Does your business culture nurture innovation, or stifle it? Are you looking for ways to build your business creatively but finding daunting constraints at every turn? This course is designed to help you understand the forces that limit innovation, identify those barriers in your own business culture, and break free of them to realize the full value of your imagination. You’ll learn new skills and strategies that you can immediately apply to drive innovation in your group or organization, and you’ll build an understanding of the six most common constraints on innovation in both individual and group settings—that is, the six ways that creative thinking is often sabotaged before it can produce results. You’ll also learn to recognize stakeholders who are actively invested in stopping your ideas in their tracks. Finally, you’ll examine societal and technical constraints that you’ll need to overcome to foster a forward-thinking culture. Through case studies and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to: - Generate, assess, and implement great ideas in your organization - Build your organization’s capacity for innovation, including creating an innovative culture - Lead innovation projects, processes, and teams - Recognize big issues lurking on the horizon before they become constraints - Drive adoption of great ideas - Develop and manage an innovation portfolio - Innovate to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-changing landscape
History as Obligation
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Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers
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Societal Constraints: Why My Innovation Means You Have to Change
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David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
[MUSIC]
Now I'd like to talk about history as a constraint.
What is the role that history plays, what came before,
and how does that create obligation for what comes in the future?
And so, history,
let's think of this as the obligations that are created by past beliefs.
How yesterday's actions, and experiences, and decisions shape that is
constrain today's options, and the things that we have as possibilities today.
And so if we're going to innovate,
to what extent do we have to take account what came before.
The past really is never dead.
It just sort of keeps coming back and asserting itself in different ways.
And so that's what we have to watch out for is when things in the past we're not
aware of them, we're not understand why they are the way they are and
then what it is that we have to do in order to acknowledge that.
That is to honor what came before in a way that allows us to move forward and
does not constrain what we're trying to do, go forward.
So I want to talk about three things in the world,
that sort of the physical infrastructure, the things we connect to.
I want to talk about knowledge in the world, the skills and practices.
The things that people know and how they know them, things that people have
come to understand, and then understanding in the world.
The kind of cultural practices and traditions, and what kind of obligation
that creates that we have to consider as we innovate at a societal level.
So things in the world.
Think about things in the world like the infrastructures.
We have a Segway, now I'll drive on the street.
Now I'll drive on the sidewalk.
Well this becomes a problem.
The Segway needed this infrastructure in order to allow adoption to happen.
Without the infrastructure,
without the place to ride it, it was a dead innovation.
Let's show you another innovation early problem.
The typewriter, so the early typewriters were problematic because they had laid out
the keyboards alphabetically and as people would learn to type and type faster and
faster there were constant jams.
And so these kind of jams, I don't know if you've ever played with a typewriter like
this it's really easy to get the keys to jam up.
And so in the late 1800s I think it was like 1868 maybe.
A guy, Christopher Sholes, came up with a different layout.
And so what he figured out was that there are these keystrokes that
having keys that are close to each other made these mechanical
things that go up close to each other and they would jam.
And so what he said is I'll spread out the frequency of these letters in essence,
slowing down the person from typing and it'll create fewer jams.
And so basically, he spread it out.
He came up with called the QWERTY keyboard.
QWERTY, which is named for the top row of letters across the keyboard,
as you can see here.
So, people like the QWERTY keyboard, people learned how to use it.
People were going along with it.
It wasn't quite as fast as it could be, but people though, this is great.
Soon, someone came out with a different keyboard.
This is Blickensderter.
It was faster, it was lighter, it was cheaper.
And also, it did not jam.
And the reason it didn't jam was it used a ball, sort like an IBM Selectric,
if you've seen one of those.
It has a little ball with all the letters on it, and it would go that way.
It was mechanical.
It was about 20 years later.
In fact, it was very, very superior to the Remington from a technical point of view,
but was unable to take over.
What had had happened in the intervening 20 years.
So when Remington bought the rights to the Sholes keyboard,
to the QWERTY keyboard, they started a number of secretary schools.
They started professionalizing, basically, the profession of being a secretary.
They had people learn how to do it.
So they had about 20 years of head start, and even though something came
along that was better, faster, cheaper, they were unable to unseat it.
