Braindancing Bytes: 'INSIGHTS ON INNOVATION FOR THE CREATIVE EDUCATOR', Part IV, by Dilip Mukerjea

[continued from Part III in the Last Post:]

Part IV: A TASTE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

When Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the great Austrian-American economist, called the process of creation and renewal “the gales of creative destruction,” who imagined we’d be witnessing this phenomenon in real time?

With today’s commercial challenges, few corporate leaders have the vision, energy, or time to control the processes of creative destruction, especially at the pace and scale necessary to compete against the markets. Yet this is precisely what is required to sustain long-term performance excellence in ever more volatile landscapes of business...and education.

The emporiums of commerce, and the cathedrals of education, cannot sustain themselves without this knowledge.

Hundreds of managers are befuddled by the question:

“What drives an innovation breakthrough?”

Others ask how one grows a company beyond its core business. And most fundamentally of all:

“How do we find new ideas?”

As can be seen in my drawing here, examples of the outcomes of creative destruction were the electric light superseding the candle, the buggy giving way to the automobile, and the personal computer making obsolete the typewriter.

The high-performers in today’s marketspaces think productively, not reproductively. With emphasis placed only on reproductive thinking, core competencies soon become core rigidities. In contrast, productive thinking is always refreshing because it calls upon cognitive flexibility and fluency.

Productive thinkers know that nothing is impossible or improbable, and that creative success is inevitable!

Remember An Wang?

He moved from success-full to success-fool. Triumphant in the 1980s, when his word processing machines dominated corporate operations, his status quo soon lost status: the devices never evolved into computers. Neither did they incorporate spreadsheets.

Wang swooshed from near absolute dominance to bankruptcy, a victim of the riptide forces of creative destruction.

The rules have changed forever. Some companies have made the crossing. Under Jack Welch, General Electric negotiated the apocalypse and emerged resurgent. Johnson and Johnson is moving across the divide positively.

Corning has cannibalised its dependence on consumer durables and become a leader in high-tech optical fibres.

L’Oreal has found a new way to organize itself and transfer beauty concepts from one economy to another. But these are the exceptions.

For the larger mass of companies, this journey is long overdue. And for schools and colleges? Immediate action is needed!

At the birth of a corporation, the preeminent emotion is passion, the vital energy that makes things happen. With passion dominant, the tendency is to ignore information and analysis, in the name of vision: “Why bother with analysis when we know what to do?”

As the corporation ages, bureaucracy gets entrenched. Passions metamorphose into “rational decision making,” often the sorry codification of what has worked in the distant past.

An apt metaphor for creative destruction is the foetus, for whom, birth is like a death, for it is the end of the old life in the womb. Likewise, today’s business scene is a stage for lives that are in essence, works in progress for their next incarnation.

Emulating the foetus, which cannot conceive of the life to follow, our limited minds are unable to conceive of life in the wake of creative destruction.

Likewise, consider a simple metaphor through movement, such as dance, which is but the continual loss and instantaneous regaining of balance.

In Indian cosmology, Shiva’s dance is the fine edge of the universe tumbling into chaos and destruction and the simultaneous recreation of poise, in a continuous ecstatic, spontaneous whirl of creation-destruction-creation-destruction.

Organisations wither and die from a lack of competitive adaptiveness. The assumption of organisational continuity, is obsolete. Discontinuity dominates.

The companies that survive and thrive into the 2020s will be unlike corporations today. They will have to master the volatile dynamics of creative destruction — designed for discontinuity, morphing like the markets.

Joseph Schumpeter anticipated this transformation over six decades ago when he observed:

“The problem that is usually being visualised is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them.”

© Dilip Mukerjea

Say Keng's comments:

If I were to sum up very briskly the essence of the 4-part blogpost by Dilip Mukerjea, I would like to use a particular excerpt from global futurist and independent scholar Jack Uldrich's forthcoming book, '20/20 Foresight: A Futurist Looks Ahead to the Ten Trends That Will Shape the World of 2020', as follows:

"... the future of education isn’t learning about something, it’s about learning how to fluidly adapt to change. And it’s definitely not about going to a place to get “educated,” it’s about accessing and customizing the ocean of knowledge that already surrounds us in “the cloud.”... "

Readers can go to this link at 'Jump the Curve with Jack Uldrich' weblog to read the chapter from which the foregoing has been excerpted.

I would strongly recommend readers to read also Jack Uldrich's '8 Questions for Innovative Educators' in the same weblog. Here's the link.

Braindancing Bytes: 'INSIGHTS ON INNOVATION FOR THE CREATIVE EDUCATOR', Part III, by Dilip Mukerjea

[continued from Part II in the Last Post:]

Part III: THE INNOVATION ARENA

The expression ‘innovation’ has been defined by the great Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter as:

The commercialization of all new combinations based upon the application of:

❂ new materials and components

❂ the introduction of new processes

❂ the opening of new markets

❂ the introduction of new organizational forms.

This suggests that innovations emerge from a blend of two domains, the technical and the business. When only a change in technology is involved, Schumpeter terms this as invention. However, as soon as the business element is involved, it transforms into innovation.

Felix Janszen, in The Age of Innovation, has created a mnemonic out of Schumpeter’s observations:

T a new technology;

A a new application in the form of a new product, service, or process;

M a new market or market segment;

O a new organizational form or a new management approach; or a combination of two or more of these elements.

