Finland’s Innovation Economy November 6, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Regional innovation.Tags: finland, innovation economy, pisa, timss
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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
Regional Clusters: More Complex Than You Think October 27, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research, Regional innovation.Tags: jan heide, paul tracey, regional clusters, silicon valley, simon bell
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Economists have noted for over a century that similar firms tend to “cluster” near each other. In the last few decades, research on clusters has picked up dramatically, in part because they are associated with more rapid innovation. One of the best-known examples of a contemporary regional cluster is Silicon Valley and its cluster of electronics and software firms.
Clusters are often assumed to work due to openness, collaboration, loose organizational boundaries, and information sharing. A new research paper* by Simon Bell, Paul Tracey, and Jan Hiede argues that it’s often more complex than this. They call this “standard” model of a cluster “a relational model of governance based on implicit rules and understandings.” And they point out that there is a lot of evidence for another type of successful cluster: one that’s hierarchically organized, with “unilateral rules originating from a dominating firm” (they cite several examples of research showing this, from the U.S. to England to Shanghai). The problem is that most research has only focused on the relational type of cluster, within which “innovation is an interactive and collective process requiring joint action on the part of cluster members” with “organic” interaction patterns between cluster members. A hierarchical cluster, in contrast, has “centralized decision making structures, rules, and formalized interactions.”
So their research question is, how does a cluster evolve into one or the other form? What variables make one more likely than another? The authors argue for two causal variables:
(1) information tacitness: tacit information is not codified and is difficult to communicate explicitly. It often involves unspoken practices and behaviors. The authors propose that the greater extent of tacit information in a cluster, the more likely it is to be relational.
(2) transaction specific investments: Someone has to pay to build the factories, machinery, hire the workers, and build a brand. In some industries (think automobiles) this costs a lot more than in others (think creating a web site). The authors propose that the greater the degree of specific investments required, the more likely the cluster is to be hierarchical.
The authors identify four other propositions that are too complex to summarize here, but this is an intriguing paper. In many ways, although the authors don’t say it this way, it challenges the mystique of clusters as being nice, good, and collaborative. (After Saxenian’s book comparing Silicon Valley to Boston’s Route 128 came out, it undeniably made Silicon Valley look friendlier and happier and made Route 128 look old-fashioned and uptight.) For example, on p. 630 the authors note:
For many of the key players in the global electronics industry, the motivation to belong to geographical clusters stems from a desire to control information flows between plants and to reduce spillovers, rather than from a desire to create new knowledge through a process of interactive learning.
This is a long a somewhat complex academic article, but it will reward close reading.
*Bell, Tracey, and Heide. 2009. The organization of regional clusters. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 34 No. 4, 623-642.
The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest October 23, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Enhancing creativity.Tags: bob mankoff, cartoon caption, cartoon caption contest, cartoon special issue, new yorker
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Since it was founded in the 1920s, the New Yorker magazine has been famous for its one-frame black and white cartoons, each with a single one-line caption published underneath. For the last few years, the magazine has gotten readers involved in the art of cartoon humor: it publishes a one-frame cartoon, without a caption, and invites readers to come up with funny captions and submit them. The funniest caption is selected by a panel of judges and published two weeks later.
Here’s a short article I wrote after interviewing a few recent winners of the contest, after being introduced to them by cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.
How do you win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Even if you never plan to enter the contest, taking the question seriously may help answer a bigger question: where do good ideas come from?
Maybe it’s like this—the proverbial light bulb moment. You stare at the cartoon for a while, stumped, until a caption suddenly jumps up from your unconscious mind like Newton getting bonked by an apple and thinking up gravity. But that’s not the way it usually happens—not with cartoon captions, and not with scientific or artistic breakthroughs, either.
I’m a psychologist who studies what goes on in the mind when you’re being creative. I found that there’s a pattern to their creativity—and this pattern provides a window onto how all creativity works for scientists and inventors and for The New Yorker caption contest as well.
