BusinessWeek’s regular innovation supplement, IN: Inside Innovation, has a new edition in the April 20, 2009 issue. This edition features a story on the 25 most innovative companies. You can probably guess the names of some of the top 10 as most are well known for their innovative products and work culture. It’s still interesting to read the profiles of the different firms and how they achieve their reputation for innovation. Tata, Vodaphone and Blackberry are all companies profiled in this issue. While it’s a good issue and worth reading some of the graphic features are not up to par with past issues. I hope future issues will bring back some of the great graphics I’ve come to associate with IN.
Category Archives: Creativity & Innovation
People Don’t Go To Libraries For Information…They Go There Because…
What do libraries really offer? It’s an important question to ask because the answer helps to determine what the library’s core business is. And in seeking the answer we need to think less about the goods, services and content libraries provide, and to focus instead on the value that our user communities derive from the services and content. As I learned from a Bill Gribbons talk on user experience, the whole process of designing the experience begins with knowing what the library’s core business and values are. But grasping the library’s core business and being able to articulate it is a challenge.
A brief article titled “Innovation Strategy: What Business are We In?” in Innovation Tools got me thinking that a way to start defining the library’s business is to imagine what it isn’t – and what it is that people really want from the library. The Innovation Tools article shared a number of those “they thought they were in the …business, but…” and that got me thinking about applying that to the library. For example, “Black & Decker doesn’t sell drills, they sell holes in the wall” or “Harley-Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles it sells the concept of freedom to middle-age men.” And of course you’ve heard those lines about companies that thought they were in one business but were put out of it by disruptive technologies. For example, “companies that thought they were in the typewriter business were really in the communication business and they were put out of business by the word processor.”
The first thing that comes to my mind is that libraries think they are in the information business but they are really in the education or learning business. Members of the library’s community need information the same way Black & Decker’s customers need power tools and drill bits. It’s just a means to an end. For years we have heard that the library’s basic business is to acquire, store, organize and make information – in all formats – accessible. That now seems to be the classic focus on the commodity or product rather the benefits libraries provide to their users. David Lankes gets it. In a recent Blended Librarians Online Learning Community webcast he said that libraries are in the knowledge business, and that since knowledge is created through conversations libraries are also or ultimately in the business of facilitating community conversations. That’s a core principle of Lankes’ Participatory Librarianship concept.” My fellow DBL blogger Brian Mathews shared his thought that he sees libraries as being in the productivity business, helping students and faculty to efficiently get the resources and help they need to acheive their objectives.
It may be that there is no single business that defines libraries. Each library differs somewhat with respect to its culture and community so the nature of defining the library’s business may be, to some extent, situational. Your library may be in the community building business or your library’s children’s department may be in the business of creating the next generation of readers. The bottom line, according to the Innovation Tools article is that you begin defining your library’s business by:
– ask the customers
– ask the people who consider your product but do not buy it
– observe your customers and see how they use your product
The point is that “Unless you know exactly why prospective customers will buy your product (or use your services) you are unable to properly market or sell. Worse you will be blind to the alternatives, the opportunities and the threats which exist.” In other words, if we fail to truly know what business we are in we can’t possibly innovate in order to avoid be marginalized by another disruptive technology. If we think we’re in the business of creating gateways to content then we deserve to be disrupted by the next great technology that everyone will use to achieve their learning outcomes – which is why virtually all students use Google first to tackle course assignments or use YouTube to supplement course content. Librarians do demonstrate innovative practices, but too often we innovate in technologies that do not address our core business. If we really want to create change that is of value to our users we had better figure out why they go to libraries and what they use them for. Then we can clearly articulate the business we are in and innovate based on benefits people derive from libraries.
Best Books In Design & Innovation
It’s that time of the year. Many publications and websites are issuing their “best” of the year lists. I always check BusinessWeek’s best business books list to see if our library has acquired them all. But I made a new discovery this year. I found that BusinessWeek also produces a separate listing of their picks for the top ten books on design and innovation. I thought I’d share that list here.
I can’t quite say these books are ranked, but the first book listed is one I’m reading right now (well, sort of, I started reading Subject to Change about half way through). That’s Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. This book has attracted a great deal of attention and deservedly so. The idea of communicating through doodling is big right now – you’ve no doubt seen those popular UPS whiteboard commercials – although I don’t think that guy is actually doing the drawing. I’m enjoying the book although I’m not sure I’ll be drawing my way through presentations. But I am learning much more about the power of visual communication, and how to reach people with visual messages. In addition, even if you never use drawings in communicating with others, there is value in using drawing to work through challenges or to simplify complicated ideas. Visual thinking through drawing can provide an alternate and creative approach to problem solving – and it fits in well with a design approach.
Unfortunately I have not had time to get to most of the other books on BusinessWeek’s list, but I plan to get to a few of these in 2009:
Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy by Judy Estrin
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn
If you don’t have time to read Christensen’s latest or it seems of only marginal interest, you can grasp the book’s core ideas by reading this IdeaConnection interview with Christensen in which he discusses the book.
The Endless City by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic
The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan
This one also showed up on BW’s best business books list. I try to pay attention to any article or ideas coming from Ram Charan, one of the most interesting consultants in modern business.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies byCharlene Li and Josh Bernoff
This one should be of particular interest to the library community because it focuses on using social networks to create and share ideas, and explains how companies are using it to reach new customers.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
Here’s a title well known to the library community as it was mentioned in more than a few librarian blogs. Not surprising given the interest in the social communication tools that Shirky discusses. Personally, I just didn’t get into this one, but the ideas may really resonate with you.
