After an inspirational session with the innovators network heritage (INE) yesterday, in which we discussed past successes and future plans for cultural world domination, I thought it would be nice to forget the debates about open linked data and digital sustainability for a while, and look back at the core of our job: innovation.
Below is a list of some of the core points that are good to be reminded of every now and then related to innovation. What is it, where does it come from and what can it bring us? Some of the points are apparently obvious, others less so and might be project or organisation specific. I’d love to hear your take on innovation in the comments.
Innovation is the process from idea to delivery. As a friend once told me, ideas are as abundant as successfully finished projects are rare.
Innovation starts with observation. As Geoff Mulgan writes, “Innovators generally have a wide peripheral vision, and they are good at spotting how apparently unrelated methods and ideas can be used togethers.” This means a good innovator is usually a generalist, has an eye for detail and great curiosity about how things work.
Innovation is often obvious. Don’t discard ideas because they seem too simple, they might never have been tried before. Or as the late Peter Drucker said, “The greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to day, ‘This is obvious! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s so simple!’”
Innovation can happen anywhere in your organisation. Probably, your biggest win isn’t to be found in the social media department, but it doesn’t hurt to let them look (together with communications, collections, programming, sales, etc.).
A business model is part of every innovation. If an innovation isn’t meant to add some real value to the visitor’s experience, collection management, the budget or something else, it’s just a crazy idea getting too much attention.
It’s better to disrupt the market, than your audience. As every Facebook lay-out update shows, change always upsets people. Make sure you upset the right people, or as Clayton M. Christensen writes, “[Innovators] should try to disrupt their competitors, never their customers.”
Innovation can be high-risk or low-risk, but there’s always a risk. Risk-free innovation is like money-free poker: if you can’t lose you can’t win. No pain, no gain.
Returns are relative to the risk taken. High-risk innovation (expensive R&D departments, all-out bets) tends to yield higher potential returns than low-risk innovation (allowing staff to use 4 hours per week to try to do stuff differently).
Management and innovation are mutually exclusive. The problem with government innovation schemes, at least in the Netherlands? They usually ask for a planning and tangible outcomes. However, although innovation has tangible outcomes, it can never be sure what they will be at the outset, or innovation would be called project management. Also, you don’t want a manager to be too innovative, and an innovator to spent too much energy managing stuff.
Motivation is the key to innovation, for it focuses expertise and creative thinking. As Teresa M. Amabile writes, “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself-and not by external pressures.”
Innovation thrives on differences between people. There’s a compelling TED talk by Geoffrey West on how in bigger cities, there’s a lot more of everything. One of these things is innovation: more different people means more chance encounters, random interactions, inspiration, innovation.
Of course, this is just the 101. All quotes are from the The Innovator’s Cookbook, a series of essays and interviews curated by “good ideas guru” Steven Johnson. It’s a book worth reading, as it goes into things as ‘crazy’ as the set up of a building and its influence on innovation. All this, certainly, will be dealt with in future classes, either here or elsewhere on the Internet. For now, I’m ready to take questions…;-)
Not too long ago, while reading The Ascent of Money, I had to refresh my memory about the events leading to the French revolution. The Wikipedia entry on the subject made me sad. Now I had to read two books. (The article alone is over 3,300 words long.)
I believe that on their way to perfection and completeness, Wikipedia is offering us at least 3 opportunities to shine: brevity, humour and passion.
1. Brevity
Due to its desire to tell the full story, Wikipedia is quickly becoming unusable for anything other than scholarly research. The length, depth and level of detail of many entries greatly surpasses the information needs if you just want to know a bit about the topic. The article on the causes of the French revolution is not at all a very long entry, yet already some thousand words longer than the average TED talk.
Most people don’t want to know about Schrödinger’s cat at all. And even if they might, it’s more likely they’ll start with the movie. Can’t get enough? Wikipedia’s there to tell you everything, but by then you’ve already become a scholar of parallel universes and quantum mechanics. Read the rest of this entry »
“In the organisation of the future, the decisions that matter won’t be taken in some high-tech war room, but on the front line,” says Tim Harford in Adapt. You, more than your CEO, will determine the success of your museum’s next grand project. True, she gives you the direction and funds and – if you’re lucky – the mandate and freedom to design mind-blowing products, but it’s your creativity, cleverness and skill that will make a difference in the end. Here are 7 ways in which I try to stay on top of things, and come up with great ideas for future projects.
Plan playtime
Is your calendar always full as well? Plan playtime. Playtime is not just time you leave empty to do whatever, that doesn’t work and you’ll probably sacrifice it to to-do’s anyway. Playtime is for instance 2 hours to go to a great store and look around, or an afternoon to go through your old notebooks.
Fill a random stuff folder
I have a folder called “playground” in the root of my project folders. It’s my digital scrapbook, full of random stuff. In it, I don’t worry about design conventions, budget, or even copyright (sorry!). It’s simply random stuff, like the pieces of an as of yet unknown puzzle. Look through it repeatedly, and maybe the picture will become clear.
Learn basic coding and design tools
The rapidest form of prototyping is the prototyping you can do yourself in playtime in the random stuff folder. But it’s not just knowing how to code a simple programme and design its front: simply learning about coding and design helps to spark creativity as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Last year – best wishes for 2012! – I got my hands on a copy of The Happy Museum: A tale of how it could turn out all right. It’s a happy little publication (PDF) I hadn’t heard of before about the role museums play in our changing world, and should play to remain relevant and add to a more sustainable future. And, hidden between the lines, there’s a twist in the story that takes is from society straight to social media…
In 2010, when asked to imagine museums in 2020, I wrote about how I believe a museum has and should have a responsible position in culture, art and heritage and also in society in general. The Happy Museum takes this further and focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.
The Happy Museum has two USPs when it comes to playing an active part in these areas, and I’ve added a third which I believe is equally important:
Apart from the gift shop, museum don’t try to sell anything but understanding and enjoyment. Therefore they are a sanctuary from the advertising and commercialisation of the public space.
As public (social) spaces, museums offer a counterpart to the ever more privatised public realm, where hardly anything is freely accessible anymore (especially when they are truly “free”, as in “gratis”).
In the world of StarBucks and Apple stores, museums provide an opportunity to experience something ‘unique’ in the original meaning of the word: one of a kind (not unique as in: venti triple half-caf organic caramel macchiato).
Quite some blogs are offering “best of” lists at the moment (notably, Expert Enough, Know Your Own Bone and Time’s Best Blogs of 2011), and I find these surprisingly pleasant. Also, even on blogs I follow closely I miss some posts, which then turn out to be the best. That’s my luck; to help yours, here’s the best of the museum of the future of 2011:
It’s great to see the strategic and result-oriented posts get quite some attention this year. Also, without Google I would have been nowhere (in terms of topics and traffic). Read the rest of this entry »
