Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 13

3 Unexpected Ways to Get More Innovative

What if the groundwork of your innovation has already been laid for you? What if there were enormous databases of information and ideas out there for anyone to use? This is exactly what the basic infrastructures that power our everyday lives offer us. Think of all the governmental organizations, open websites, and public libraries that give us access to free knowledge. When most people hear the word infrastructure, they think of big bureaucracy–not radical innovation. But the truth is that you can find countless opportunity for creativity in infrastructures.

Americans have had a love-hate relationship with governmental infrastructure for over three hundred years–from eighteenth-century colonial rebellion to twenty-first-century Ayn Rand bumper stickers to JFK’s 1961 call to “ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.”

Nowadays we only hear about infrastructure when it fails–when a train crashes or a bridge falls or a space program shuts down, but infrastructure is a permanent and reliable source of creative inspiration for tons of people. Infrastructures are massive collections of resources greater than any single individual or business. These deep reservoirs of knowledge put things into place that allow us to be innovative.

Infrastructure doesn’t just refer to roads, airports, the military, utilities, and the other basic services that keep contemporary civilization running–it also includes crucial sources of and outlets for sharing new information: libraries, universities, the Internet, broadcast capabilities, geological surveys, meteorological services, and institutions for research on space, healthcare, and all areas of science.

Infrastructures give us a competitive advantage, huge shortcuts to innovation, but their creative potential has an expiration date. Remember that the Internet was originally developed for the Department of Defense in the 1950s, then used for NASA research and by universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually, everyone around the world could use it and it lost its competitive advantage. The same is true of GPS, which comes from satellite technology, and now appears everywhere. The challenge is to tap into the creative potential of an infrastructure while it’s still fresh. Here are three steps to take when making infrastructures work for you.

Find what you’re looking for. The call sounds almost too obvious: to look for the things that will help you. But it’s easy to overlook the vast, open-access catalogues, archives, indices, and directories out there just waiting to help you innovate. Actively seek them out. Go to government websites (like http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/index.shtml?query) where you can learn about any educational opportunity imaginable. Talk to librarians. You can search through anything from the Library of Congress to the Department of Patents from the comfort of your own home. Take advantage of community colleges. Read through the relevant pamphlets, materials, and websites offered by local and state governments. All of these resources will help you make intelligent decisions as you run your innovation experiments.

Use what we have now. We encounter infrastructures on an everyday basis, yet we rarely take advantage of their innovative opportunities. PBS and NPR both have extensive services for innovators–including series geared towards anyone from K-12 instructors teaching innovation to entrepreneurs. Attend public lectures. They’ll open your mind to ideas and trends you hadn’t considered before. Look into research findings published regularly by National Science Universities, the National Health Association, the National Science Board, and other public research institutions. Take college courses. Go to your local municipality or your local state, which almost always have incubators–research labs that connect you with like-minded people and that give grants for helping you start your own work. Open your eyes and you’re bound to find something you didn’t realize was there all along.

Add to what we have. Contributing to the growth of existing infrastructures is a powerful way to mobilize your creative powers. Teach, blog, volunteer. Enroll in massive online open courses. Share materials through COINs, or collaborative open innovation networks. Participate in Citizen Science–a twenty-first century spin on the eighteenth-century tradition of asking non-professionals to help with scientific projects. Consider, for example, the way ornithologists ask birders to survey state parks and share what they see. Or the way geneticists part of the human genome project ask people to record information about their own genome. The limits of Citizen Science are constantly expanding as more radical forms of amateur participation become available in space exploration and the development of other technologies. At the heart of the next big scientific breakthrough just might be someone like you.

If radical change is what you seek, then what you need is a stable foundation on which to build that innovation. Think of it this way: the infrastructures that support our modern world have done the heavy lighting for you. Now, it’s up to you to build on that groundwork. What new layer will you add to old stone?

From Brand to Brand New: How to Re-Create Your Brand

Back in the day Dodge meant sporty and Chrysler meant sophisticated. Within a decade they both meant little as gas prices rose and tastes changed. Failures, bail outs and “mergers” followed. Just when it looked like the innovative vision Walter Chrysler had reached the end of the road a most improbable driver took the wheel and in a most unlikely moment of clarity showed us how to move a brand from misery to destiny.

