When workers change departments for a short time–for example, shadowing another employee in a totally different part of the organization–it enhances the innovation potential of the entire organization. That’s because it results in more “weak links” throughout the organization’s social network. And from research, we know that creativity is more likely to result when information… Read More Changing Places
This is big news: Google buys Motorola for $12.5 billion. Why buy a mobile phone company that’s struggling? What makes it worth so much money? Why does Google want to get into the hardware business, anyway? Everyone in the industry understands the real reason: Google wants Motorola’s 17,000 patents. Google doesn’t intend to use the… Read More Google Buys Motorola: The Real Story
I used to think that a curator was someone who managed the galleries at an art museum. Of course, that’s true, but I’ve come to realize that at a deeper level, a curator is a designer of experiences. I first awoke to this deeper meaning when I was invited to speak in Amsterdam by De… Read More Designing an Experience
At the Emmy awards in 2010, Casey Pugh’s Star Wars Uncut won an award. This is an Internet project that invited fans to submit their own versions of their favorite 15-second scenes from the movie. After receiving hundreds of submissions, some made with Legos or pets, and others mash-ups with parodies from the cartoon South… Read More Star Wars Uncut
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… Read More Problems With Open Collaboration
We’ve heard a lot about collective intelligence, Web 2.0. Internet-based examples abound: Wikipedia, Google, Threadless. Thomas Malone and colleagues have written a new article proposing an analytic framework to help us think about these networks, what they call the “building blocks” or “genes” of collective intelligence. Of course, I wanted to see how their framework… Read More Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds
I’ve just been reading a fascinating new book, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age, by Ross Thompson (published 2009). It’s a fairly detailed study of technological innovation from 1790 through 1865, in a range of industries. Several histories have been written about how innovation systems emerged in the late 19th century: systems that included… Read More Innovation in the 19th Century
The intellectual property issues just keep coming up! (See my previous posts on IP issues.) Maybe I should go back to law school… This morning, I was interviewed by a team of researchers at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden; they are studying collaborative innovation networks and how they can contribute to transformational change towards… Read More Idea Sharing in Nonprofits
The reasons for downsizing are usually good ones–the company is losing money, the stock value is way down, market share is dropping. Of course, it’s brutal for the people who get let go, but it’s supposed to make the company leaner and better able to survive. But I’ve just read a research article* that shows… Read More The Downside of Downsizing
I just returned from giving a keynote at the Applied Improvisation Network conference, in Chicago–the legendary world headquarters for improv theater. This is a fascinating and fund group of performers and teachers. I was delighted to discover that improv has gone international–lots of folks from Europe, Asia, and Australia had flown in for the event.… Read More Applied Improvisation
The Creativity Guru 