can find a “home,” where they are recognized for their contribution, and were they feel they can be their best selves. Charlie Gilkey, author of the Productive Flourishing blog, recently noted that it took him several quarters to come up with his list for a post titled “What I Believe.” The end result is something that reflects what most of us are looking for in our lives. Work is where people spend most of their waking hours, so organization better figure out how to create the conditions for a culture that supports those beliefs he mentions.

One such example of the fulfilling organization, a company dedicated to the principals of loose/tight leadership (small set rules, tightly managed), is the online video powerhouse Hulu. Recently Fast Company magazine ran a great profile online of Hulu’s organization culture, which showed how power is distributed to the lowest organization level possible for effective decision-making and execution. Engagement is driven by the establishment of a small set of performance-based rules that are tightly enforced, while most aspects of organization life are left to the individual or group to design, organize, implement, and process. The net result is an organization that makes people want to deliver their best effort.

We all want to belong

This kind of democratically-biased culture creates a cohesion that is rare in many larger organizations. Usually when start-ups cross the growth chasm (as distinct from the adoption chasm defined in Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm), the transition in revenues or size (over $10 million and over 150 people, respectively) means their flexibility collapses under command-and-control patterns and poorly defined and managed performance expectations. That hasn’t happened at Hulu. They are large, growing larger, and thriving by deferring to their community members.

Organizations that fail to cross the growth chasm come up hard against the reality of being inhospitable. They cease to grow and flourish, because they don’t make room for the strength that others may provide by applying their own unique and divergent talents. The start-up company that fails to grow is usually completely tied to one person’s hierarchy of needs: the founder. The founder is usually on a never-ending treadmill of addressing their most elemental needs for safety.

In Hulu’s case, ownership of issues, problem-solving, and performance management is baked into the culture of this company. Everyone has an opportunity to accept responsibility and accountability for outcomes. Rather than struggling with lines of authority, each person is supported in discovering how they may best contribute collaboratively to the overarching corporate success. This cohesive sense of belonging serves as a path for higher levels of self-actualization, each of which offers material benefit in attaining organization strategy.

 

To be held in high esteem

The path through successive levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy is not necessarily straight, but the value to the company of performing at each successive level is nearly always positive. Provided that each level offers some opportunity for consolidation of the needs met, and that the striving continues upward, value generation will be significant. Given a place to call “home” and the recognition that they do have a place to contribute, many employees capitalize by fostering esteem among their peers.

That focus informs value by playing to the individual’s strengths so that they may be successful and have increasing impact over time. The respect of peers for contributions, whether directly from innovation or as a result of building on an existing practice or procedure, by turn fosters self-respect. This leads to a positive environmental feedback loop—each success creates the opportunity for greater successes over time.

A better you/me/us through self-actualization

At the pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy is the concept of self-actualization. The term originated in a work by Kurt Goldstein called The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (commence head-spinning now). While Goldstein used the term to describe a state all humans strove to achieve, Maslow used the term self-actualization to describe a desire, not a driving force, that could lead to the realization of one’s capabilities. For Maslow, self-actualization did not determine one’s life; rather, it gave the individual a motivation to achieve personal ambitions and fulfillment.

Taken as a level of development to meet specific personal needs, self-actualization is completely in alignment with effective innovation. Those people who are operating to become more self-actualized are more likely to embrace reality and facts rather than deny truth. This leads to more rational understanding of the root causes of circumstances and a drive towards focusing on problems outside themselves.

When it comes to an understanding of the human-centricity required for effective innovation — the notion that an innovation must have a specific utility in mind — those who firmly address their need to self-actualize accept their own human nature with all its shortcomings, and similarly accept the nature of others with a general lack prejudice. This breeds resilience and a spontaneity that are great innovation traits.

Those organizations that can play to this desire for self-actualization, that recognize the need to become our better selves, will reap the benefits. Command- and control-driven organizations will, by their nature, drive performance from the level of meeting physiological needs of safety and property. Those organizations that treat their members with respect, recognizing their talents and contributions, will enable their members with the freedom to be their best, and in so doing, will make better organizations because of it.

What kind of organization are you building? A safe place? Or a place to become your best self? If you’re interested in more innovation, it had best be the latter.

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Filed Under: Blog, Innovation, Organization Culture, Social Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Design Thinking Applied – Network of Leadership Scholars & Primed Associates, LLC. Partnering

June 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Primed Associates, LLC. is partnering with the Network of Leadership Scholars, a virtual community within the Academy of Management, to bring scholars and representatives from enterprise together to address real organization issues. Drew Marshall, Principal with Primed Associates will be facilitating a series of challenge-focused sessions using elements of the design thinking process. This conference is to take place on August 10-11, 2011 immediately prior to the annual meetings of the Academy of Management in San Antonio, Texas (August 12-16, 2011).

