Dec 8, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
The formula for risk analysis of innovation could be written as:
Likelihood of failure X Cost of failure.
Therefore, in a traditional hierarchical organisation, there is an ingrained reluctance to take risks and perhaps fail because of the financial cost, whereas in an open system where there is no apparent cost of failure, the restriction of the usual organisational and transaction costs are largely absent.
This does not reduce the incidence of failure, but it removes the financial costs, leaving the personal incentive to succeed, rather than focusing attention on the financial ones.
It is the personal drive to succeed, to do something useful, that makes lives easier, richer, more fulfilling, which is the source of most really original innovations.
Dec 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Management
Currently, I am in the middle of a project that seeks to find a way to motivate a collaboration between a group of industry and government bodies on a pressing problem. None of these bodies have a culture that welcomes external collaboration, they often seem to have trouble even internally.
In the process I came up with a list of “must haves” that the proposed co-ordinating body must take on just to get the prospective collaborators to the table to talk about it.
Any comments, and additions would be welcome
- Independence,
- Transparency
- Plays a catalytic role in the collaboration
- Ensures the governance of the collaboration is robust and consistent.
- No self interest beyond the role to facilitate the collaboration
- Serves as a co-ordinating body for activities,
- Serves as the communicator, but without any exclusivity
- Serves as the “warehouse” for codified IC
- Acts as the dissemination mechanism for IC, and contributions to the process.
- The body needs to have the confidence of all stakeholders.
- Dispute resolution mechanism
Dec 6, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
An idea is the outcome of all that has gone before, resulting in the “eureka” moment, the equivalent of the singers overnight success after 10 years of work in obscurity, playing smokey bars, gaining experience and honing skills.
Usually, ideas emerge from relative chaos of all the commercial equivalents of those smokey bars, places where problems, experiments, stories, left field solutions and all the richness of human interaction meet.
Makes you think that perhaps all this time around the water cooler is not really wasted, so long as the culture is tolerant of the ideas that will be thrown up, and enables something to be done with them.
Nov 28, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
The internet is choked with lists, 10 ways to do this, 5 best ways to handle that, bloggers put them in because a list is a proven driver of blog traffic. People seem to want the core of an idea to be trimmed down to a set of bullet points, perhaps it is just more digestible that way.
I have certainly done it a bit, with 12 facebook tips for SME’s, How to make twitter useful, 6 rules for strategic alignment, and many others, some my lists, others a link to the lists of others, each for one reason or another seemed to be useful and worth sharing. In the case of the lists I created, mostly they emerged from work I was doing for a client at the time, and the process of assembling a list assisted me to order my thoughts, and so hopefully, helped a few others in a similar way.
Today, the “Uber-list” from Forbes magazine, which has a whole feature on the worlds most innovative companies, the worlds 2000 leading companies, the most powerful people, the richest, and so on.
It makes for interesting reading, almost wherever you make your dollar, there is some reference to the industry, who is who in the zoo, and what they did right.
Thanks Forbes, something for everyone.
Nov 17, 2011 | Collaboration, Strategy
Scientific collaboration is a challenging proposition, most scientists would agree that collaboration is a key component in problem solving, but few practice it beyond their immediate research group, as their careers are dependent on publishing. As a result, they hoard ideas, data, methods, and all the other stuff necessary for progress, and publish it themselves.
The culture of the scientific community is geared to recognize publishing new and original stuff in scientific journals, not sharing ideas on a wiki. Scientists do not get a job or more funding on the basis of wiki-sharing great ideas, but they do for getting marginal stuff published, so guess where the focus is! To build collaborative scientific effort, we need to reverse this relationship.
During the project to map the human genome, huge amounts of data were required, data that was dispersed amongst the various bodies doing the research that generated it. To facilitate sharing, an agreement that became known as the “Bermuda Principles” was forged that created the culture of sharing data immediately it became available, and this simple change turbo-charged the effort to complete the project.
What drove the difference the agreement created to most other scientific collaborative efforts was that the major funders agreed that the price of participation in the project was the sharing of data, if you wanted the funding, the absolute condition was sharing data. Bingo, collaboration was created by putting a price on participation.
Nov 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership
The core skill of a successful innovator is their ability to recover from disappointment and failure, to learn from it, and go again, to embrace and recover fom error, not avoid it. As Steve Jobs Pixar’s founder said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who can” in the now more famous 1997 Apple advertisement “think different”
In this presentation by Randy Nelson, Dean of the Pixar University, the in-house learning facility of that innovation machine, Pixar, the things Pixar looks for in a potential employee are outlined. My summary and thoughts are below, but it is well worth the time watching Randy.
- Resilience and adaptability are the key components of the ability to recover, and change direction in the face of negative results and failure.
- Look for people who have mastery of something to demonstrate the innate drive to be the best. A resume is usually just a wish, a promise, so probe for mastery of something, anything as an indicator that they have what it takes to be the best.
- Find people who are interested, more than they are interesting. Interested is an indicator of curiosity, a core competence in success.
- Collaboration is more than co-operation on steroids. A production line can be co-operative, the actions at one stage impact on the actions at a subsequent one, so you need co-operation for it to work well but it is a sequential thing, whereas collaboration is all about amplification, the sum is greater than the individual parts. Individuals bring ranges of separate experience, knowledge, depth of understanding, depth of knowledge, breadth of knowledge that allows them to communicate on multiple levels, then collaboration can happen.