In 2009, America was in the throes of a financial meltdown. So the media took little notice when Sergio Marchionne, CEO of the Fiat Group, bought a twenty percent stake in Chrysler after it had emerged from bankruptcy protection that same year. Believing that the Chrysler brand was valuable, he focused on a single commercial during the 2011 Super Bowl. Critics called the move careless. How could a company with serious financial problems justify the $10 million dollar advertising placement? And then it happened. For two minutes the country saw the city of Detroit as a metaphor for Chrysler: down but not out. Context and perspective changes everything. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since Great Depression, we could identify with the brand and valued its fighting spirit.

This was an honest moment of self-reflection as iconic rapper Eminem drove a Chrysler through highs and lows of the Motor City. The tagline was unforgettable: Imported from Detroit. Sales skyrocketed. Chrysler had saved itself and somewhere along the way gave an old brand a new identity simply by getting its story straight: a company of makers getting back to work.

Strong brands require more than the conventional us versus them–good guys versus bad guys twaddle. You need a bigger and better narrative: one that encompasses the amazing diversity of your organization and helps all of your people understand and appreciate how they are interconnected and more importantly where they are going together.

Brands are invaluable because they create a real sense of connectedness not only between an organization and its customers but also within the organization itself. Marketers refer to this bond as identification and valuation. At their best brands are inviting because they are inclusive and easily integrated into our social identity. At their worst they frighten us with the exclusivity of an isolated cult.

So how do you go about creating a better brand?

Get Real: In this age of information overload, getting your brand message past the spam filter, caller ID or mute button is only the first step. The biggest barrier is getting past the highly developed spin detector. The truth is that we now assume that most messages that actually reach us are finessed half-truths or seriously biased provocations. Think about the last time you got a message from a new or previously unknown source that you considered to be both credible and engaging. Thought difficult, it can be done. Consider the example of the Subaru. The once obscure brand is experiencing tremendous sales growth following its ad campaign showcasing grimy vehicles transporting messy children and dogs. Take your mother’s advice and just be yourself. Authenticity works.

Appoint a Poet Laureate: Who creates and re-creates your story? That’s basically what a brand is after all: owning a story in the mind of your customers and employees. It’s what connects us. Countries appoint poets, painters and architects to ensure that there is both continuity and innovation in the collective consciousness of the nation. It’s far too important to farm out to someone who has little vested in it. You can’t just change a brand on your own. Brand is consensual. It must be agreed upon over time. For example, McDonald’s is trying diligently to reposition its brand as a healthy choice restaurant with scant success because there is no credible narrative that takes us from yummy French fries to succulent salads. That requires a gifted laureate to walk us over those golden arches from the past to the present so that we can make sense of the journey.

Put the Pieces Together: In the early nineteenth century the Brothers Grimm started collecting German folk tales while still students at university. The result was Grimms’ Fairy Tales which helped create a shared vision for a German nation by integrating well known plots and characters into a unified identity. Commission a similar undertaking. Collect your best products, services, designs and campaigns and put the pieces together until they create something meaningful. Apple did this with its “Think Different” ad campaign. With a single ungrammatical slogan and disjointed photos of iconoclasts like Einstein, Martha Graham and Miles Davis to name just a few, Apple re-created a brand in bits and pieces simply by association.

Innovation is of little value if it lacks a brand that makes it meaningful. Brand is of little value if it lacks innovation that makes it valuable. You can wait for a crisis to drive you forward like Chrysler or you can just do it, but that’s another story.

How to Free Up Your Ability to Think Creatively

The biggest obstacle you face on the path to creativity is yourself. It’s the internal barrier that limits the way all of us think and see the world: our dominant logic. Everyone has a set of tenets or beliefs that determines what we value and what we don’t value. Often that dominant logic gets in the way of coming to more thoughtful, comprehensive solutions to our innovation challenges. You need to understand and incorporate other viewpoints into your own if you want to achieve your full creative potential.

The most pervasive dominant logics are political and religious affiliations. Have you ever changed someone’s mind about politics or religion? Probably not–because the overwhelming pull of our dominant logic blocks up our minds from alternative perspectives.