The first important discovery about creativity is that ideas emerge over time, from hard work and constant revision. The “sudden flash of insight” is largely a myth. And the same goes for the cartoon caption contest: caption winners almost never have their ideas instantly. They think hard about the cartoon, and they keep trying new ideas and work on improving their first ideas. One winner, John Brouwer told me, “The caption came slowly. I felt my mind would crack.” Second, creativity takes preparation: training and constant effort to get better, or what the psychologist Anders Ericksson calls “deliberate practice.” You think about what’s working while you’re doing it, and you constantly aim to improve.
Many contest winners hone their abilities by entering the contest every week and think hard about what captions are effective : Todd Bearson said, “I’ve probably gotten better by watching which captions end up winning, comparing them to what I wrote and learning what seems to work and not work.” Third, cartoon contest winners usually generate lots of captions. Studies of creativity have shown that quantity breeds quality—what I call the productivity theory, because high productivity corresponds to high creativity. When the famous physicist Freeman Dyson was asked how to generate good ideas, he said, “Have a lot of ideas, then throw out the bad ones.” Cartoon caption winners are no different. Colin Nissan said, “Keep writing until one rises to the top.”
The fourth and final feature of creativity is perhaps the most surprising of all. The creative insight seldom comes to lone geniuses who sequester themselves from society; on the contrary, conversation and social ties enhance creativity. Contest winners tend to bounce ideas off of friends or family. Patricia Carrington had her idea while discussing the cartoon with her husband. Harry Effron while talking about the cartoon with his dad. John Kinde actually gets together every week with a “humor master-mind group” to brainstorm caption ideas.
In my own research, I’ve learned that creating with a group increases people’s creativity. It works like a jazz ensemble—everyone’s ideas build on everyone else’s, and the improvised performance is created collectively by the entire group. To collaborate, you don’t even have to be in the same room; creativity over time flows in an improvisational river. Think of all the cartoons that include the mythical figure of death carrying a scythe. When you connect them over the years, you notice that each new “death” cartoon invokes and builds on all the others in what amounts to is a collaboration over time.
Consider the fact that everyone who enters the caption contest is collaborating with the cartoonist. The cartoonist launches the contest by generating an ambiguous cartoon, one that can be interpreted many different ways. This kind of ambiguity, the kind that opens up many future possibilities, often prompts innovation. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones that inspire good ideas in others.
Superstar Extinction October 16, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: human capital, Jialan Wang, joshua graff zivin, life sciences, pierre azoulay, superstar extinction
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How important is collaboration in scientific laboratories? A new paper by Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang* studied what happens to research productivity when an academic “superstar” dies while they’re still actively engaged in scientific research. A superstar is a brilliant scientist who teams up with others to collaboratively conduct research and who co-authors with other scientists.
The researchers analyzed the coauthors of 137 eminent life scientists. On average, each superstar had 73 coauthors. (That number alone is astonishing, and shows how collaborative modern science is.)
Following the death of the superstar, his or her colleagues suffer a quality-adjusted decline in productivity of 8% to 18%. The authors found that this decline was lasting. Furthermore, the closer you collaborated with the superstar, the more your productivity declined. Their conclusion:
These findings are surprisingly homogenous across a wide range of coauthor and coauthor/superstar dyad characteristics. Together, they suggest that part of the scientific field embodied in the “invisible college” of coauthors working in that area dies along with the star — that the extinction of a star represents a genuine and irreplaceable loss of human capital.
As Azoulay said:
Our interpretation is that superstars infuse their scientific field with fresh ideas. They replenish it periodically and when they die, the entire field contracts so it’s really about their ideas and the effects of losing them are fairly broad and diffused.
*In press, Quarterly Journal of Economics
Design Thinking October 10, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Enhancing creativity.Tags: a fine line, change by design, design driven innovation, design thinking, hartmut esslinger, roberto verganti, Tim Brown
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Change by Design, the long-awaited book by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, has just been published. And it’s getting a lot of press: it was excerpted in Business Week’s October 5, 2009 issue, and was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal on October 9, 2009 (“The shape of things to come”).
