Improvisational Cuisine February 8, 2010
Posted by keithsawyer in Everyday life.Tags: cuisine, improvisational cuisine, posh
add a comment
I just learned of a restaurant where the kitchen improvises your meal (thanks to Leslie Marticke of SCAD): it’s called POSH and it’s in Scotsdale, Arizona. From their web site:
POSH serves a seasonal coursed menu, starting with 4 courses, up to as many as desired. How it works…we offer a list of main ingredients, requesting you to CROSS OFF which items you DISLIKE, then our creative chefs surprise you with the remaining selections. We have a spot at the bottom of the list to add additional dislikes or particular medical conditions (allergies).
The kitchen is essentially a stage, surrounded by a 25 seat “dining counter” where you can watch the improvisations unfold.
This sounds fascinating! I wonder, though, how improvisational each dish is. I suspect the chefs have some basic recipes, that they’ve tried out already, and each night what you get is some variant of an existing dish. That would be more like “theme and variations” than like open ended, free jazz.
What if the customer could present the parameters of the challenge to the chef? Something like: “Create a dish with shrimp, tequila, and avocados” or “make a noodle soup with walnuts in it”. More like the challenges that are posed in the Iron Chef competition, but on a nightly basis.
Microsoft and Innovation February 6, 2010
Posted by keithsawyer in Organizational innovation.Tags: dick brass, e-books, ipad, microsoft, tablet pc
2 comments
I just read a fascinating articled by Dick Brass*, who was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004. He wrote the article on the occasion of Apple’s release last week of the iPad, a table computer. Many people are probably unaware that Microsoft has been advocating table computing for about ten years. Dick Brass was the guy in charge of tablet computing at Microsoft, so it’s fascinating to read his account of why Microsoft failed with their tablet PC, with a ten-year head start over Apple. (Of course, we don’t yet know whether Apple will also fail or not…but Apple has certainly got far more publicity in one week than Microsoft has in ten years.)
According to Dick Brass, it’s bigger than just the tablet computer–the real issue is a culture and organizational structure at Microsoft that repeatedly blocks innovation. Brass gives a second example to prove his point: he also turns out to have been in charge of an e-book project at Microsoft, also ten years ago and thus far ahead of Amazon’s Kindle.
Well, you might say “if Dick Brass failed twice, then maybe the problem is Dick Brass.” I don’t know enough about Microsoft to evaluate whether his account is the right one or is self-serving, but it has the ring of truth. After all, his projects aren’t the only ones at Microsoft that have failed to generate innovation–it’s widely known in the industry that Microsoft is quite bad at innovation. They report record earnings each year, but the money all comes from the Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite: products that are about 20 years old. Almost all of their new products come from their acquisitions of other companies that came up with the innovations.
Brass writes “Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” And that it’s not a cool place to work; “There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.” What happened? “Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation…Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world.”
How did the Tablet PC get blocked? “The vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept…he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet….so even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged.” And last year when everyone knew Apple was about to release a tablet computer, Microsoft eliminated their tablet group.
Another part of the problem is that Microsoft focuses on software and prefers not to develop hardware. It’s not a bad strategy because software is extremely profitable, and hardware is much riskier. But this sharp divide makes it harder to develop “beautifully designed products” like the iPhone–these depend on the new discipline of “design thinking” (formerly known as “concurrent engineering”).
Brass’s conclusion? “Unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future.”
*New York Times, Thursday Feb. 4, 2010, p. A25
Jugaad and Bricolage December 31, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Everyday life.Tags: bricolage, jugaad, levi-strauss
4 comments
Business Week* reports on a management fad from India, that goes by a Hindi slang word, jugaad (say joo-gaardh). It means “an improvisational style of innovation”. It’s “inexpensive invention on the fly”. It sometimes has negative connotations, like cutting corners. The idea is that it doesn’t have to be perfect or fancy; it’s just good enough to satisfy immediate needs. (Implicit in the Western fascination with this concept is the assumption that Westerners want products to satisfy more than basic needs, like to match their lifestyle, or provide admirable aesthetic design, or conform to their hip identity.)
This term reminds me of a French term famously associated with the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who died in 2009 at the age of one hundred. The term was bricolage and it loosely translates into English as “tinkering” or simply making do with whatever stuff you have lying around. A tinkerer, or bricoleur in French, is someone who fixes things quickly and cheaply. Levi-Strauss famously argued that mythical thought was bricolage. (In today’s French the word has somewhat different connotations of do-it-yourself; a store like Lowe’s or Home Depot would support your bricolage.)
So jugaad is not really new at all. It’s improvisational creativity, and it’s the source of all innovation.
*Reena Jana, December 14, 2009, “From India, the latest management fad”. page 57.