Our shared goal (in organizing this pre-conference conference) is to enable lively conversations around real issues faced by companies within three inter-connected dimensions: leadership, innovation and sustainability. Our hope is that the research designs and solutions that are generated as a result of these focused conversations will lead to collaborative solutions, potential research projects at the companies, and will lead to wider adoption of evidence-based practice. As one of the organizers, Nagaraj Sivasubramaniam (Associate Professor of Leadership, Department of Management in the Palumbo-Donahue Schools of Business at Duquesne University) noted, “Far too often, academics and practitioners talk past each other, and in attempting to bridge this divide, we hope we can realize the full potential of academic-practitioner collaboration.”

To address this divide, the desire is to capture the spirit of the network – collaborative conversations about issues we care about deeply. To increase the value of these conversations, it was decided to invite companies/public institutions to present a challenge they are grappling with, invite scholars to serve as a subject-matter experts, and utilize a facilitated design thinking framework to explore potentially break-through outcomes.

Participating enterprise organizations are bring challenges to the table such as: developing and leading virtual teams, talent management in quasi-governmental agencies, the application of complexity theory in leadership development, and leadership development to address the void created by the simultaneous planned retirement of a firms group of founders. We will have a mix of academics and practitioners – including participants from additional enterprises who will be participating but not bringing key issues to address. There will also be a blend of different research interests/expertise present as well as several participants from Europe, Asia and Australia, giving this a fairly diverse flavor.

Look for an update in August following the conclusion of this exciting event.

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SXSW – The social focus in innovation

March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This week I had the good fortune to be asked to co-moderate a session at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Based on a set of criteria laid out by the festival organizers – apparently as an expat Australian living in the wilds of central New Jersey I ticked some boxes on the diversity chart – I was afforded a front-row seat at the 25th anniversary of a remarkable event.

I won’t tell you all the things that I saw, simply some highlights. What I will say is that for all the pontificating about whether SXSW had jumped the shark, or whether the value was in the room or outside the room, I felt that for an event this size SXSW was one of the better managed conferences I have ever attended. Assistance was readily available should it be required. People were generally courteous. The opportunities to learn were plentiful, and yes, those opportunities were both in the presentation rooms and out on the street in cafés, bars and restaurants, too.

I was not able to devote more than three days to my SXSW experience and given how much I did I don’t know how anyone can pull themselves together for the full ten-day Platinum program. With all the parties involved it would be a shattering experience which would require another ten days vacation for recuperation.

Speakers heard
There is something about conferences with a reputation that makes speakers lift their game. To fail (or is that, FAIL?) at SXSW would certainly be a career limiting move. One of the highlights was seeing June Cohen, the Executive Producer of TED Media, share the journey that the TED conference has taken as it has become a platform for sharing the inspiring and thought-provoking from around the world. Ms. Cohen’s passionate exploration of the challenges of taking TED content “radically open-source” was engaging and intriguing. What TED is and what it is becoming are fast becoming two very different ecosystems. I’m looking forward to watching and learning more over time.

From the sublime to, well if not ridiculous, the profane was the experience of Gary Vaynerchuck live. The large ballroom in the Austin Convention Center was filled with Gary V acolytes and had all the atmosphere of a tent revival meeting. Mr. Vaynerchuck did not disappoint his fans or those new to the experience of him live. He strutted and stormed across the stage and ventured into the audience to spread the love. By turns charming and crass, witty and snide, he kept the audience locked into his always present but not-quite-overt sales pitch for his new book The Thank You Economy. As a New Jersey resident I love his enthusiasm. As a business person I love his story. Certainly the man knows the cardinal rule of the entertainer (no, not working with animals and children) – leave ‘em wanting more.

Rather than providing more speaker recaps, I’ll leave with a brief overview of Bruce Sterling’s closing speech. Now, I as a long time fan of science fiction, I am a huge fan of Bruce Sterling’s writing. I had never seen him live, but knew that his connection to SXSW was long and deep. He did not disappoint either. In a speech that was part angry polemic and part trickster diatribe, Mr. Sterling spared no mercy in skewering Washington, DC politics, Italian politics, politics in general, corporations specifically, and another SXSW speaker J.Craig Venter directly. One of his earliest pearls was that, “all the political language has been rendered toxic.” As a writer, if your use of language is restricted it means you’re a party to organized deception. And Mr. Sterling was not to be silenced. Go here, for a very neat Twitter capture by Jon Lebkowsky. http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/03/bruce-sterling-at-sxsw-2011-brilliance-on-twitter/)

Another highlight directly connected to the speakers, panelists and presenters was the sponsorship by the advertising giant Ogilvy, of a series of visual note-takers from ImageThink who attended and documented nearly 100 sessions over three days. Their output is phenomenal. See here for a link to the efforts.

Connections made
As mentioned earlier, I was invited to participate with Renee Hopkins, the Senior Editor of Texas Enterprise in the co-moderation and facilitation of an Innochat live core conversation. Core conversations are meant to be topic-focused but wide-ranging full group discussions. Our topic for the day was, “Business Model 101: How do you make money?”