The book’s genesis dates back to a legendary article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Design Thinking.” It’s IDEO’s approach to innovation–to focus on “new ways of communicating and collaborating.” Designers have always done these things, using a toolkit that includes user observation, brainstorming, prototyping, storytelling, and scenario building. As Brown writes,
“Design” is no longer a discrete stylistic gesture thrown at a project just before it is handed off to marketing. The new approach taking shape in companies and organizations around the world moves design backward to the earliest stages of a product’s conception and forward to the last stages of its implementation–and beyond.
Something interesting happened a few years ago, when IDEO was asked to redesign the patient health care experience at Kaiser Permanente hospitals. IDEO had previously focused on product design, but was now being asked to apply its innovation methodology to a service organization. The result is now legendary (a famous business case has been written about the project) and the result is that “innovation and design thinking [have been introduced] across the Kaiser system.”
Yes, the iPhone looks beautiful and works well, and that’s the result of design thinking. But we’re not just talking about making cool things; we’re talking about changing the way we experience the world. As Brown writes, “In the process [designers] are helping to make our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer and more meaningful.”
Child’s Play October 9, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: deborah leong, elena bodrova, lev vygotsky, pretend play, tools of the mind
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My first book was about children’s pretend play, and was called Pretend Play as Improvisation. It was based on my Ph.D. research at the University of Chicago, where I spent one year in a preschool classroom with 3, 4, and 5-year-olds. I was studying how unstructured social pretend play helped children learn conversational skills and social skills. At the same time, I was playing piano with an improv theater group, and I couldn’t help but notice that the children’s play was strikingly similar to my theater troupe’s performances. The children collaboratively created a fantasy play scenario, and it emerged improvisationally from their conversations.
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine* (Sep 27, 2009) has an article about a new preschool program called “Tools of the Mind”. The exciting thing about this program is that it coaches children to help them create more elaborate and sophisticated play scenarios: complex, extended scenarios that involve multiple children and last for hours. And the surprising thing about this program is that the researchers who created it, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, argue that this kind of play leads to better self-regulation. And there’s a ton of research showing that increased self regulation is associated with better learning and stronger academic outcomes in primary school.
There are some pressures in some preschools to play less and to focus on academic content more. Tools of the Mind rejects that approach, and says that if you want better academic outcomes the best thing for children to do is engage in play. Why? Here’s where the creative improvisational nature of play is important: it’s simply not the case that “anything goes,” that children just do whatever they want. When a child pretends to be a daddy, he has to follow all of the rules associated with what “being a daddy” means. Of course, the children are still learning things like “how to enact a spaceman” and “how to enact a fireman,” and they often have different ideas about how to do it. So they end up negotiating with each other about how to play. And this negotiation gets them thinking about how to act and why.
Ultimately, group improvisation is an incredibly valuable learning experience for children.
*The Make-Believe Solution. By Paul Tough, pp. 31-35
Problems With Open Collaboration September 22, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Innovative networks.Tags: booz&co, IBM, open, open collaboration, open innovation, open source, P&G, strategy+business
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A recent article in Strategy+Business (a magazine published by booz&co) notes the pitfalls of open collaboration: tapping into the power of emergent, bottom-up social networks to generate innovation. The companies that have been successful with it are well known: IBM with its innovation jams, and P&G with its open innovation strategy. But other companies often struggle to realize the benefits. The article’s basic premise is that open collaboration is similar to the “quality” movements of the 1980s (remember TQM?) The article notes:
Today, practitioners of open collaboration are picking up, in some ways, where the quality movement left off. They are working to tap the knowledge and creativity of a broad range of constituents, including employees and suppliers. In the process they are also rethinking their organizational structures and systems. Most important, at the core of both the quality and open collaboration movements (and sometimes it’s unclear where one leaves off and the other begins) are the values of trial-and-error learning, open communication, and systems thinking. Both movements recognized that employees — given the right tools, training, and management environment — are in the best position to do the analysis needed for meaningful improvement and innovation.
