Making Innovation Happen
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 09:56AM Whether it's choosing words to make up a sentence or walking along a crowded street, we're all capable of improvising. But musical improvisation fills us with amazement. How do musicians make the moment-by-moment decisions to create spontaneous music that's more than noise -- and what's going on in their brains to make it all happen?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 06:42PM Every comedian has a process -- and at some point, they ditch it to follow their gut. Comedy, especially stand-up, is widely regarded as the most difficult gig in show business. Similarly, successful product innovation is so difficult, it could be regarded as the stand-up comedy of the business world. E.B. White once said that analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog: Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. However, a sacrifice must be made to help more great ideas see the light of day, and studying how good comedians work can reveal insights into how innovation can benefit from the same advice.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 02:34PM When Josh Linkner was growing up, a Lego set included a bunch of blocks that kids could fashion into whatever they imagined. By contrast, today’s Legos are packaged as specialty kits with intricate parts and step-by-step instructions for building one specific construction—such as Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. To Linkner, a jazz musician, venture capitalist and the founder and chairman of ePrize, an interactive marketing company, this Lego trend reveals a troubling emphasis on teaching people how to follow directions at a time when using your imagination is more important.
Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 09:55PM What would it take to get rid of disposable cups? That was a question MIT Sloan senior lecturer Peter Senge raised in an interesting keynote address this morning at the MIT Sustainability Summit 2010. Senge, who is the author of well-known books such as The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, focused on the need for collaboration among unlikely partners to achieve real progress on sustainability issues – and convert our “take-make-waste” economy into a new, more sustainable economy. Senge used the example of disposable coffee cups (a topic apparently on his mind because he came to the Sustainability Summit from a Starbucks-convened cup summit taking place down the street) to get the MIT Sustainability Summit attendees thinking about the need for collaboration in sustainability projects.
Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 01:08AM The New York Times article “Building a Better Teacher”* describes two different studies of exceptional teachers and what they do that makes them great. One study is by Deborah Ball, Dean of the School of Education at Michigan State University, who created Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT). The second is by Doug Lemov, an educational consultant and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. What makes excellent teachers is a paradoxical combination: Both MKT and Lemov’s Taxonomy identify a repertoire of standard practices that teachers engage in constantly. But at the same time, both Ball and Lemov have observed that expert teachers improvise constantly. After describing how Deborah Ball, in a math class she was teaching, spent ten minutes entertaining a student’s incorrect idea about odd and even numbers–ultimately, to guide the class to an important fact that was not on the day’s lesson plan–the NYT article notes “Dropping a lesson plan and fruitfully improvising requires a certain kind of knowledge.”