To use the word “logic” here is misleading: there is nothing logical or rational about these so-called dominant logics–they are almost always emotional identifications. Recent studies suggest that many people who call themselves Democrat or Republican can’t even describe their parties’ platforms when asked to delve deeper into the issues.

Dominant logics of all kinds distort reality. They inevitably twist facts and prevent us from seeing the bigger picture. When it comes to innovation, our dominant logics impede creative thinking. The most effective innovation solutions are almost always hybrids, processes that combine multiple perspectives, so it’s imperative that we learn to break free of our own biases and preconceptions. We may never be able to talk other people out of their all-powerful worldviews, but we can learn to be more flexible about our own. Here are three key strategies to help you step outside of your dominant logic:

Focus on the data. Looking for the hard facts and statistics associated with any given issue is the first step in achieving objectivity. Remember, though, that even data can be influenced by the dominant logic of others. Ask yourself these two key questions: who gathered this data and why did they gather it? If the facts are not from a neutral source, then consider what the agenda might be behind them. For example, if you read about a study that claims a certain food might make you happy or increase your life span, it’s likely been funded or conducted by the people who sell or make that food. Beware of industry sources that merely confirm what the industry wants you to know. Alternately, be active about seeking out information that may be purposefully buried. Recall the way insights about smoking in the 1950s and about gas and lead in the 1960s were hidden for years from public view.

Burn the platform. Forget what you’ve heard about trusting the teller and not the tale. Trust the tale–not the teller. Whenever you read or listen to a story relevant to your innovation initiative, keep in mind that this story is coming from someone with a specific interest in it. You need to get beyond that individual’s angle and find the true heart of the story and the question at hand. Begin by tossing out your own perspective. In eliminating your own viewpoint, you generate multiple alternative ways of approaching the problem. Solutions to complicated innovation projects are rarely ever single things. Consider, for example, effective treatments for diseases or breakthrough discoveries about space. They are a convergence of many insights, a collection or webbing of ideas.

Find the balancing point. To practice simple black-and-white thinking is to miss all of the interesting possibilities that lie between two extremes. If you want to get closer to the nuances and truths of any situation, look up, look down, and look around. Looking up means looking at the larger things going on in the world, the national and global trends outside of your control. Looking down is about reflecting on the more pressing needs and desires of those in your innermost circle. Looking around involves weighing the different opinions and ideas of the people who surround you, reading and listening to things you normally would ignore. Practice taking your opponent’s point of view. Go further than merely playing devil’s advocate–see if you can actually understand their position in a meaningful way. There just might be something in there that you can actually use or integrate into your own ideas or solutions.

Creativity lies just beyond the boundaries of our world views. It’s comfortable and easy to stick with the things we believe, but by doing so we’re also stifling our ability to be innovative. What are you willing to do to overcome the limits of your dominant logic?

Open Source Innovation: What’s In and What’s Out

The twenty-first century software industry owes a lot to a certain eighteenth-century inventor. Open source innovation is a phrase we tend to associate with post-millennial creativity, but it’s actually a three-hundred-year-old idea. Benjamin Franklin famously did not patent his lighting rod, his bifocals, his stove, and many other of his inventions because he thought that these ideas were simply too important not to share. This is the same mindset behind today’s open source movement: unrestricted access to designs, products, and ideas to be used by an unlimited number of people in a variety of sectors for diverse purposes.

Open source innovation has not only revolutionized the software and biotech industries–it’s completely changed the way we think about creativity. To be derivative is now a form of being creative. That is, in order to do something new, we don’t have to build something new–we can use existing and emerging forms, made available through open access, and do something new with them. This promotes a democracy in the innovation game: with open source services, there is no discrimination against persons or groups or against fields or endeavors.

The new open source landscape is a vastly fertile one, with countless possibilities for growth, but its vastness and freedom can also feel overwhelming. Here are three key shifts to understand as you navigate the open source movement.

Passive recipients to active co-creators. We’re no longer merely receiving innovations from so-called geniuses or creators who work alone–now we are part of that creative process. Innovation is about re-working what’s already out there, taking things that people have already created and shared with the world, and putting them in a new sequence or finding a new use for them. The best example today is the development of new apps that make incremental changes on older apps.

