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Finding a job is so 20th century. That is why young people today need to be more “innovation ready” than “college ready.”
We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”
Who is doing it right?
“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’ They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing.
[In the US, look at the] growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of Engineering, the M.I.T. Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students learn to innovate.”
"Somewhere between the two extremes exists a tipping point – a place where full creativity and the lack of structure reaches a balance with purposeful, valuable and necessary structures and processes."
____________________
Balancing structure and freedom, processes and creativity is an art, not a science. ____________________
Move much more toward additional structure and you begin to limit and stifle creativity and innovation outcomes.
Move much more toward freedom and creativity and you lose the ability to manage, develop and commercialize ideas. Where does the tipping point reside?
Your innovation activities need enough structure to identify and commercialize great ideas effectively, but not so much structure that people are stymied or slowed by processes, forms and decisions.
In organizations where purposeful innovation is fairly new, the tipping point is closer to the regimented side, since there are few widely distributed capabilities or tools. As an organization gains experience innovating, the structure and rigidity become less important, as innate skills and culture learn to shape and manage ideas more effectively.
Related posts by Deb:
Photo: by lambdachialpha Flickr CC
Marina Gorbis identifies unique human skills [that] should be the core of any public education program.
- Sensemaking
- Social and emotional intelligence
- Novel and adaptive thinking
- Moral and ethical reasoning
As Gorbis write... “Learning is Social”.
We need to learn how to work better with machines, letting machines do what they are good at.
Gorbis shows how machines and average people can outperform experts at playing chess.
“Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably,superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
Two perspectives: 1) ...the real risk in a hyper-data world is use that crosses the line between constructive and invasive, and 2) that people will use it naively, and to mistake correlation. Angela Ahrendts: The security dimensions of Big Data are well rehearsed, and protection must be a given. ...the real risk in a hyper-data world is use that crosses the line between constructive and invasive. For us, Big Data must be about serving our customers’ interests, rather than our own. ….Customer information should work for the customer, making every retail experience a great retail experience... Appropriately protected and intelligently used, we believe it can do just that. Angela Ahrendts (@AngelaAhrendts) is the CEO of Burberry.
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Figuring out what causes what, and why and under what circumstances is hard work. Big Data is a tool for this work, not a substitute for it. ____________________
Andrew McAfee: ... Big data’s great promise is that it’ll get us out of ....decision-making by HiPPO—the Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion. ... In the same way that witch doctors gave way to actual doctors as medicine became a science, HiPPOs will in many domains give way to data-driven decision making.
Many people accurately perceive that Big Data will give rise to privacy concerns, but I want to highlight a different risk:
- That people will use it naively, and to mistake correlation (“as the geese fly away, the weather gets colder”) with causation (“the geese are causing winter!”). Figuring out what causes what, and why and under what circumstances is hard work. Big Data is a tool for this work, not a substitute for it.
Andrew McAfee ( @amcafee ), a principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-author of the e-book “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.”
Recent posts by Deb:
What makes for a healthy, "anti-fragile" (adaptable, responsive) organization today? I've posted by SideShare from my recent presentation to the Michigan Management Labor Association's (MMLA) presentation on Healthy Organizations and Wellness.
For unions and management, planning for the future:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
"An insider's view of the advance readers' edition of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by the super-smart Nicco Mele."
The book releases here in the U.S. on April 23, 2013.
We are all struggling to figure out which big institutions make sense....And ...which are best torn down.
....While there are many exciting aspects of the end of big, ...there are also threats. ....The rise of fringe groups such as the Tea Party and WikiLeaks are a result of the end of big because the Web rewards extremist views.
____________________
Without the Washington Post, would Woodward and Bernstein have emerged independently? ____________________
In journalism, if we no longer have big news gathering organizations, who is going to fund the big investigative story?
Without the Washington Post, would Woodward and Bernstein have emerged independently? Without the Watergate Scandal how would history have differed? These are questions worth asking.
The End of Big was not self-published. Nicco talks a lot about micro publishing but went with a big publisher (St. Martin's Press) for his own book.
But at the same time, Nicco is running EchoDitto his own small business and he also has a small publishing operation (his blog).
Instead of convincing universities to take a chance on its classroom engagement platform, Top Hat Monocle made direct contact with professors who asked students to also pick up the tab.