The people said no thanks,
because the keyboard layout was different than the corded keyboard layout.
And I've had something like the Dvorak keyboard, nowadays you have an option in
a computer you can actually change the keyboard, and yet people don't.
Why not?
Well we have this installed base, there's knowledge in the world,
we know how to do it, we notice way this infrastructure is there, and so
our producer keyboard that looked like one of these other things here,
it would be hard for people to learn.
I couldn't be insured that there are enough people in the world to
knew how to do that.
The QWERTY keyboard on the other hand,
I can assume that everyone knows how to use that keyboard.
There's other keyboard, the piano keyboard.
This things drive me crazy, it's got like three keys, and two then three then two,
the black keys, and
then there's some place sometimes people know often they go they push,
they know which move was one to push is really is actually kind of perplexing.
Actually I know how to play the piano and it's still perplexing to me.
Because as we try to learn more and more things it's not intuitive at all.
And yet, if you were to produce something that you're going to call
a keyboard it pretty much has to look like this because there's a history and
so in that history creates obligation for going forward.
Unless what I was doing had something to do with these keys,
I probably should pretty much stick to that kind of keyboard layout,
if I want to assume there are people in the world who can actually use the thing
that I'm proposing, the innovation.
Back around the time of the invention of the gramophone, Thomas Edison, what he
would do is we had the gramophone and then a live person play behind a screen,
and try to get people, train people to hear the difference between them.
To say, you know what,
in fact, this device is actually, this gramophone is actually
superior to this person playing because the person playing will make mistakes.
It won't sound as good.
It doesn't sound in the same way as this gramophone here.
And so it has reverb, it had all sorts of things.
The sound of the room came with the gramophone
which is where the person behind the screen didn't sound as good.
And so what was happening was that these understandings in the world about what
music is,
what does it mean to consume music, that he was actually changing by doing this.
In fact, this was an early version of the, maybe of a generation
where you remember there's some ads that were, is it live, or is it Memorex?
And so he was doing this a long time before that.
Even later there's still this idea of what is high-end stereo.
It was a vinyl, is it CDs, is it MP3s, and that people keep, there's a constant
debate about this about what does it mean to here, how can you hear these different
kinds of music in some way, what is the better, what does it mean to be high end?
And these are things that people have an understanding of, distinct opinions about.
And so, the history what came before is something we have to account for and
our beliefs about these things.
Also, we look back at the industry constraints we talked about last week
about the market.
So if I have a lot of vinyl, I'm really reluctant to buy a bunch of CDs.
If I have a bunch of CDs, I'm really reluctant to go to MP3s.
And so this is, this kind of adoption cost was worth thinking about here, as well.
So in addition to the history creating this kind of knowledge in the world,
these things that people know, it also creates these adoption costs to these
changes that we have to make in order to change our lives around these new things.
We adopt innovations for what they say about us.
And say is there a good reason to stand in line at the Apple store, wherever,
in the iStore, or the G phone store.
Stand around the block, and sleep there, and camp out there over night for
that device when you can just order online when you can just get it a few days later.
Do you really need to make a phone call with that thing?
Why do people do that?
Well, it's about what this says about them.
So it's more than just the function of the device.
It really is what the device says about them.
If I have one of these then I'm one of those kind of people, and
those kind of people who are desirable in a certain way.
And so, what it says about us is an important aspect of this about this
knowledge in the world, because people understand what it is,
under people who understand how to interpret this thing.
And so when they see you with it,
they're going to understand, he's one of those people, I like that.
So these three ways of history, things in the world.
The physical things, the infrastructure of things that we connect to.
Knowledge in the world of skills, and practices that we undertake,
in what they mean and also are understandings in the world,
our cultural practices and the traditions that we have and
how it is that we express those traditions through time.
So if we want to overcome history constraints,
again, I think overcoming is kind of a strong word.
I think if we want to understand history constraints and
how it is that we can operate within them, then I offer the following.
Let's think about these three things like things in the world,
knowledge in the world, understandings in the world.
Things about the physical infrastructure, understand that
I've just fell the time with the people in Quinn the Neece on leaf.
And one thing that's happening here in their is some company that is putting
charging stations up and down and across the state of Tennessee where Neece and
headquarters is.