Our culture and our systems to customers and emerging opportunities. The open source turn is also a turn outward. This has inspired so many organizations to spend more time with other people, looking more thoughtfully at the groups and trends that surround them, and less time with their own corporal culture. Our backyards are expanding. It’s time to explore them.

Own and protect to share and expand. The proliferation of open access platforms has redefined the notion of intellectual property. This more capacious idea of creative license means that ownership is not our end goal. Rather, the new project is more of a public or social one–it is the distribution of creativity as opposed to the singular concentration of it.

Benjamin Franklin saw that there were uses and applications for his inventions outside of his original intentions. He understood that the only way to fully realize that vision was to make it everyone’s. What started out as Franklin’s invention became the world’s collective creation. The hope is to take that Franklin stove or bifocals, do something new with them, and then distribute them to see what other people will create. How will you reimagine the world’s lighting rod?

The Innovator’s Storybook: Creativity and the Well-Told Tale

There are six irresistible words at the start of all major innovations: let me tell you a story. Behind every great change is a well-told tale–a compelling narrative that pulls you into its world but also teaches you something new about our own world. The best stories are both seductive and instructive. As they entertain and enlighten us, they also create a shared vision of the possible. They go one step further than merely explaining something that already exists–they generate fresh ways of seeing, novel forms of thinking.

Developmental biologists tell us that the ability to understand and create a story is a very complex skill deeply connected to our ability to be creative. In his book, The Storytelling Animal, literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall uses evolutionary psychology to show how we’re neurologically wired to process and react to stories. So it’s no wonder that all literary traditions represent story-telling as a life-giving force. In Arabian Nights, the only way for Scheherazade to stay alive and postpone her execution is to keep telling stories. Plato recognized the power–and dangers–of rhetoric and banned all spin-doctors from his Republic. Even at the height of our digital age, the importance of the oral tradition persists. From TED Talks to podcasts, the art of narrative continues to drive the way we think.

How do stories shape innovation? Storytelling weaves together all aspects of the creative process. The story we craft about our innovation project becomes our polestar. Once we have a story to tell, we can make adjustments to either conform to the story or adjust the story to align with our project. Narration is a fundamental act of sense-making: it makes the objectives and stakes of our visions clear to other people. Here are three ways to sharpen the story you tell about your innovation initiative.

1. Get Your Story Straight. Boil your narrative down to its essence. What is the fundamental action and message here? It takes a lot of work to find the heart of your story. One of the ways to do this is to change it up and then see what remains most important. Switch the order of the plot. What happens when this or that action precedes or follows a totally different action? Experiment with changing your characters. Add and subtract key and minor figures. Who is not in your story but should be?

2. Start with emotion and end with logic. The most gripping narratives have an emotional component to them. Reveal something intimate about yourself. Share a struggle or a triumph–a source of sadness or a burst of joy. Make it fun by adding humor. Use situational color, vivid details that bring your tale to life. The other powerful narrative tool is shock. Be counterintuitive: say something that everyone thinks is true and then show how it’s not true.

3. Treat your story as a work-in-progress. Season to taste. Remember that you need to adjust your tale for your audience. If you’re speaking to the Junior League, avoid using rough language, but if you’re speaking to the Fraternal Brotherhood of Teamsters, speak even more roughly than you normally would. Improve the story as you keep telling it in different versions. See what works and what doesn’t work. Maybe something you thought was a tangent is actually a crucial element that should be in the foreground. Or maybe using simpler words makes the narrative more accessible and understandable to your listeners. Finally, relate your story to other stories. For example, if you’re confronted with a difficult decision, you might draw a parallel to a similar moment of crisis in the Bible or to a recent story of adversity that appeared in the news. No stories exist in a vacuum. Your story will always fall in the tradition of stories that came before it. Use those connections to engage your audience.

Telling stories is easy. Everyone knows how to do it. But telling great stories is incredibly difficult. Novelists go through years of drafts and workshops before they end up with the best version of their work. Innovators are also perpetual revisers who incessantly rework and reimagine the stories behind their ideas. The person you might think is your villain just might turn out to be your hero.