...most students carried mobile devices...which could be used for in-class interaction. [The founders] ...developed a prototype product that focused on quizzing and polling students, and pilot-tested the prototype in two classes.
_____________________
Large organizations have a very long sales cycle ... catch them outside of [their] budget cycle, you may not get another chance for a year or two. _____________________
“Selling to large organizations like universities, governments and big corporations is difficult and time-consuming. Large organizations have a very long sales cycle and if you catch them outside of a budget cycle, you may not get another chance for a year or two.”
THE SOLUTION The founders decided to “consumerize the classroom” by focusing on individual professors, rather than universities. This made sense because the value proposition was focused on the classroom and because professors have much latitude in making adoption decisions.
THE RESULT
This academic year, it is being used by 2,000 professors and more than 150,000 students at 300 universities worldwide. More than 80 per cent of these universities are in the United States.
The company has 75 employees, offices in three countries, and has been able to raise another $9.1-million in financing.
Professors were asked, do they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype." 79% said yes.
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In the largest survey of instructors who have taught massive open online courses, The Chronicle heard from critics, converts, and the cautious. Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011.
Since then MOOCs, which charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access, have been touted by reformers as a way to transform higher education and expand college access.
Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.
Via Smithstorian, Deb Nystrom, REVELN Consulting
"She started her own creativity and innovation consultancy company to do what was NOT being done, – using academic research to improve innovation in companies"
Amantha Imber wondered why the research she had read was not being applied to help firms innovate.
What was the use of having a body of scientific research, including proven drivers to innovation, if it was not being used to help companies grow?
“There was a gap between academic research and what happens ‘in the real world’,” she says.
_____________________
"..staff need to feel a sense of challenge. They also need to have the resources to deliver." _____________________
Six years later the consultancy she founded, Inventium, is advising some of the world’s best-known corporations, including Coca-Cola Amatil, American Express, Qantas and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Inventium won this year’s BRW Client Choice Award for best management consulting firm. The awards are run by Beaton and are based on responses from more than 40,000 professional services clients to ensure their independence.
...“People talk about trying to build a culture of innovation. From analysis we know what sorts of elements need to be present,” Imber says.
“One of the most important is that staff need to feel a sense of challenge. They also need to have the resources to deliver. People need to feel that risk-taking is allowed and failure is not terrible, but rather an opportunity to learn.”
She says there are keys to transforming ideas into realities.
“Crush assumptions,” she says. “Whenever we set out to solve a problem, we have assumptions that fence in our thinking.
By deliberately crushing assumptions and asking ‘What if the opposite was true?’ you can significantly increase your creativity.”
"Six (6) emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years."
The work is by the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.
Trends included in the short list of major changes in higher education include: - Flipped Classroom,
- MOOCs, Mobile Apps,
- Tablet Computing,
- Augmented Reality,
- Game-Based Learning,
- The Internet of Things,
- Learning Analytics,
- 3D Printing,
- Flexible Displays,
- Next Generation Batteries,
- Wearable Technology.
The NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program.
Related posts by Deb via REVELN:
Via Alberto Acereda, PhD
...Get to the task at hand: Defining innovation in a way that is both meaningful and actionable.
An innovation is a non-obvious solution to a problem (whether real or perceived) that, once it takes hold in the marketplace, not only becomes obvious but also becomes the new standard.
“Those who struggle with ambiguity sometimes reach for false certainties just to appear decisive.”If it is about sense-making in ambiguous business situations, I’m intrigued.
Randall White & Sandra Shullman have classic and newer information on dealing with ambiguity in leadership, both in 2010 and in 2012.
Highlights:
Using LSP (Learning Sensory Preparedness) to succeed in your business:
1. LEARN: Learn to make a decision with incomplete information.
2. SENSE: Train your mind to be fluid and attuned to faint signals of impending change.
3. PREPARE: Examine five ideas or trends that you know nothing about, but that will affect the business in three to five years.
"Google's driverless car has broad implications for society, for the economy and for individual businesses. Just in the U.S., the car puts up for grab some $2 trillion a year in revenue..."
Excerpt:
We consistently underestimate the implications of a change in technology—Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders, Sears, etc.—
Many industries face the kind of disruption that may beset the auto industry
[This blogger will be doing a series on] the ripple effects that the driverless car may create ~ disruptive technology ~ the dangers and the opportunities that one creates.