So there's one problem which is the cars, if you want to fast charge them, if you
want to charge them quickly they require a high voltage power system of 480 volts.
And the problem is basically there are gas stations everywhere but
there's not everywhere where you can get 480 volts.
Most homes will not have access to 480 volts.
It's usually industrial places or eating establishments, places like that.
Eating establishments have them, because they have large ovens, and
large washers and large machines, and heaters, and
things like that, and so they have that kind of voltage there.
So what they did was they actually partnered up with these eating places to
say, you have the infrastructure in place, you have the 480 volts and that kind of
thing we need, and we have people that we can bring so let's collaborate on this.
And let's actually leverage the infrastructure that you have and
allow us to charge cars while people are here.
In fact, you can charge one of these cars to about 80 or
90% of charge within half an hour which is maybe about the time that
the person would spend inside of a small restaurant or inside a place like this.
I believe it's Cracker Barrel in Nashville,
although I have seen some in other places as well in a Walmart.
I have seen chargers in places where people go and spend some time and
where also where the infrastructure is accessible.
So again, this car would be very difficult to bring out if it weren't for
the infrastructure.
Consider also, this was very similar to the digital camera.
The digital camera was, Sony focused on the camera whereas,
the infrastructure was also being done by others.
So the printing was being done by HP, the hard drive was being done by Conner,
the CPU was being done by Intel.
And so all those things were done they became the infrastructure for
to allow the digital camera to exist.
And so again, this is sort of understanding what's out there as a way of
being able to leverage being able to use to help our innovation move forward.
Knowledge and practices in the world where the skills and
practices other people have, how they have that.
I don't know if you ever had the experience where you walk up to a door and
pushing on it and pushing on it and it won't open.
It's like you're trying to push it and
then someone says hey wait a minute that's a pulling door not a pushing door.
You say why?
It looks like it should be a pushing door.
I don't understand this.
A friend and colleague, Donald Norman,
wrote a great book called The Design of Everyday Things.
So it's about design and
about how we design things that are actually not intuitive.
People know a lot of things, but there is knowledge in the world, and so,
why don't we use that?
If people know things, like how to hold something or how to operate something, why
not use that in your innovation, because if people have to learn new things.
They're much more likely to not adopt, because the things that we don't
understand are much more likely to reject than things that we do understand.
So there is this knowledge in the world,
that comes from history, that comes from people's past experiences, so use that,
we should definitely be using that old knowledge in the world.
Then there's this thing of understanding the cultural practices in the world.
Open standards, a soda, it is a soft drink,
they generally come in 12 ounce sizes, and that's a standard.
And so unless you have a really good reason for not using a 12 ounce cup or
a 12 ounce drink and you're making a drink.
Use 12 ounces because the machines will hold that, everything's about that.
If you trying to make some change around that then that's fine, but
don't make arbitrary changes just to make changes.
JPEG standard, J-P-E-G, the photographic standard.
If you do something photographic then you use the standard unless you have a really
good reason not to.
Then you should use it, people will complain about it, say it's terrible.
It's blocky, it's not as good as it could be.
Well, if you change it just to change it,
it's very unlikely that people are going to adopt that.
Because cameras don't work on it and then there's all the software that works on it.
And people understand JPEG and want to use it.
And so allow them to use it, unless you have a very very good reason not to and
then you need to explain to people why it is that this is not a JPEG,
why it is you want to use something else.
So these three ways of history.
Things in the world, knowledge in the world, and
understandings in the world are things we can leverage, that we can use.
Then it's not about overcoming adoption, but
we can actually use them to help us drive adoption of our innovations in the end.
So how do we overcome these societal constraints?
Is that really the goal here?
So again, I've been saying all along it's really not about subverting society.
Societal constraints have a role, that they have something important in them.
It's about protecting society.
It could be that society's right, that you're proposition for
change is not going to work, that it's going to be harmful to you,
it's going to be harmful to society.
And so again, we want to consider these things where the values and the values and
the identity of that drives,
how social control is likely to be asserted around our innovation.
And also what's the role of history in terms of what our proposition for
change is?
How are we changing and
is there any obligation that we have to the past in the direction that we change?
[MUSIC]
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