Not knowing what to expect we knew that we needed to bring some technology into the room, which was not provided (on purpose) for core conversations. The intent by the SXSW organizers was to keep people focused on dialogue and not technology. That said, we need to stream a live feed from the #innochat Twitter feed as that was the heart of our initial pitch. We managed to do that and have Gwen Ishmael and Justin Sutton from Decision Analyst, Inc. in the room moderating the live stream and bringing participants into the room by highlighting specific tweets. With over 100 participants in the room and a good many online our discussion was lively and over all too quickly (see: Vaynerchuck – “…leave ‘em wanting more,” above.)

For me, however the main highlights from attending SXSW was making connections with people I know online from Twitter in real life and from past lives. A group of innochat leaders were able to connect in real life over food at Threadgill’s North (I highly recommend the meatloaf with garlic cheese grits.) It was great to take a set of relationships from one technology space offline and have just as wide-ranging and robust discussion. I also had the good fortune to experience dinner with a former co-worker (and friend) and her husband. I was treated to the spectacular views from the deck of The Oasis, which have to been seen to be believed (as does the décor of the currently being refurbished and expanded establishment.) And if you ever get the chance to see The Carper Family play live at the Hole in the Wall I highly recommend it!

All in all, experiencing a place like Austin making accommodations for the masses of conference attendees while retaining its sense of self was wonderful. The mix of music, film and digital media folks made for a vibrant combination and the energizing discussions filled with opportunities to learn, with friends and queuing strangers alike, made it a great experience.

I look forward to returning next year, if not sooner.

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Ignite Princeton 2 – 4 minute recap

February 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who attended Ignite Princeton 2 at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey on Wednesday February 9 – Thanks! It was great to see and great to have your support for a fun local event. Thanks to the people who traveled from near and far to participate and present. Without your involvement it wouldn’t have been half as good. A little video recap to share with you…

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New from Primed Associates – Primed for Innovation Issue 1

February 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Primed for Innovation Issue 1 - The Innovation Ecosystem

Primed for Innovation Issue 1:

Welcome to Primed for Innovation a primer on things to consider when you are interested in improving your organization’s approach to innovation. The following topics are offered as thought starters. [Read more...]
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SXSW Interactive – Primed Associates will be there

February 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who don’t know, Drew Marshall at Primed Associates is actively involved with #innochat, one of the most active chat groups on Twitter which meets every week on Thursday at Noon USA Eastern Time. One of the things that makes #innochat so engaging is that it attracts those who are keenly interested in innovation from around the world. Each week a new topic is presented, a framing post for the topic is posted on the #innochat site, and the group focuses on some key questions the topic raises.

At innochat we covered a wide range of subjects in 2010, such as:
• Collaborative Innovation – hosted by @Renee_Hopkins on January 11
• Explore the relationship between design thinking & innovation – hosted by @estephen on February 18
• Can we learn to be innovative? – hosted by @PaulSloane on March 18
• The Role of Consumers in Innovation – hosted by @Gwen_Ishmael on April 22
• Discovery-driven planning is a plan to learn – hosted by @Brioneja May 27
• Complexity vs. Complicated tackled with good design thinking – hosted by @jpamental on June 17
• Innovation Process Models – hosted by @SSusman on July 8
• Innovation Backwards: Leading Entrepreneurs to Innovation – hosted by @Renee_Hopkins on August 19
• Setting Cultures That Foster Open Innovation Crowdsourcing – hosted by @Gwen_Ishmael on September 9
• Crossing the O (Operations) Gap – hosted by @DanielleCass on October 14
• On building innovation communities – hosted by @AndreaMeyer on November 4
• Time-Value of Innovation and the 24 Hour Customer – hosted by @ExponentialEdge on December 9

To say it is fast and furious would be an understatement.

Well, with the idea that even those involved in #innochat can benefit from an change in perspective to drive their own approach to innovation, Renee Hopkins, one of #innochat’s current leaders (along with Gwen Ishmael and our technology guru, Jason Pamental), decided to create an #innochat event for SXSW 2011 Interactive. Here she is in her own pitch to the good folks at SXSW:

The regular Thursday noon Innochat has become hugely popular on Twitter. As founder of Innochat, I propose a live session with a mixed panel of innovation experts and entrepreneurs in which we’ll discuss business model theory and business model innovation and design as they pertain to specific start-ups and established companies. We will gather volunteers beforehand, entrepreneurs and representatives from existing companies who are willing to discuss their process of business model innovation and eager to get advice from the panel of Innochat experts. Business model innovation is a hot topic currently because entrepreneurs are discovering that without a clear picture of their business model success remains elusive. And established businesses facing threats are discovering that redesigning their business models may be the only thing that will save them. This topic is of particular interest at SXSW because many attendees are either startups or come from companies threatened by the rise of digital publishing of all kinds — the music industry, print media, the film industry, and the software industry, in particular — companies that critically need new business models to survive.

Needless to say, Renee’s pitch was accepted and she and Drew Marshall will be moderating this core conversation on Monday March 14 at 12:30PM (Austin time which is Central Standard Time). We hope to see you there. Or, see you participate on line by following the #innochat hashtag on Twitter.

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