The Good, the Bad, and the Future of Creative Collaboration

Innovators know that sharing isn’t just caring–it’s the only way to get by. Collaboration has recently emerged as the defining characteristic of creativity and growth in nearly all sectors and industries. The singular genius who works alone is a myth of yesterday. Today, the biggest breakthroughs happen when networks of self-motivated people with a collective vision join together and share ideas, information, and work.

Collaborative innovation comes in many forms and kinds. From brainstorming sessions like innovation jams to crowd-funding initiatives like Kickstarter or crowd-sourcing initiatives like Innocentive, these forms of growth all mobilize a diverse group of people with a variety of skills. The benefits to joint innovation efforts are plenty: the global scale of the initiative, the rapidity of experimentation, the reservoirs of outside talent, the guaranteed wider array of solutions.

But with each of these upsides also comes a downside: the chaos of implementation, the disruptive power of clients, the difficulty of serving solutions, the uncertainty of constantly changing course. Here are three key points to keep in mind when practicing collaboration that will help you enjoy the benefits of teamwork without the drawbacks:

Avoid getting stuck in the center. When a large group of people have ideas and they all share them, there’s the danger that everyone will get pulled to the center and be reduced to something banal or unexceptional. This is a concept first introduced by Sir Francis Galton, who showed how the introduction of more and more points of data or measurement results in a regression to the mean. Don’t let the multiplicity of ideas at a brainstorming session get flattened out into a mass of mediocrity. Keep challenging yourself and those around you to go outside of the expected limits and boundaries of your project.

Surround yourself with people unlike you.Find the people who can fill in your blind spots and help you with things you don’t know now. This means embracing individuals you may have nothing in common with: thinkers who see the world differently than you do. Gather the talents of those who can teach you and give you things that you cannot give yourself.

Remember the importance of expertise. Collaboration assumes a horizontal structure of activity. That is, everyone involved is suddenly on the same level. This democratic attitude can be a great thing, yet people sometimes forget the centrality of expertise. You can ask all the people on your Facebook newsfeed how to do a root canal, but you’re always going to seek out a professional dentist. Don’t just solicit the opinion of the masses when you’re building your innovation team–find experts in the fields relevant to your initiative.

Collaboration offers us a whole new set of opportunities for growth, but it also presents myriad difficulties. So be strategic in the groups you enlist and create. The challenge to achieve equality without uniformity, variety without discord, cooperation without consensus. Thinking in a group doesn’t have to mean groupthink.

How Rules and Bureaucracy Breed Innovation

Most of the matter in the known universe is stuff that we have no way of seeing. Dark matter–the incredibly dense, invisible material that exists between stars, planets, and all the other objects that we can see–accounts for over 80 percent of the total matter in the cosmos. What can astrophysics teach us about innovation? In an organization, spaces that exist in the gaps between bureaucratic processes, spaces that all too often go undetected, much like dark matter, are the richest areas of growth. Think of the places that straddle more than one department, that live outside of the normally rigid distinctions we follow, or that combine two or more areas of expertise. We call these spots in a business the whitespaces. Working in whitespaces is about making dark matter visible, lighting up the promise that hides in the shadows.

Innovation happens in whitespaces, at the edge of disciplines. In these places, creative thinkers, leaders, and experimenters don’t encounter the expected resistance to new ideas. Here, outside of bureaucratic oversight, innovators find a safe haven, an informal environment where they can pursue radical initiatives.

Two kinds of people thrive in the whitespaces of organizations: the outsiders (the mavericks at the perimeter of a business with cutting-edge ideas) and the insiders (the powerful leaders of a business who have an innovative focus). For this reason, whitespaces are transdisciplinary: they promote the integration of knowledge and the creation of hybrid solutions. You’re much more likely to create something new and exciting in a whitespace than you are in any individual department. What can you do to take full advantage of these interstitial locales?