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Google and Apple - what makes for innovation and what are the lessons learned? ...Google could have made the decision to stay solely focused on search, but they had the foresight to move beyond the certainty of what is to pursue new opportunity by focusing on what if.
Apple on the other hand, while once the leading innovator in their space, has ceded that position to other more aggressive players like Samsung, HTC , and yes, Google.
Where Apple went wrong is they began to confuse version releases and feature improvements with innovation.
Via Susan Bainbridge, Deb Nystrom, REVELN Consulting
"What Nassim Taleb misses about technology and innovation is that its purpose is not to entertain the delicate tastes of the chattering classes, but to improve the lives of us all. ...What’s more, most of technology’s black swans are positive ones."
Excerpts: The Usefulness Of Useless Things
What Mr. Taleb fails to understand is that technologists are supremely aware that most of their efforts will come to nothing
_______________________
What, I wonder, would Mr. Taleb make of Edison’s 9,999th try?
_______________________
...They are, in fact, searching out black swans (to use Mr. Taleb’s own parlance), in full knowledge that they will spend most of their time rushing up blind alleys.
What, I wonder, would Mr. Taleb make of Edison’s 9,999th try? The truth is that useless things often end up very useful indeed. Modern information technology did not originate with engineers, but has its roots in an obscure academic crisis, whose major figures, such as Cantor, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel and others never dreamed that their work would have important practical consequences.
...What Mr. Taleb seems to miss is that these are ...people dedicated to following their dreams and willing to put their own skin in the game to do so.
What’s more, most of technology’s black swans are positive ones. As [Greg Satell] recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Innovation is a particularly sticky problem because it so often remains undefined.” You can’t simply focus on the technologies that are sure bets, but must take into account the entire matrix (pictured in the article, four quadrants.) ... the logical consequence of his argument) is that we should remain in the upper right quadrant, where both the problem and the domain are well defined and he would presumably assign the lowest value on basic research and disruptive innovation, which have no clear applicability.
Yet it is there that we break truly new ground.
"I will say the blended model, ...with certainty, is revolutionizing, higher education." "...access to a Master Teacher..." ~ Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania
Charlie interviews:
- Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX;
- Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania;
- Joel Klein, former New York City Schools chancellor and CEO of Amplify and
- Tom Friedman of the New York
Related posts by Deb:
"Work history does not matter as much as we think it does, and bosses matter more — these are findings from an emerging field called work-force science." ...Work-force science, in short is what happens when Big Data meets H.R. ....“This is absolutely the way forward,” says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Most companies have been flying completely blind.” Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.
For example:
...Tim Geisert, chief marketing officer for I.B.M.’s Kenexa unit, observed that an outgoing personality has traditionally been assumed to be the defining trait of successful sales people.
But its research, based on millions of worker surveys and tests, as well as manager assessments, has found that the most important characteristic for sales success is a kind of emotional courage, a persistence to keep going even after initially being told no.
For years, [Google] candidates were screened according to SAT scores and college grade-point averages, metrics favored by its founders. But numbers and grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as important hiring criteria....
Google has found that the most innovative workers — also the “happiest,” by its definition — are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.
"In the circle of life, connected consumerism is the new reality. Those businesses that don't disrupt their own markets will find their markets disrupted for them." ~ Brian Solis
Visual POW infographics from Brian Solis' new book, What's the Future of Business.
Relevant posts from Deb:
"How Jenny Griffiths inspired winning innovation in her futurefacing clothesbuying company Snap Fashion."
Griffiths's "BIG" Moment
In April 2012, Cisco announced the inaugural British Innovation Gateway, or “BIG” Awards, an annual contest offering $135,000 in prize money, an additional $75,000 in marketing, public relations, and legal support, plus a 12-month mentorship with Cisco’s own in-house business coaches for a company working in an undiscovered, tech-savvy niche.
In September, Griffiths won it all with a pretty basic message. As her 60-second spot put it: See something you love, want, need? Get your phone out…
That’s led to some of the more widespread attention she’s been seeking. The U.K. Apple app store made Snap Fashion a featured download, which helped boost user traffic: The app has since had more than 10,000 downloads and the site attracts tens of thousands of users.
Mega-retailers that seemed unreachable before (think: Net-A-Porter) now cold call her to get more involved with the service.
Griffiths plans to use the CISCO contest windfall and mentorship to expand. This year, she is releasing an Android app, building better platform compatibility with likes of iPads and iPad Minis, recruiting local designers to the site, and unveiling a men’s section.