So what held back the quality movement? Hierarchical thinking; truly listening to the ideas of the rank and file; making the long-term commitment to professional development and cultural change. Of the seven suggestions the article lists for better success, I found three compelling: (1) Build a culture of trust and open communication; (2) Build a flexible innovation infrastructure; (3) Align evaluations and rewards.
Netflix Prize Announced September 22, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Genius Groups.Tags: bellkor, netflix prize, reed hastings, the ensemble
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In my previous post about the Netflix Prize, I said that two teams had met the Netflix criteria and the race was too close to call. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has just today announced a winner: The BellKor Pragmatic Chaos team won out over The Ensemble for the $1 million prize. Hastings said:
Teams that had previously battled it out independently joined forces to surpass the 10% barrier.
BellKor improved predictions for what movies people will like by 10.6 percent; so did The Ensemble, but BellKor submitted its final entry about 10 minutes before The Ensemble.
The Old Brand New September 17, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in Creative performance.Tags: dick hebdige, stadsschouwberg amsterdam, the old brand new
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Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam
What is art? And what is “new”?
I was asked to address these questions in an evening lecture in Amsterdam Tuesday night (15 September 2009), as the final evening in a series of seven monthly events that were called The Old Brand New. The lecture series was curated by a collaborative group of organizations in Amsterdam, led by de Appel arts center. And the theater was without doubt the most beautiful venue I’ve ever spoken in (see the image of the Stadsschouwberg at right).
The tension between the new and the old. This tension has been central to art theory and practice for almost 100 years, so how much “new” could I add? The core of my message was based in my own research on improvisational performance, both jazz and improv theater. I played audio and video clips for the audience that demonstrated how improv performers are always walking the line between the old (stabilities and structures) and the new.
Ultimately, the same question is central to all social theory–how to explain the tension between the structures that guide and support us in social life (cultural practices, ways of speaking, social roles, institutions, workplaces) and the new and improvised things that we do every day? Sociologists call this “the structure-agency dialectic” and I talked a little about that, too, in Amsterdam.
My talk was preceded by a lecture by the famous scholar Dick Hebdige (known for the book Subcultures), and followed by Q&A with Dick and I. A video of the event should be available on their web site before too long: http://www.theoldbrandnew.nl
Do Tight Deadlines Make You Less Creative? September 2, 2009
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: creative time pressure, deadlines, Greg Oldham, Marcus Baer
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In fact there’s been a lot of research on this topic. For the most part, I’ve cited a study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard showing that when people feel more time pressure, they are less creative. Now I’ve read a new study* by Marcus Baer and Greg Oldham, that extends this finding. One difference is that they examine a special kind of time pressure: “creative time pressure” which is, specifically, how much time pressure you feel when engaging in the more creative tasks at work–in contrast to deadline pressure for a more ordinary, non-creative task. A second difference is that they separate employees into two personality groups: one that is high in openness to experience (which suggests they will have a broader repertoire of ideas and concepts) and one that is low; and, they separate employee context into “high support for creativity” and “low support for creativity.”
Consistent with prior studies, they found that as creative time pressure increases, the employees became less creative (as measured by their supervisors). There was one exception: the group of employees that was HIGH in openness to experience, and also HIGH in support for creativity. For that group, the relation between time pressure and creativity was not linear; instead, it was an inverted U shape. That means that they were maximally creative with an intermediate level of time pressure; then, they became less creative with more time pressure but also with less time pressure.
Their recommendations: supervisors should try to identify the intermediate level of time pressure that is the sweet spot for creativity. And they should make sure to assign people who are high in openness to experience to those conditions. And finally, all managers should make sure that the environment is supportive of creativity and that employees perceive that to be the case.
*Baer and Oldham, 2006, “The curvilinear relation between experienced creative time pressure and creativity.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 963-970.