These elements or dimensions constitute the innovation arena, and immersion into innovation involves traversing an innovation trajectory across all four of them. The four dimensions are interconnected with and interdependent upon, one another.

Thus, a specific technology can have only a limited number of applications. This means that innovation is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a trajectory comprising several small events. We must thus look at the innovation arena as a system when analyzing an innovation: a new business has tangible and intangible features that emerge not just from one or separate origins or stakeholders, but from within the system as a whole.

To change strategies, structures, and systems, is inadequate. The thinking that produces those strategies, structures, and systems must also change ~ at a fundamental and profound level, flux-dancing with the pace of today’s mercurial challenges.

The prime objective is to spark a renaissance of
business initiative, leading to innovation. The key is to see learning and innovation as inseparable from everyday work.

PERSPECTIVES ON CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the great Austrian-American economist of the 1930s and ‘40s, called the process of creation and renewal “the gales of creative destruction.”

With today’s commercial challenges, few corporate leaders have the vision, energy, or time to control the processes of creative destruction, especially at the pace and scale necessary to compete with the market. Yet this is precisely what is required to sustain long-term performance excellence in ever more volatile markets.

(J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, Allen and Unwin, London, 1954)

The pivotal difference between corporations and capital markets is the manner in which they enable, manage, and control the processes of creative destruction. Corporations work on the assumption of continuity; their focus is on operations. Capital markets evolve on the basis of discontinuity; their focus is on creation and destruction.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, a new member of the S and P 90 could expect to remain on the list, on average, for more than 65 years. In 1998, the turnover rate in the S and P 500 was close to 10%, implying an average lifetime on the list of 10 years, not 65!

This is the scenario projected upto 2020, and suggests that no more than a third of today’s major corporations will survive in an economically important way over the next 15 years. The demise of these companies will come from a lack of competitive adaptiveness.

[to be continued in Part IV in the Next Post:]
© Dilip Mukerjea

Braindancing Bytes: 'INSIGHTS ON INNOVATION FOR THE CREATIVE EDUCATOR', Part II, by Dilip Mukerjea

[continued from Part I in the Last Post:]

Part II: IINSIGHTS ON INNOVATION

What do you believe is impossible to achieve, yet, if it could be done, would fundamentally transform your business?

What are you NOT doing that you should be doing, if you knew your prospects were to evaporate in less than a year from now?

We have emerged from an Age of Atomic Chaos into one that contains Genetic Possibilities.

Prominent domains in which opportunities and profits exist, lie embedded in the ICE AGE (an acronym for items represented below):

(1) Information

(2) Communication

(3) Entertainment

(4) Attractiveness (including healthcare and wellness)

(5) Genomics

(6) Education (relevant to The Learning Economy).

Are you actively knowledge-ing, or has knowledge rot set in? Without continual learning, and knowledge mapping, we stay behind...operating on obsolete expertise.

Knowledge can be used in two ways as a resource in a product:

(1) When we make the product smarter, we get continuous improvement.

(2) When we make a smarter product, it can lead to BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION!

Do you have an Innovation Dashboard to track the real-time status quo of your innovation efforts? Or is your innovation culture rooted in intellectual feudalism?

Is every member of your organisation actively involved in business innovation? Or are they merely following rules and filling roles that offer no competitive advantage?

Billions of people walk in to work every day...how many of them are sleepwalking? How many of them have become passive players in a game of obsolete paradigms? We live in exponential times.

Winners in the innovation arena don’t follow best practices; they lead with different, revolutionary initiatives! They are aware that strategy life cycles are shrinking, and thus have incorporated innovation into their consciousnesses. They extract wealth from minds, not mines!

Beauty lies in the brain of the beholder !

Today, “business as usual” means “business as unusual.” Real time has become ‘unreal time’. Are you operating on the leading edge or on the bleeding edge? What is your COST of CONFUSION and the VALUE of CLARITY?

Clarity is not certainty. Clarity comes from a level of awareness that allows us to manage ourselves; certainty often comes from blind belief. You can have certainty from clarity, but not always clarity from certainty, which often means buying into the illusion of guarantees and controls offered by management administrivia.

A lack of clarity leads to an abundance of confusion! Is this affordable?

The word innovation first appeared, according to Webster’s online dictionary, in the 15th c. It was derived from the Latin word novus, or ‘new’. In modern business terms, newness can refer to anything that affects customers, manufacturing, sales, or service. The content of “newness” can, of course, vary from incremental improvement to wholesale transformation. Innovation can encompass:

✑ a new product enabling a pioneering approach to surgery, as Johnson and Johnson accomplished in the ‘80s with “keyhole” surgery, or laparoscopy.

✑ a new process for making steel, as Nucor launched in the 1970s

✑ a new service for the customers, as MCI created with their Friends and Family service.

✑ a new way of doing business, as Enron came up with when they created the natural gas trading market.

Innovation can be incremental, substantial, or transformational. While innovation is based on creativity and invention, it is much broader. An invention implies the “conversion of a creative idea to some communicable and verifiable form, generally to fulfill some need or perform a task.”

Innovation is invention that has generated economic value. No economic value, no innovation.

Invention precedes innovation. It does not presume economic worth. Innovation implies an expectation of wealth creation. Not every invention is an innovation, because not every invention can be commercially exploited.

[to be continued in Part III in the Next Post:]
© Dilip Mukerjea