Massively Collaborative Mathematics December 26, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: density hales jewitt, fields medal, timothy gowers
add a comment
I like this story from the 15 October 2009 issue of the journal Nature, about how a pair of blogs allowed dozens of contributors to collaboratively solve a theorem that no single mathematician had been able to solve: the Density Hales-Jewitt Theorem (DHJ for short). The mathematician who created the blog was Timothy Gowers, a Professor at the University of Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, the highest honor a mathematician can receive. Even someone of Gowers’ high caliber was not able to solve the theorem. So he decided to try an experiment: He posted on his blog an invitation, to join a collaborative process of working on the theorem. He called it “The Polymath Project.”
Gowers’ blog regularly had thousands of readers, including many of the world’s top mathematicians, so the blog thread soon had thousands of words and dozens of top mathematical thinkers participating. Six weeks later, the theorem was proven and the proof will be submitted to a top math journal, under the collective name “D.H.J. Polymath”. The Nature article describes a creative process just like the one that creativity researchers have identified, of creativity as a series of small insights, as described in my book Group Genius:
For the first time one can see on full display a complete account of how a serious mathematical result was discovered. It shows vividly how ideas grow, change, improve and are discarded, and how advances in understanding may come not in a single giant leap, but through the aggregation and refinement of many smaller insights.
The article concludes:
We believe that this will lead to the widespread use of mass collaboration in many fields of science, and that mass collaboration will extend the limits of human problem-solving ability.
Failures Make You Stronger December 22, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research, Uncategorized.Tags: mary gick, mutilated checkerboard, spontaneous transfer, susan mcgarry
add a comment
Mutilated Checkerboard
I’ve just read a classic psychological study* by Mary Gick and Susan McGarry, published in 1992. They conducted a series of four experiments to test whether your problem solving ability could be enhanced, if you had previously worked on a very similar type of problem. The target problem was the “mutilated checkerboard” problem (see figure at right). The problem is: “You are given a checkerboard and 32 dominoes. Each domino covers exactly two adjacent squares on the board. Thus, the 32 dominoes can cover all 64 squares of the checkerboard. Now suppose two squares are cut off at diagonally opposite corners of the board. If possible, show how you would place 31 dominoes on the board so that all of the 62 remaining squares are covered. If you think it is impossible, give a proof of why.”
In order to solve the problem, you have to discover the “parity” rule: No covering is possible, because each domino must cover one black and one red square, and because the two black corners have been removed, there are two more red squares than black squares.
Gick and McGarry then developed several other problems, that are analogous to the mutilated checkerboard in that they require a “parity representation” to be solved. Some of them were easy to solve, and some were harder. For example, the easy problem was: 20 men and 20 women are at a dance. If two of the women leave, is it then possible for the remaining people to form 19 male-female couples? Solving this problem did not later increase performance on the checkerboard problem (which I find a bit surprising, but continue reading…)
Then, they developed another analogous problem, with men and women being seated at a dinner party. Most people failed to solve this problem at first, but when they received a hint, they could solve it. And the surprise is: failing at first, but then getting the hint, resulted in increased performance on the checkerboard problem! Their conclusion:
“source solution failures that are analogous to target solution failures facilitate spontaneous transfer” (p. 635). Wonderful paper!
*Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 1992, Vol. 18, No. 3,623-639
Wu Ming December 11, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Genius Groups.Tags: hothouse, luther blissett, wu ming
add a comment
No, it’s not a band, it’s a writer’s collective in Bologna, Italy. This is the group that has collaboratively authored several best-selling novles, including Q and ‘54. Q was published under the name “Luther Blissett” (after a “cultural guerilla warfare” project in 1994 where hundreds of people around Europe pulled off hoaxes using the name “Luther Blissett”). According to the Guardian newspaper, this was “a 650-page historical spy novel that used the Reformation as a multivalent allegory for the ups and downs of 20th century anticapitalism” (14 Nov 2009). Their later books were published under the name “Wu Ming” which they say means “anonymous” in Mandarin.
The group has five members and they often go by the names “Wu Ming 1″, “Wu Ming 2,” etc. They don’t mind their identities being made public, but they won’t allow photographs or go on television; even their solo books are published under the Wu Ming name. The idea is to reject the myth of solo authorship.
How do they collaborate? They meet every day or two, and email constantly. Each word is edited by every member, so no one person’s “style” comes through; it is a collective style.
There are other successful writer’s collectives, like Hothouse in Britain; they won the 2007 Waterstone prize with their teenage novel Darkside. These examples challenge our notions of artistic vision and literary style; they question our myth of the writer as a solitary genius.
Innate Cooperation December 3, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Uncategorized.Tags: altruism, cooperation, michael tomasello, why we cooperate
8 comments
A new book by Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate, presents evidence that babies are born to be social and to help others. Tomasello argues that helping others is genetic, rather than learned. This is an important contribution to the “altruism” debate–why would a rational (i.e. self-interested) person expend energy helping someone else? The standard answer (of the rational choice/microeconomist paradigm) has been that helping is a social norm that emerges because, over time, helping someone else ultimately results in a gain for the helper. And once the social norm emerges, children learn it during socialization.
