Report 103

Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

Wednesday 17 August 2011
Issue 193

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly (or thereabouts) newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

JEFFREY IS ON TWITTER: @creativeJeffrey

Follow CreativeJeffrey (that’s me!) on Twitter at http://twitter.com/creativeJeffrey.

INNOVATIVE LEADERSHIP

The word “innovator”, to describe an individual, is used far too widely these days. As I have written in the past, business innovation is a collaborative affair that runs from idea, through development to implementation. This process normally involves many people with various expertise. So the notion of a lone innovator simply does not exist. Usually, when people speak of innovators, what they really mean are “creative thinkers”, in other words, people who are able to generate creative ideas that become the basis of innovations. Sometimes, however, what people mean by “innovator” is what we will call an “innovative leader”. Classic examples of innovative leaders include people like Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) and Thomas Alva Edison (who commercialised electric lighting and many related things). Innovative leaders are creative visionaries who have big ideas and, most importantly, can motivate people around them to turn those ideas into reality.

An Innovative leader does not even need to be the person who creates the idea behind an innovation. Often, she simply recognises a great idea – perhaps devised by a subordinate – and envisions the path that leads to that idea’s becoming a reality. Indeed, I would argue that creative genius is less important in an innovative leader than is the ability to form a vision around an idea or set of ideas. And once she has formed that vision, she needs to be able to share with employees, suppliers and business partners the vision as well as enthusiasm for turning that vision into a reality.

Imagination and Communication
In order to achieve this, the innovative leader needs a powerful imagination and excellent communications skills. She also needs to have confidence in her team and their ability to work together to achieve that dream.

The innovative leader is not a micro-manager. She focuses on the big picture and works with creative thinkers who can add to that vision and make it greater. Micro-managers, on the other hand, tend to stifle creativity and focus far too much on the details – causing them and their teams to lose sight of the big picture.

Perhaps most importantly, the innovative leader needs to be able to communicate her vision and generate enthusiasm for it. Her team needs to be able to see the vision themselves and be willing to invest their own time and resources into making it happen. Innovative leaders know that leadership by demand is far less effective at encouraging creativity and innovation than is leadership through motivation and inspiration.

Ideally, team members will also be making creative contributions to the project. After all, innovative projects are almost never comprised of a single idea. Although they may have got their start from a solo idea, in the end they are the result of dozens or more ideas, ideas on improving the original concept, ideas on how to implement it, ideas to solve problems as the concept is developed and so on.

Willing to Kill When Necessary
An innovate leader needs to recognise when her project is not working and be willing to kill it, no matter how much emotional investment she has put into it. She knows that if the project will not generate sufficient value to warrant continued development, she would do better to invest her energy, resources and time in a new innovative project. This is something many people find difficult to do with pet projects.

Innovative leaders are not just CEOs. They can be team leaders, division managers and others who manage people and projects. However, for a team leader to be an innovative leader, she very likely works under an innovative leader of a CEO. She certainly works in an organisation with a culture of innovation. Because if she does not have that culture of innovation, she will not risk trying to realise crazy ideas and she will find it extremely difficult to motivate her people to invest their time in her innovative projects. Indeed, without a culture of innovation, the innovative team leader will most likely leave the company for another one with a more receptive culture. In some cases, she might just run off and set up her own company – taking her team with her!

Relevant Expertise
Lastly, it is worth noting that innovative leaders are people who have an expertise relevant to their innovative projects. When accountants or financial experts are put in charge of car companies, they are seldom innovative leaders. They understand the finances behind the products, but not the products. When engineers or car designers, on the other hand, are in charge of car companies, they have the knowledge and experience necessary to become innovative leaders for their companies. Of course that does not guarantee they will be innovative leaders! The vision and motivation are also critical.

Of course this holds both ways. No one would ever think of putting an automotive engineer in charge of a financial services business!

LIVING IN A CROWD-SOURCED HOUSE
By Anastasia Wasko

The crowd-sourced "house" is built in an ideal place where everyone has passion, commitment, and integrity. Everyone’s end goal is the unity of creative energy and the greater good. Communities declare themselves, their principles, and their standards in a way that would make Internet authority Clay Shirky smile with proof of concept. The analog—a crowd-sourced house—provides the best metaphor for the real-time practice of living in a theoretically connected, idea-shaped world.

The exponential multiplication of crowd sourcing, vis-à-vis open brainstorming, distributed participatory design, and penniless-but-thoughtful-idea-type Web sites, demonstrates that your ideas are worth proliferating. That conclusion doesn’t mean that your ideas are good, relevant, or lucrative. It just means you are putting an idea out there, and someone (perhaps very near, perhaps very far) has the option to comment back, offer constructive advice, or simply take a self-defined amount of interest. Given the amount of collective cognitive capacity that is readily open and willing for comment, you should be able to hold your own corner in a crowd-sourced house.
Idea communities can be constructive leverage for your project.

