Innovation - a verb not a noun

Erica Hurley and I ran an 'innovation visioning' workshop for a KIN member organisation this week. The organisation is faced with a number of significant new external finanical and regulatory influences and constraints. This means that delivery of their services to the cost and quality required will require a radical rethink of the way they operate. The emphasis of the workshop was creating an innovative culture and climate, where ideas can flourish, be evaluated, nurtured and implemented. We were doing some post-workshop feedback which resulted in an 'aha' moment from one of the participants; 'I get it; innovation is not a noun, but a verb'. This neatly sums up what we were trying to do - create the conditions in which people can do smart things differently.

Advanced level product innovation, but where's the service or management innovation equivalent?

I was looking around the websphere for inspiring case-study examples of product and service innovation. I came across the following interesting examples of approaches to product innovation:
BMW's blurb is certainly hyperbole “We have created the perfect synthesis of architecture and process-oriented thinking”, but you've got to hand it to them when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is. I'm sure it's a terrific R&D facility, but I wonder if it does truly create innovative products? Their Open Innovation facility may do so but is not very 'open'. See their paper here
More inspiring is this 3 part McKinsey video presentation on product innovation at Italian design house Alessi; as you would expect, it is superbly well designed. Most impressive is the third segment, where founder Alberto Alessi explains why and how measuring the success of innovation is so important. His 5 measures, combining form, function and commercial metrics are really interesting.
OK, so there's lots out there on product innovation, but where's the equivalent for service or management innovation?

Eames' implicit knowledge transfer

I was enthralled by Eames Demitrios' charming TED.com presentation about his grandparents' work. Charles and Ray Eames will be familiar to most through their iconic furniture, particularly their wireframe and timeless office chairs. What particularly struck me was Demitrios' engaging way of communicating, particularly his 'broth of images' (see about 5mins 40 secs). We all know that the best presentations are a good combination of visual imagery and narrative, but he takes this a stage further and provides a wave of simultaneous moving images, leaving an impression or gestalt, rather than facts or information. We deal in tacit knowledge transfer, explicit knowledge transfer; I guess this is an example of implicit knowledge transfer?
http://www.ted.com/talks/the_design_genius_of_charles_and_ray_eames.html

Enabling Technologies

Last week we held the first non-specific Enabling Technologies (ET) Special Interest Group (SIG). It was, I think, a success!
We had an ambitious agenda but just about managed to get through it all.

This meeting took place at the Swan at Streatley the day before the KIN Summer Quarterly workshop.

Scott Gavin was our guest speaker. Some of you may be familiar with Scott's work in the 'Meet Charlie' series of Slideshares - I've certainly used them at a couple of meetings I have run and if you haven't seen them and have an interest in things 'WEB 2.0', you should.

At this meeting, one of our activities was to define what technologies we want to focus on. It was emphasised that Enabling Technologies are not 'just about the Technology' but have People and Process aspects also. So we won't be just talking about the technologies themselves, but looking at the pragmatic issues around their implementation and effective use.

I found this little clip which helps illustrate the issue!



We started the process of constructing a map of the technologies that KIN members are using (of which just the central part is shown here. This will be expanded over time so that KIN members will be able easily to identify who to talk to if they want advice and expertise from other KIN members in the use of any given technology.

We developed a draft 'charter' for the SIG to clarify it's purpose, scope and objectives:

Purpose:
The purpose of the SIG is to share Knowledge and Experience to enhance members' ability to select, implement and support enabling technologies in their organisations taking into account people, process and culture implications
Scope:
IT Tools to facilitate and enhance the KM processes of Location, Collection and Connection within organisations
Objectives:

• To enhance awareness of what's available by mapping what KIN members are currently using and/or have considered using.
• To add to the map other technologies/tools that might also be considered
• To use results of the mapping exercise (and other feedback) to drive focussed K sharing events between member organisations and acquisition of K from expert
• To develop an ET 'toolkit'

Following on from Scott Gavin's presentation where one of the things he talked about was the benefits of tagging and social bookmarking, I continued to encourage SIG members to try out Social Bookmarking both as a benefit to KIN and to look for the value such a tool could bring to their own organisation. To help anyone who would also like to 'have a go', I've adapted two presentations I found that shows you how to get started.

Get Started with Diigo Pt1 - Set up your account

Get Started with Diigo Pt2 - Using Diigo

And a simple demonstration of just one of the benefits of using Diigo (there are many others - but one step at a time!)

Diigo vs adding links manually

All the web resources referred to at the meeting can be found in this list.

And Finally: A look at how the future was expected to look in the 60's. Interesting that the 'people aspects' were probably more inaccurately foreseen than the technology itself!

Thinking about the mojo

As an expert in something, have you ever been asked 'just how do you do that' and not being able to really say how? Working in knowledge transfer, it is sometimes better to just observe expertise rather than get the expert to try and describe what comes naturally to them. Have a go at writing down how you tie a shoelace. See what I mean? This is why video is such a great medium for conveying complex or technical processes for knowledge transfer.
There is a fascinating article in this week's New Scientist about Ralph Guldahl, the PGA champion of 1937 and 1938. There is a story that after writing a step-by-step guide for golfing beginners, he completely lost his mojo and his ability to win. The suggestion was that by 'capturing' this knowledge he lost his natural golfing ability; was he thinking too much about what he had previously done instinctively? A cautionary tale for those of us in the knowledge transfer business? No. It seems Guldahl, having a young family and being fed up with life on the road just got bored with that life. Getting an expert to describe what they do is not risky, just difficult.