...Cisco hasn’t offered to buy the company--at least, not yet. They seem to be betting that the example of a homegrown startup making it on its own in London will be more powerful encouragement to the legions of startups now sprouting in East London.
"As a growing body of research points to positive outcomes from meditation in schools, programs are spreading across the country." Infographic: Maili Holiman
What do you think about this Schools That Work story? We'd love to hear from you!
Tweet your answer to @edutopia, comment below, or email us.
3D printing technology has helped replace 75 percent of a patient's skull with the approval of U.S. regulators. The 3D-printed implant can replace the bone in people's skulls damaged by disease or trauma, according to Oxford Performance Materials.
______________________
"We see no part of the orthopedic industry being untouched by this..."
______________________
The company announced it had received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its skull implant on Feb. 18, 2013— a decision that led to the first U.S. surgical operation on March 4.
"We see no part of the orthopedic industry being untouched by this," said Scott DeFelice, president of Oxford Performance Materials.
DeFelice's company is already selling 3D-printed implants overseas as a contract manufacturer.
But the FDA decision has opened the door for U.S. operations using the implants. [Video: A 3D Printer of Your Own]
3D printing's advantage comes from taking the digitally scanned model of a patient's skull and "printing" out a matching 3D object layer by layer.
The precise manufacturing technique can even make tiny surface or edge details on the replacement part that encourage the growth of cells and allow bone to attach more easily. About 300 to 500 U.S. patients could use skull bone replacements every month, according to DeFelice. The possible patients include people with cancerous bone in their skulls, as well as car accident victims and U.S. military members suffering from head trauma.
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Companies can become more innovative and profitable by analyzing external sources of information such as social media, a new survey from Arthur D. Little says.
Using external data helps companies develop fresher ideas for products and services, said Rick Eager a partner at the firm. “Businesses get used to operating and thinking in a certain way and data gets filtered through the patterns of how we always do things,” Mr. Eager said. “When you always use the same channels for business intelligence, like internal sales figures, you are limited in what you can come up with.”
"Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen literally wrote the book on technology disruption...and he thinks Apple, Tesla Motors, venture capitalists and most of the nation’s colleges and universities should be afraid." The author of The Innovator’s Dilemma said Wednesday that all of them could be killed by less advanced competitors in the same way that many once dominant technology companies have been in the past. ...He believes that and the commoditization of smartphones threaten Apple in the long run. ...“For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core." “But now online learning brings to higher education this technological core, and people who are very complacent are in deep trouble.' __________________ ...people who are very complacent are in deep trouble. __________________
...“there is a different business model that is disrupting this in addition to online learning. It’s on-the-job education. ...you come in for a week and we’ll teach you about strategy and you go off and develop a strategy.
...You learn it and you use it. These are very different business models and that’s what’s killing us.”
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Suggested by
Julien Rio
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"In a fast moving world, how to make sure your innovation meets the success it deserves?"
...Doctor Levi Spear Parmly invented dental floss in 1815, the innovation was great! He found a perfect way to remove the dirt remaining between the teeth that no brush could reach. His product was responding to a real problem.
Unfortunately, even though the problem was real, people were unaware of it. Therefore, this great innovation that sounds like an obvious solution nowadays hasn't been on the market before 1882, 67 years later. Sometimes innovation solves problems for which people are unaware of a real need.
Bill Gates has been in the media of late with “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems.”
Gates’ solution is about continuous improvement. However ...as Gates’ says, this is simple in concept, but often difficult to execute.
Excerpts:
While times have changed for most business functions, it seems that the HR and recruiting departments are stuck in a time warp, circa 1975. 1) Stop using skills and experience-based job descriptions.... Instead require the hiring manager to define the job in terms of 6-8 measurable performance objectives.
2) Measure the hiring manager’s ability to attract, develop and retain top people.
3) Never interview more than four people for any job.
4) Define Quality of Hire before the person’s hired based on a performance-based job description.
Related article from Deb:
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Thomas Friedman is giving us perspective on what's here now and what's coming. Solo-preneurs, entrepreneurs, the power of the network is becoming core to work in the new economy. Hiding away in corporate job structures has been vaporizing, more quickly than the almost overnight shift from big cars to smaller ones in the 70s. Are you ready? Are your kids ready? ~ Deb