Mathemagenic

My (almost raw) notes on the session on Innovation.

Innovation success factors by Hank Kune

(background reading - Critical success factors for innovation in non-profit organizations, .doc) 

• Organisational structure for innovation processes
  • Treat innovation as a systemic process
  • Create space for innovation (physical, emotional, budgetary…)
  • Set ambitious goals and combine them with small steps
  • Focus on results
  • Learn from innovation process
• Organisational culture
  • Create a climate for innovation
    • Making time for innovation, e.g.
    • Rewards and recognition
  • Foster valueing innovaton
  • Break patterns and abandon excepted truth, e.g.
    • Look for ideas that do not work, but still get implemented
    • Support nonconformists
    • Confronting solutions proposed by managers by ideas collected from schoolchildren
  • Motivate personal
• People
  • Make people central to the innovation process
  • Communicate about innovation
  • Involve senior managers directly
• Environment
  • Search for and make use of opportunities outside organisation
  • Be customer-oriented

"You can't give people freedom and space without accountability"

Sources of innovation

• Burning platform (hot problem to work on)
• Burning passion (creative people driven by their own passion to find answers)
• Low threshold: everyone everywhere in the organisation knows how to do work, so listen to all people (e.g. secretaries) to find new ideas

How to facilitate creativity

• Network of facilitators, web-site with creativity techniques
• Finding people outside of organisation
• Artists functioning as translaters between different parties

Models of innovation and management of knowledge by Hilary Kane

See Models of Innovations and KM presentation (.pdf) and a corresponding paper How Might Models of Innovation Inform the Management of Knowledge? (.pdf).

During this talk I regretted of not reading the paper in advance. It's worth it. And I also enjoyed much the way Hilary has presented - making links to presentations and discussions of two previous days.

Citing Kuhn: "If we don’t marry theory and practice we are not more than fact gatherers"

Interactive session on innovation by Gerald Prast

This was an interesting interactive session. First we have brainstormed do's and don'ts of implementing innovation, then went into "what I can do to make it happen" and finished with discussion on connecting research and practice. Full brainstorming summary is on-line, but I'd like to cite the last piece:

How to marry theory and practice ("heaven and hell/hell and heaven")

• Use what is there
• Teach each other
• Avoid big words 
• Use the theory of innovation stages
• Bridge the (artificial) divide by people who have experience in both
• Do action research 
• Use Free discussion 
• Try to understand each others’ pressures 
• Engage people with deep knowledge of one subject and an interest in one or two others ("T-professionals")
• Use triads: Theoretician, practitioner, journalist/story-teller
• Re-wire the brain using Goleman theory
• Create common space to exchange points of view (e.g. Google answers)
• Act as a change agent, not as a lecturer
• Practice what you preach

You can find overview of this theme on-line, so here I'd like to write about a couple of things that caught my attention.

In his speech Bruce Cronin did an introduction of theories, practices and tools "around" social networks. As I'm reading other weblogs (also papers) on the topic, that wasn't much new. What I really liked is an opportunity to get a bit of conversation with not-blogging expert on social networks (he was aware of weblogs anyway :)

Next to other things I was wondering if being well connected (or being a broker) in a network is a function of personality type or job responsibilities/position in a company. Bruce couldn't generalize from his experiences and suggested that both play an important role. Or it also could be that people with "networking" personalities much easier reach positions in a company that require being well connected.

Christian Van’T Hof shared his experiences on creating Good and Best practice database with KM cases (presentation should be on-line; paper is here). He talked about a trend of moving from IT based KM to a community-based KM with using nice metaphor of Borgs (from Startrek) and guilds. What I found interesting is not the trend itself (not new for me), but Christian's suggestion that it will go back in search of the balance [later: see Sam Marshall about the same trend].

Tobias Mueller- Prothmann talked about usability evaluation for on-line knowledge communities (paper + presentation). He and his colleagues are working on usability evaluation questionnaires, which I hope to be able to use one day. It was very nice of Tobias not only to read How to get the most out of conferences by Scott Berkun that I linked to from participants page, but also use some ideas to make his presentation more fun.