Cultural innovation 101, or the basics of turning our world upside down

Photo by Declan Fleming on Flickr.

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.

1. Innovation is the process from idea to delivery. As a friend once told me, ideas are as abundant as successfully finished projects are rare.
2. 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.
3. 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!’”
4. 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.).
5. 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.
6. 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.”
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. 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.
10. 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.”
11. 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…;-)

The city as a muse for Museum Rotterdam

Last week I was invited by Museum Rotterdam to the festive launch of a magazine that concludes the first phase of the amazing outreach and participatory project the city as a muse. The event – in a circus tent in a rundown part of town – was in many ways un-museum-like and (therefore?) I enjoyed it a lot.

After a recent shift in direction, which included removing “Historical” from its name, Museum Rotterdam tries to be a museum for all people in the city. The city as a muse is a project that searches for inspirational developments and initiatives among the people of Rotterdam and tries to connect this with the museum. The first phase of the project aimed at a group of women (‘De Vrouwen van de Velden’) who’ve organised themselves to jointly cope with the drastic changes in their neighbourhood.

The women are mothers, of varied cultural backgrounds, poor and extremely creative. Once a week they have breakfast together to discuss and organize. The urban curator of Museum Rotterdam joined them for a couple of months and conducted interviews, photo sessions and other activities to discover as much as possible about the lives of the women. The final product of this intensive cooperation is not an exposition, but a magazine like the modern glossies.

The women in the magazine represent themselves, but also a growing group of people in Rotterdam (and cities all over the world). It’s a compelling story of Rotterdam AD 2011.

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Small-scale marketing (for yourself, your art, activities and expositions)

Photo by Trey Ratcliff on Flicr.com (CC BY-NC-SA)

Last Friday already (time flies) Isabelle Conner and I hosted a series of round table sessions to help young artists with their marketing, personal branding and the successful use of distribution channels. Isabelle is a genius. The questions she asked the young artists are well worth thinking about once every while. It’s like, marketing 101, suitable to put anything ‘small’ in the market, such as yourself, a project or exposition or even a small museum.

1. Introduce yourself, please

Who are you? What do you stand for? What makes you unique? Whatever you are and do, there’re a lot of others doing the same. Take the average conference, what makes people come to you, apart from that they know you? What have they heard about you beforehand?

You should be able to tell others in one sentence who you are, or what the activity is you’re working on. This doesn’t mean it should be brief: be specific. There’re a million photographers in the world, so when you say you are one, you might as well let people know why you stand out between the others.

Be surprising, dare to stand out. One of the artists present made art using her voice to create sounds. So I asked her if she could make a special sound and she made the sound of breasts. I will never forget that and just told you about it. That’s marketing.

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