1. Seek out the whitespaces. Since whitespaces live on the border of our everyday boundaries, we need to actively seek them out in order to take advantage of them. This means pursuing projects that you might not normally pursue or that may not show up in an annual plan but still feel important to the organization. These are projects that grow beyond the edges of departments and budgets. Imagine your organization like a Venn diagram, and go to the areas where things overlap–for example, where marketing and manufacturing meet or where human resources and finance intertwine. Nearly a decade ago, a company in IT services wanted to enter the market in India. The challenge was catering to a clientele that couldn’t afford the highly complicated system that came with the organization’s standard service. They partnered with their customers to design and distribute a low-cost app that told people the price of various commodities. In this whitespace–the intersection between customer relations and marketing and design–the company successfully found a way to enter this new market.

2. Enlist the gardeners. If you want to grow, you need to find and attract the people who will promote that growth–the gardeners of your organization. There are two types of gardeners: the leaders who can provide money and the young, bright thinkers who bring that spark of creativity. If you don’t give the gardeners the opportunity to grow their projects and talents, then they will leave the company and find that opportunity elsewhere. One automobile company successfully nurtured gardeners by inviting and funding outside talent to re-conceptualize the old business model. The organization had a sector devoted to making cars and a sector devoted to parts, but didn’t have a department that focused on the entire solution. The executives saw that they needed to develop a sector that concerned itself with thinking about transportation as a whole. By gradually giving money and resources to new people, the organization eventually developed a new concept–within the whitespaces–that united both the cars and their parts.

3. Get momentum. Excess planning is your enemy. Instead of planning, run many small projects and see what works. The goal of the whitespace is to experiment, to build prototypes, try a bunch of different things at once and then learn from the results. Incorporate overlooked customers or customers who aren’t currently being served into your experiments. The risk of trying new things with those customers is relatively low. For example, one very large IT firm that provides data on rates of delivering packages had an idea to eliminate large-scale logistical planning and allow small business-owners to do that themselves. They built a simple app for these small businesses that turned out to be a wildly effective experiment. Once the firm saw the achievements of this little app, they officially entered the new market with runaway success.

4. Expand the whitespace. Hide in plain sight. You don’t want bureaucracy to find you but you also need to be visible enough so that the right people–the powerful thinkers and leaders–do find you. Make use of both physical spaces and digital spaces, like COINs (Collaborative Open Innovation Networks). One beverage company expanded its whitespace by inhabiting an old warehouse two blocks away from its worldwide headquarters, where executives found the inspiration and energy to re-develop and re-launch a once-failed drink.

Here’s the thing that innovators tend to forget: bureaucracy is our friend. The rules and regulations of any organization are also the forces that unwittingly create whitespaces, the opportunities to break new boundaries. Bring light to those in-between spaces that other people can’t yet see. What will you do to illuminate the dark matter around you where innovation grows?

The Secret to Teaching Creativity at Business School

How do you teach creativity? I’ve had to work through this issue for over 25 years. In 1990, I returned to being a professor after taking five years off to be a senior executive in what was an entrepreneurial company when I started and multibillion dollar multinational corporation when I left a short time later.

Though I never attended business school, I quickly learned to develop my creative abilities under the tutelage of that most enlightened taskmaster: experience. My education continues to this very day thanks to the companies and organizations around the world that provide me with unique challenges and opportunities to create innovation solutions with their best and brightest leaders. The secret to teaching creativity is that you really can’t teach it. Rather it is something integral to our experiences that is either assimilated or accommodated. You never master creativity. Instead, you have to let creativity master you.

According to a recent IBM CEO study of over 1,500 senior executives in dozens of countries, creativity is now the most valued quality in a leader. Business schools are rushing to fill the void in their curriculum with a wide array of courses and minor adjustments to their pedagogy. While many are doing their best to meet this unmeant need, business schools are designed to encourage quantitative critical thinking: pricing options, building brand maps, optimizing supply chains, and the like.

Creativity is by definition a form of positive deviance: qualitative, divergent, and nonconformist. This presents significant problems. For example, business school faculty members typically lack the real world experience with creativity at work to teach the subject with any credibility. More so, student admissions rely heavily on standardized tests that are not equipped to evaluate the creative potential of applicants. Finally, grading on an objective criteria or curve has little bearing on the relative merits of a student’s creative work. In short, the very institutions that now need to teach creativity are historically designed to eliminate it.