Do you work in an organization where wiki-platforms are the standard for idea exchange? Are the platforms public or private boards? Interdepartmental or workgroup-specific? You are the real world. Although textbook theories might cast doubt on the prospect of productivity in a group setting, actual real-time practice shows that ideas can be fleshed out and semi-tested in ways that isolated individual thinking and reviewing is incapable of. Fanning out the breadth of contributor profiles enhances heterogeneity in exchange; some will read, others will respond, and yet others will moderate by default: If you do not receive any constructive feedback, perhaps your concept is still intangible.

There are many roles to autonomously distribute, and each has a key value because it is part of the idea-generation process. An idea community, those people who live in a crowd-sourced house, is comprised of forward-thinking, innovative folks. The community's self-organization will help you leverage your project concept and development.

Turning your light on in the crowd-sourced house
There is no need to harp on the culture of the idea community; the semblance of a group culture is too fluid for definition. Communities are functional bodies, but it is the individual who holds the fundamental key to the idea community: the culture of the individual.

The culture of the individual provides an organizational structure to the anarchy of the idea community. The fundamental nature of self-aggregation automatically conjures the following questions: How often do we wait to be presented with the opportunity to actively think? Do we suppose that creativity and innovative thinking necessarily have an end goal? Why not apply the open innovation and discussion process to things that don’t assume that crowd sourcing is the best way to generate potentially useful ideas?

If there is risk, ideas are self-edited. It’s easy to understand that the smaller the risk for the individual involved, the greater the chance there won’t be any self-editing before ideas are presented. If you want a room in the crowd-sourced house, you must pay your way through the exchange of ideas, because that’s what your culture does. (Cue light!)

Therefore, once the foundation for open exchange has been clearly defined, an idea community emerges to usher the development along. Then you need to consider the backdrop: bureaucracy and other cultures of one.

The bureaucracy and the individual can get along
Crowdsourcing can be leveraged across levels of engagement, application, and culture. It might not sit well with some executives to think of their customers as idea partners—but it should, says author Henry Chesbrough, director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California's Haas School of Business. Open innovation is the standard that will drive the economies of the future. Ideas should not arrive from a single person and live in a vacuum, and they should not be waylaid by individuals in a vacuum. With crowd sourcing, ideas are waved through by individuals who are part of communities that nurture them. It is the executive’s responsibility to ensure shareholder engagement, and sometimes business practice needs to be suspended for ideas to move forward.

If the democracy of open idea exchange isn’t immediately apparent to you, let me reiterate it here. The individual in a crowd-sourcing environment moves ideas forward. Any distinction between amateurs and professionals is blurred, and project advancement can be considered payment. Crowd sourcing, and living in the "house" built with it, paves the way for democratic, sustainable innovation by each individual. Such an individual might make your next great breakthrough. It might also be the nonquantified means and end—that is, the deadline, the project restraints, or the immediate criticism—that enables true innovative thinking and collaboration to come through.

The globalization of innovation
Wikipedia is the seminal example of what happens when the collective turns productive. OpenIDEO, the never-coming-out-of-beta platform of design agency IDEO, is a happy land of specialized knowledge where both lay people and trade people can meet. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offers “hits” and “rewards” for “Requesters” seeking human help on small computer tasks. One ad will generate “hits” from a “worker” base that is guaranteed to be more diverse than your own. The best crowd-sourced scenario makes planning and strategizing second to the idea of pure discovery—if you trust the process.

What happens when you challenge a global workforce with such an idea process? Who knows. The net for idea implantation is astounding. There can be unexpected interpretations that match your idea or problem with a highly relevant application and solution. Crowd-sourcing strategy throws caution to the wind, but discovery is persistent, even when you go out to lunch. There shouldn’t be the immediate need for quantification, and crowd-sourcing options are a very economical way of making good use of open systems, open source, and creativity. There isn’t a need to assemble the diverse team; the team assembles itself for you—and you meet online from your anywhere-in-the-world crowd-sourced house.

About the Author

Anastasia Wasko is the principal of the syntax rugrat, an innovation consulting practice that helps solopreneurs and small businesses leverage creativity in business. She believes the creative process is a democratic one, and she enjoys mediating "flow" for individuals and projects, large and small.

Anastasia spent several years living and travelling abroad. she is inspired by language, the literal translation of ideas to reality, and the way experiences are constructed through language.