Tomasello’s book presents data showing that infants as young as 18 months old try to help others. For example, if they see an unrelated adult who needs help picking up a dropped object, they help right away. From the age of 12 months, if an adult pretends to have lost an object that the child can see, the child will point to the object. Eighteen or twelve months is too early for such behavior to have been learned from parents. As another piece of evidence, Tomasello reports that children don’t begin to help more after they’re rewarded for helping–which suggests it’s not influenced by training.
Tomasello also talks about research into how helping behavior evolves as children get older. When they’re three, they begin to get more selective; they’re nicer to another child who was just nice to them. And, they begin to expect other children to follow the same norms of helpfulness.
This argument seems to support the theory that helping behavior was selected for during evolution, which is consistent with the rational choice models of altruism. Regardless of the mechanism, I’m glad that we’re all this way!
American Innovation: In Decline? November 21, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Uncategorized.Tags: creative teaching, decline of american innovation, innovation survey, newsweek
5 comments
If you’ve been in a newstand this month, you’ve probably seen the cover of Newsweek magazine shouting out its cover theme: “The Decline of American Innovation.” It turns out that the article is actually about how Americans are worried about potential decline, not about any actual documented decline. And Americans are worried, according to the polls cited in this article: 61% of Americans think the recession has lowered the country’s ability to innovate. Only 41% think that American is staying ahead of China when it comes to innovation. Only 55% of Americans think America is staying ahead of India, only 32% think we’re staying ahead of Japan.
But what’s fascinating about the survey is that Newsweek also interviewed people in China about our two country’s relative innovation potential. And the Americans were consistently more negative about American innovation than the Chinese were. Take a look at these differences:
Is the U.S. staying ahead of China on innovation?
U.S. percentage yes: 41%
Chinese percentage yes: 81%
Is the U.S. staying ahead of India?
U.S. percentage yes: 55%
Chinese percentage yes: 87%
This Fall, I’m a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. From Europe, the U.S. looks like an innovation powerhouse and it seems to be unstoppable. I just read a magazine here where designers and thought leaders were asked “What should we nickname the decade of the ’00s?” and over half of them referred to the iPhone or to Apple. Perhaps there’s something about the American mindset that leads us to think we’re less successful than we seem to others?
I’m spending my time at Cambridge in the Faculty of Education, studying creative teaching and learning, so I was also interested to see that the questionnaire asked why Americans are falling behind in innovation. 42% said the main reason was “Our schools are lagging in math and science education.” So how do the interview respondents think schools should change to give students creative skills?
Again, the Americans and Chinese gave radically different answers:
Increase math and computer science skills :
U.S. respondents: 52%
Chinese respondents: 9%
Teach students creative approaches to problem solving :
U.S. respondents: 18%
Chinese respondents: 45%
These last two are the most intriguing findings of the entire survey. Do Americans really think that knowing more math will make children more creative? I think the Chinese are ahead of us on this one.
Finland’s Innovation Economy November 6, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Regional innovation.Tags: finland, innovation economy, pisa, timss
8 comments
This is my first posting from Europe, during my two-month stay as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. I have about twelve guest lectures scheduled and I’ll be posting about my travels.
This week I’ve been in Finland, giving a series of four invited lectures at four different universities.* If you have ever looked at those national rankings that come out every year, comparing how students in different countries score on math and science and other subjects, you may remember that Finland is usually number one. What are they doing that makes them so successful?
Finland has made an impressive investment in education, both directly in their schools and in university-based education research. My colleagues in the schools of education here tell me that many of their best students want to become teachers; for every opening in a teacher preparation program, they receive ten applications. And all teachers must complete a five-year program that leads to a Master’s degree; to receive the degree, they have to write a research paper, and these are often of a quality that would warrant publication in a scholarly journal.
The Finnish language is only spoken by the 5 million people in Finland, so everyone has to learn other languages. First of all, Finland is officially bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, as a result of Finland being part of the Swedish empire for centuries, so every student has to learn both Finnish and Swedish. And then after that, they all learn English. I didn’t meet anyone here who didn’t speak good English. So if you’re spending so much time learning three languages, who has time left over to get so good at math and science? Somehow Finland does it.
Of course it’s complex but I think the short answer is a strong national commitment and a willingness to invest resources in education. Finland’s leaders know that the days of manufacturing paper and paper mill equipment are mostly gone. They realize that high tech companies like Nokia are the future for Finland’s economy. And they know their human resources are their most valuable resources.
They are also committed to equity; they have substantial investment in special education, they have no significant variations in learning outcomes across regions, and in school districts where students seem to be struggling, they invest more money than the national average to try to bring them up. Finland demonstrates that a commitment to equity is not incompatible with excellence.
*University of Helsinki, University of Jyvaskyla, University of Tampere, Tampere Technical University
