clair075

I find that I've become increasingly irritated with all of the narrow interpretations and self-serving definitions of what is, or isn't, innovation.  I'm happy to climb up on a soapbox again to talk about one of the most common scapegoats for innovation, the act of brainstorming.  No other activity is more miscast, more often blamed for failure, or more often denigrated.  Strange that the activity that should be the easiest, most natural activity in an innovation process is singled out as the most complex, difficult and dangerous.  But fact alone highlights how poorly understood the entire innovation process is.  So I rise today to neither praise nor bury brainstorming, but to place it in its proper context. The Purpose of Brainstorming Brainstorming is a technique that allows individuals or small groups to generate ideas.  Brainstorming resides in an activity or phase that we call Idea Generation, which in turn sits in the larger context of innovation....

It's almost inevitable that innovation will grow to become an amorphous blob of ideas, techniques, processes, "experts", software and a host of other things.  It's the natural order of economics that when an opportunity is available, everything rushes in to fill the vacuum, and as the market becomes crowded various offerings must differentiate themselves from the others to demonstrate value. It's like this with cheese, wine, beer (remember when there was only Budweiser and Miller?  Now you can have chocolate beer, artisanal beer, birch beer, pumpkin beer, beer from the mountains, from the coast, etc) and a host of other products and services.  Unfortunately, we are reaching peak innovation offering, which means we'll soon see the dreaded hypenated innovation offering.  We'll know we've reached peak innovation insanity when someone writes the "Chicken Soup" for innovators souls book.  Coming soon to a bookstore near you. This slight rant of mi...

I'm writing this a bit tongue in cheek, but the point of this blog is very serious.  There are a number of phases that innovators go through, accepting what they can about innovation based on what the executives and corporate culture allow.  Growing as an innovators is something like experiencing the seven stages of grief, only it's often in reverse.   When we experience grief, as when we lose a loved one, psychologists note that many people progress through a number of stages. Those are:  disbelief, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression and finally acceptance or even hope.  That is, at first we deny the issue, then we try to come to grips with it, then we express anger, then we finally come out of the darkness and end up with some hope.  If you've never seen it, one of the best examples of the seven stages was acted out by Tony Shaloub, who played the character Monk on television. He goes through the stages in about 2 minutes (accelerated because of...

Today I read a long post that claimed that up to 30% of the banking jobs in the US would be "destroyed" by innovation.  No longer will we need bank tellers. Any job that can be automated or done by machines will be.  This is a classic case of creative destruction, described by Schumpeter as a component of innovation.  Innovation will always create disruption in existing conventions, economies and industries.  This means that it will also destroy EXISTING jobs.  It does not mean, however, that innovation is constantly destroying the net number of jobs.  This is what the media tells you, and it is wrong.  What does happen is that the type of job changes. For example, at the turn of the 20th century something like 60% of the population lived on farms, and we could barely create enough food to feed ourselves.  Today, something like 2% of the population lives on farms, and we create enough food in the US to feed ourselves and to spark a world-wide obes...