INNOVATING INNOVATION

A 3Cs strategy can serve as a foundation for shaping opportunities to create significant value:

Consider, Create, Consolidate.

- Consider what to focus upon;

- Create possibilites out of your focal options, via smart techniques;

- Consolidate the decisions and actions that emerge from your considerations and creations;

They integrate strategic, operational and organisational initiatives into pragmatic skills to deliver near-term performance improvement and longer-term capability building.

Today, most of the world’s brilliant people aren’t members of any single team but are distributed all over the planet in diverse institutions.

Increasingly, innovations occur at the interstices between different disciplines — between, for example, biotech and nano technologies, genetics and robotics, information and telecommunications.

Organisations need to find ways to leverage the disparate intellectal assets of people who see the world differently and who use unique tools and methods. Such people are likely to work both in different disciplines and in different institutions.

Discovering and leveraging successful ways to work with them will lie at the heart of innovating innovation.

Today’s computers have the power to simulate massively complex, nonlinear systems, coupled to phenomenal visualization techniques; they enable the customer to be brought ever closer to the design process.

Two principal sources of learning are: ‘learning by doing’ — via actions and interactions, and ‘learning while waiting’ — what is discovered from markets during product development.

Keep learning in both modes, so as to stay current, creative, and competitive.

[Excerpted from the 'Catalysing Creativity' edition of The Braindancer Series of bookazines by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are the intellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]

MEMORABLE QUOTE FROM THE MOVIES: THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

Last night, while watching the romance comedy movie, 'Sleepness in Seattle', starring Tom Hanks (playing Sam Baldwin, an architect who had lost his wife to cancer) & Meg Ryan (playing Annie Reed, who was about to get married to someone else) on StarHub cable television, I was intrigued by one particular dialog which went as follows:

Jay (played by Rob Reiner as Sam's construction buddy): ". . . what do they call it when everything intersects?"

Sam: "The Bermuda Triangle."

In a nut shell, the movie was about Sam's son Jonah, who was looking for a new mother. So, when Jonah put his father on national radio, hundreds of women wrote to him. One of the women was Annie, who went to great lengths to meet Sam, who had meanwhile started to re-enter the dating game. Sparks flew when they met.

What has caught my fascination is not so much the movie, which of course has been entertaining to watch, to say the least, but a new perspective of creativity, which I would never have thought of.

That's to say, I did not see the Bermuda Triangle as an "intersection of ideas", metaphorically speaking.

I reckon Sam's response as I have outlined above brings me back to what I have written earlier: the 'Medici Effect' or "intersection of ideas".

'Innovation at the Verge' is also the other thing which is invariably connected to the foregoing topic.

Please read my earlier post entitled 'Ideas Build on Ideas'.

As I have always maintained, watching movies can really carry a dual-benefit: entertainment & learning/creativity.