Innovate, Innovative, Innovation
In several long-term assignments I've developed strategies and implemented programs to encourage people to innovate - as individuals, in teams, organizations, industries, and regional economies. Whether an innovative construct is new to human consciousness or simply new to the awareness of a group of users, it includes risk and rewards, resistance and contagion, winners and loosers. Innovation clusters in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, in Austin Texas and in Silicon Valley have depended on an equilibrium of disruption and continuity. In all three locations, innovations succeeded because of the duets played by leadership and followership. Client-focused change programs in education, retail, manufacturing and media have also created new balances between formerly distinct categories of product and service. New insights often (but not always) stimulate innovation. For all those trying to get out of the box, I have these words:
There is no box.
Community
Community gives context. My interests focus on communities of awareness, communities of influence and communities of practice. Social media offer an amazing petri dish for studying community. Innovation programs are equally intriguing. I've studied individuals and their communities in a number of ways. My assessment of service communities in Minnesota prompted a reorganization of services for families and children. Later, following my study of afterschool care in Dallas County and mapping the community programs linked to schools, the Dallas Afterschool Network was established and the Foundation for Community Empowerment implemented community-school intervention strategies. People build communities around brands and media, too. Media X at Stanford University is a membership community.
Collaboration
The hardest part of collaboration is, quite frankly, that other people are involved. Sometimes an endeavor can be more quickly done alone - but that seldom delivers the buy-in required for sustained effectiveness. The energy required to explain, listen, negotiate, motivate, manage, and lead other people is often a deterent to collaboration. Interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers is a prime example. Public/private consortia and university/industry partnerships pose similar issues. Collaborations are panaceas in concept. In reality they require high touch, tender loving care and are usually high maintenance. Often, however, they pay big dividends. I've nurtured several exceptional collaborations.
Metrics & Meaning
I like math, and I also like magic. Both depend on the underlying or overriding story for their meaning. Several years ago I was asked to help engineers determine how much to charge advertisers for space on a narrowcast price-book driven media platform. New metrics based on studies I ran have been introduced. A lot of questions are still unanswered, though. in the three-way brawl of consumer-generated content, individuals' control of personal devices and advertisers' qwest for persuasion, new frontiers of innovation in metrics and meaning await..
Words and Images
Magic not included.