Here are four ways that the creativity revolution is changing the structure and function of business education:

1. The Move from Corporate to Entrepreneurial: More and more students are coming into their MBAs with the goal of self-actualization, the desire to create their own businesses, products, and services. These projects demand an alternative set of proficiencies and tools, a curriculum that encourages students not merely to conform to an existing regime of standards but to question those very assumptions.

2. The Move from Functional to Cross-Functional: Business programs are becoming increasingly horizontal. That is, they bring together disciplines that have previously remained separate. Engineering and business, natural sciences and business, arts and business: these are the kinds of cross-functional programs arising today. These programs signify something more than mere inter-disciplinarity. As they grow and develop alongside each other, they are trans-disciplinary.

3. The Move from Theoretical to Experimental: With this shift away from theory and toward practice, business schools are embracing the experiential aspects of MBA education. Underlying this change is a “see one, do one, teach one” philosophy of pedagogy. Like medical schools and law schools, business education is a vocational endeavor. The ultimate aim is to be able to practice what we learn. As we resist the abstractness of theory, new models of apprenticeship, coaching, and mentoring will abound.

4. The Move from Singular to Perpetual: Look around and you’ll find certifications that need to be kept up and renewed and ongoing opportunities to be involved with and stay connected to schools. With the rise of MOOCs (massive online open courses) and alternative forms of knowledge production and dissemination, the boundaries between the classroom and the real world are gradually breaking down. Business education will no longer be just a single event with an end date but an ongoing–even life-long–experience.

The future of business education is already here and has been for years. Innovation pervades everything we teach and do as our shared goal is to make our world better and new. Creativity cannot be contained by a course or a department–it is an all-encompassing worldview that necessarily informs all aspects of our work and lives.

For decades there has been a clarion call that business schools would soon be something consigned to the past. In its place we are told will be a mlange of online offerings, action learning projects and peer to peer social networks of all kinds. But the same things were said in the 1930’s when it was paperback books that were going to replace higher education. In 1940’s it was radio. In the 1950’s it was television. Let’s consider the possibility that the value of higher education, including business education, is not so much in what is taught or how it is taught but rather the collective creativity that is generated by collaborative communities of deep and diverse domain experts and practitioners.

The secret to teaching creativity is simply to surround students with people who are creating.

Using the Right Innovation Tool for the Right Innovation Job

An all-purpose solution is never the answer to your innovation challenge. Creativity initiatives come in all different sizes–and so should the tools we apply to achieve them. Be wary of innovation techniques or frameworks that claim to solve everything. The team that comes up with next miracle drug needs a radically different set of tools than the designers looking to improve an already-great app.

In the 1980s, I worked for a think tank that helped launch an extremely popular innovation technique. The creators co-wrote a best-selling book and the technique quickly became a lucrative franchise. I was disturbed to see what other people wanted to do with this method. Facilitators and consultants made grand, ungrounded claims that this technique could be applied to anything. In reality, it didn’t do half the things that people claimed it did. And many of the things that it did actually do quite well, outsiders simply didn’t see.

When people discover a great tool, they suddenly want to use it everywhere. If you give a child a hammer, everything needs a pounding. A tool kit is, after all, not unlike the set of techniques available to innovators: a hammer, a saw, and a wrench are all indispensible when you’re building or repairing something, but they’re not interchangeable. You can’t use a wrench when you’re supposed to be using a saw.

The same is true of innovation practices. The strategies you use to market a breakthrough new product will not help you re-conceptualize the way you build an old one. So how do you decide which tool to use when it comes to your innovation project? Here are three factors to consider.

What is the intended use of the innovation? First, consider the domain of innovation that this tool is targeted toward. Is it meant for engineering? Artistic creation? Medicine? Then, consider the stage of innovation that this tool is meant to facilitate. Is it ideal for the early stage of brainstorming, the middle stage of implementing ideas, or the late stage of marketing? For example, analogical group creativity techniques are likely to help you create and connect ideas but won’t help you implement them.