You can visit her web site at http://thesyntaxrugrat.com

JEFFREY SPEAKS IN JOHANNESBURG AND FARO!

Johannesburg
I will be delivering a presentation on open innovation at the fourth South African Innovation Summit next month. But that’s not all, some of South Africa’s and the world’s top thinkers in innovation will be speaking and delivering workshops at this fantastic event. Join us! http://www.innovationsummit.co.za/

Faro
I will make my first ever public presentation of Anticonventional thinking during an interactive workshop at the European Conference of Creativity and Innovation (ECCI) in Faro, Portugal in September. Join me and the cream of Europe’s creative thinking crop at ECCI – Europe’s most important creativity and innovation event of the year. More information at http://www.eaci.net/eccixii/

And What About Your Company/City?

In addition to the above public conferences, over the next few months, I am scheduled to be doing private talks and interactive workshops in Germany, Italy, Mexico and Belgium where I will help people learn how to tap into their own and their teams’ creative ability. How about you? Would your team benefit from learning how to think more like creative geniuses? If so, contact me and tell me about your organisation and your needs.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHECKS AND CREATIVITY

I have been reading lately about how companies today are performing “social media checks” on potential employees. It works like this. When a company is considering hiring someone, human resources or, increasingly a contractor, searches for information about the potential hire on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs and so on. At the same time, I have frequently read and heard that companies are coming to realise the importance of hiring creative thinkers.

I can only assume therefore that human resources must be searching social media sites in order to identify rebellious people who are not afraid to stick out from the crowd; people who are willing to take leadership even in unusual activities; people with senses of humour and the absurd (most highly creative people also have great senses of humour); people who are different and not afraid to show it.

Presumably, human resource social media specialists are looking for extroverted people with pictures of themselves doing strange things, with tweets and Facebook status updates that are occasionally rebellious and entertaining. Surely they are looking for people who publicly question the status quo and are not afraid to shock conservative thinkers with radical and sometimes disturbing ideas. After all, it is these people who will combine the creative thinking skills necessary to lead businesses in innovation and the willingness to take risky decisions about implementing potential breakthrough innovations.

Moreover, I am sure that human resource social media specialists are rejecting people whose tweets and status updates are benign confirmations of popular thinking. Doubtless they are uninterested in people whose photographs look like those taken at competent but uncreative photo studies. Surely, people who conform completely to social norms and never write or show images that are in any way risky are rejected for employment because they are unlikely to be particularly creative or willing to take risks when their colleagues have creative ideas.

Because the funny thing is, a friend told me that it is the other way around. When human resources check people’s social media backgrounds, they look for people who have no embarrassing or silly photos, who have never written anything risky or questionable, who fit into the status quo like feet into a pair of comfy bedroom slippers. Worse, they reject out of hand and without questioning (in order to avoid discrimination based law suits) people who seem deviant, extroverted and outlandish.

But that would be silly! After all, if companies truly want to hire highly creative people, particularly those who have the potential to become innovative leaders, they should hire the risk takers who are not afraid to be themselves, who are not afraid to stand out, who are not afraid to be creative and show it.

READ JEFFREY’S BOOK ON MASTERING INNOVATION

If you enjoy Report 103, you’ll love my book: THE WAY OF THE INNOVATION MASTER. It’s a creative look at how you can become an innovation master and lead your company on a path of innovation. More information at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/books/

MISSING REPORT 103 AND THE BALTICS

If you have been worried because there was no Report 103 during the first week of August, you can stop worrying now! I was away on holiday in Latvia and Estonia during the first half of the month and did not publish a Report 103.

If you’ve not been to the Baltic countries, I recommend doing so. Both Latvia and Estonia are thriving countries showing strong economic growth based, at least in part, on political and social innovation. Just over 20 years ago, both countries were miserable appendages to the Soviet Union. Today, they are thriving economies. Estonia, in particular, has demonstrated strength in new technologies. The technology behind Skype, for instance, was developed in Estonia.

Meanwhile, Latvia is making a solid effort to encourage tourism. And it works. Finally, hotel, restaurant and entry fee prices that are significantly lower than in Northwest Europe make these countries even more attractive.

And, as I have noted before, there is nothing like getting away from it all and going some place you have never been before in order to recharge your creative batteries.

JENNI IDEA MANAGEMENT

If you need to capture, evaluate and implement creative ideas from your workforce, your business partners and/or your customers, take a look at Jenni innovation process management software. It’s easy to use, fun and a bargain compared to competing products which lack the functionality and expertise in organisational innovation.

In North and South America: http://www.jenniusa.net/
Elsewhere in the world: http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/