To Reinvent, Recruit The Rebels and Retrain the Brain

History is rife with stories of how people bursting with creativity were forced to take traditional safe jobs in deadening organizations while they toiled at creative pursuits on the side. Early American writer Nathanial Hawthorne was a customs agent. The ultra creative Franz Kafka worked for insurance companies. I had a relative who became one of Holland’s greatest regional writers, but spent his entire life working as an office manager. He would get up at 4 am each day to write before he went to work. This imperative to take a safe but boring job popped into my head during a recent discussion with someone who was tasked with reinventing a business operation that has been running sleepily in well-grooved tracks for some time.

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IDEO's Tim Brown on Using Design to Change Behavior - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Many large-scale phenomena are the sum of individual actions — sometimes millions or even billions of them. Apple's recent celebration of 10 billion songs downloaded represents 10 billion choices made by consumers to download a song rather than buy it in other formats. In the healthcare space, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported a 50 percent drop in respiratory infections in children, a drop attributable (in part) to the group's campaign to educate millions of children to change their behavior: To wash their hands. But what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?

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Can truly great design be done the open source way? | opensource.com

This is a blog worth posting in full as it addresses the issue of open source, crowdsourcing and the concept of how ideas evolve in practice in organisations.

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A Framework for Unblocking Organisational Creativity

Our research "Is Australian management creative and innovative?" clearly confirmed the statement in this FastCompany article which showed all employees are inherently creative and that creativity is typically blocked by structural elements within a company. So if you can eliminate the blockages, you enable "group genius." In other words, you don't manage people; you manage the world in which they work. Matt Taylor, a creativity consultant suggest their a seven key components, or domains to unblocking thse impediments,

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Are the dynamics of innovation changing?

Ran across an intriguing article in Sunday’s New York Times. The author, Steve Lohr, raised the question of whether current trends may create a shift in advantage in innovation– from entrepreneurial companies to large ones. The argument is thatmany of today’s biggestproblems are in complex fields such as energy and the environment — and that solutions will need to be multidisciplinary rather than the work of entrepreneurial inventors. “The pendulum of thinking on innovation does seem to be swinging toward the big guys,” Lohr wrote. The article brought to mind for mean interview I conducted with Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen last fall. An edited version of the interview with Clay Christensen appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review – but one point that didn’t make it into the published version (due to space constraints) was a brief observation Christensen made aboutestablished companies and disruptive innovation.Christensen noted that he had become”a lotmore optmistic” in the last five years about leading companies’ ability to successfully innovate disruptively, if the management team understands the principles of disruptive innovation.

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