Who is the intended user of this innovation tool? Some innovation techniques require extensive training–possibly even mastery of a specific set of skills–while others are accessible to novices. Can you rely on your own intuitions to use this tool or do you need specialized knowledge? Inventive problem-solving techniques based on physical attributes, functions, and constraints can help you develop a better engine but won’t help you design a fashionable new restaurant.

Where is the outcome of this innovation tool most valuable? Determine which kinds of settings this innovation technique thrives in. Is it conducive to the conversational spirit of informal get-togethers, the rigid schedule of strategy meetings, or the chaotic energy of design labs? The other crucial factor is timeline. Is this tool meant for long-horizon projects, quick wins–or is it contingent upon other departments and procedures? For example, 12-step continuous improvement processes are effective as part of a structure regime of review and revision but certainly not for a 30-minute executive meeting where a crisis needs to be resolved immediately.

Be discerning when choosing the right tool for your innovation project. But also keep in mind that your favorite technique may say more about you and your own biases and worldview than it does about its most effective use. So be open to using an approach you might not normally use. The perfect tool for your challenge might just be the one you forgot was is in the box.

The Best Way to Look for the Next Big Thing

The opportunity to innovate may be right in front of your eyes, but turn around or blink and you’ll miss it. Seizing on a moment of potential growth or creativity is about having the right field of vision. Think of watching a spectacular sunrise. People often miss out on sunrises because they’re not looking in the right place. They can’t see the horizon. They can only see the light of the sun when it’s high in the sky, and by then it’s too late–the sun has already risen.

The same thing is true of entrepreneurs, who often look in the wrong places at the wrong time. Many seek out the so-called next big thing when they want to innovate, searching for medical breakthroughs or new technologies. But in reality, anticipation of these major developments and discoveries requires a very high level of expertise and access to research databases and universities. These are things that entrepreneurs simply don’t have at their disposal.

That’s why it’s better to think smaller and look at what’s already out there. An innovation doesn’t have to be radical in order to be meaningful or worthwhile. Instead of trying to find something no one has seen before, create extensions of current solutions. Take something that already exists and make it a little different or better. Apply more effective uses of low-cost, low-level systems and technologies to transform an old service into a more efficient one. The key idea is not newer but better, cheaper, faster. Here are three places to look for a better line of sight:

Find unmet needs and fill them. Examine key interactions between clients and consumers and see where there are critical desires unfulfilled. Consider, for example, the ways insurance companies have improved their old services by going directly to customers and determining what wasn’t getting done. When they discovered that homeowners’ insurance in California didn’t include earthquakes or that small business’ insurance plans in the early 2000s didn’t include data breaches, they came up with new services accordingly. The key insight was to uncover a shortcoming or void and fill it

Find inefficiencies and fix them. Observing when and where services are untimely is a great way to locate high-potential innovation initiatives. The relevant example is the recent series of simple but game-changing improvements made to travel. Not too long ago, travel delays caused by mechanical failures in airplanes or weather emergencies were a nightmare. Now, there are tons of low-cost apps that track your flights and gates and allow you to reschedule on other airlines and manage those travel crises. At a more local level, apps for immediate car and parking services and hotel and restaurant reservations have shortened–in some cases, even totally wiped out–wait times for services we use on a daily basis. These innovations didn’t require a massive amount of capital–they were just opportunities to apply low-level technologies to an existing inefficiency.

Find complexity and eliminate it. Identify systems that are unnecessarily complicated or that rely too heavily on bureaucratic procedures and make them simpler. Getting rid of needless complexity is exactly the motivation behind innovations in college admissions and registration. A decade ago, getting into college was a deeply convoluted, ambiguous, and stressful process. Now, there are things like college selection wizards, where you can put in your SAT scores, high school grades, and desired size, location, and program, and receive back a list of the institutions that best match your profile. Thanks to the common application service, you can submit one application for many schools. What is significant about these seemingly minor developments is their power to make a once-tortuous procedure turnkey.

Pay attention. Look up, look down, look all around yourself. Look for the things that other people don’t see. Chances are if you see an obvious occasion to innovate, other people see it, too. So look for subtle patterns, small holes, tiny inconsistencies, minor inefficiencies. The opportunity to innovate may be inside something you see every day, but you’ll never see it if you don’t look close enough.