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan
One reason I may try to take a look at this one is because the authors discuss the importance of creating unique experiences for customers. Note that there is a link to a video interview with the authors – another good way to get the gist of the book if you don’t have time to read it.
The Numerati by Stephen Baker
The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World by Amar Bhidé
Here’s to better reading for new ideas in 2009. The bloggers of Designing Better Libraries appreciate your support and readership, and we look forward to continuing our mission to share with the library community the best ideas in design thinking, user experience, innovation and creativity. We continue to believe that by integrating these ideas into our practice we can design better libraries with the end goal of giving our user communities the best possible library experience.
Latest Inside Innovation Available
The newest edition of BusinessWeek’s IN (Inside Innovation) is found it the December 1, 2008 issue, but you can also find it online. This issue features two interesting profiles. First it examines the work of David Rockwell, an architect who shifted his career to design and now creates designs for building interiors, products and processes. Even in a down economy Rockwell’s firm is growing and adding more staff.
Can you encourage innovation with contests? Peter Diamandis thinks so. IN takes a look at the work of his X Foundation and its multiple prizes, such as Lunar X Prize for the first privately-funded team that can land a robot on the moon or the $100,000 being offered for the best idea in making the airport check-in process faster. And were you aware that India’s design startups are growing so rapidly they may exceed the country’s computer support centers. For the first time, India is designing products from start to finish. You may also enjoy the usual graphics as well.
Learning More About Innovation From Tim Brown
Fans of Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO Corporation, will be pleased to know they can learn some new things from Brown – or at least obtain more insight into his thinking about creating a more innovative organization. Two new resources featuring Brown recently became available.
Brown is interviewed in the November 2008 issue of The McKinsey Quarterly in an article titled “Lessons from innovation’s front lines: An interview with IDEO’s CEO.” What I like about this inteview is that Brown gives some fairly straightforward answers to questions about how to achieve better innovation. For example, when asked to explain what gets in the way of innovation Brown answers “The biggest barrier is needing to know the answer before you get started. This often manifests itself as a desire to have proof that your idea is worthwhile before you actually start the project. This kills a lot of innovation.” I think this happens in libraries quite a bit where innovative ideas get shot down because librarians can’t prove that their idea is going to be a good or successful idea. If you read the article you’ll get a clearer picture of this.
If you think you can learn more from Brown about creativity and innovative by seeing and hearing what he can share – not just from reading his interview – then you are in luck. Now you can watch a 27-minute presentation by Brown on creativity and the link between it and play. TED recently posted a video of Brown giving a talk at a conference on serious play. This is a fun talk with Brown giving the audience a number of interesting participative activities – surely nothing you’ve tried at your library instruction sessions. He focuses on how play is used at IDEO to encourage creativity. The big challenge is getting adults to drop their fear of being judged by peers so they can be more spontaneous and playful. He also speaks about the idea of divergence and convergence. Designers at IDEO typically diverge and engage in play in order to discover new ideas and then converge in a more serious way with their team colleagues to apply their ideas to solutions. He boils the application of play for innovation to three things: 1) exploration – go for quantity of ideas and don’t worry about what works 2)build – use your hands to make something (prototypes) and 3) role play – put yourself in the shoes of your user.
I wonder if, based on Brown’s advice, we might not do better with our students if we could somehow encourage they to be playful when searching for information – which means trying new things and experimenting. While college students have long left behind their childhood creativity (more about this in the video) they are not yet that far removed from it.
Another Leadership Skill – Setting The Stage For Creativity
Leaders can emerge from anywhere in the library organization. Those who lead staff at any level recognize the importance of bringing together the right people, and orchestrating their efforts toward a common goal. Now comes an article that encourages these same leaders to manage the creativity generated in the organization. Creativity is critical to the development of new programs and services. So it is in the best interest of leaders to design and develop a work enviroment that promotes creativity. I’m going to attempt to summarize the key ideas from a Harvard Business Review article on “Creativity and the Role of the Leader“. The article appears in the October 2008 issue if HBR. Here are several things you can do to help your colleagues and organization to foster greater creativity.
Draw on the right minds – Engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work. Distribute creative responsibilities across the organization. Avoid the myth of the “lone creative genius”; get staff collaborating. Creativity and innovation are more likely to ingnite when people of different disciplines, backgrounds and areas of expertise share their thinking.
Bring Process to Bear – Carefully – Organizational creativity depends on vibrant, ongoing collaboration and free idea flow; adding people and projects restricts the flow. The leader’s job is to map out the stages of innovation and recognize that each one requires different types of support. Idea generation and idea implementation are best handled by different people. Leaders must guide ideas through the bureaucracy. Leaders need to filter creative ideas; find the ones that have little potential and weed them out.
Fan the Flames of Motivation – Intellectual challenge is a better motivator for creativity than salary or benefits. Leaders must find ways to provide intellectual challenges and independence; allow people to pursue their passions. Leaders let others know they appreciate their work. Decrease the fear of failure to increase creativity.
These ideas and others presented in the article emerged from a colloquium held at Harvard University. Attendees included business leaders from organizations that depend heavily on the contributions of creative minds. The participants came to the conclusion that more work needs to be completed to understand creativity in the organization.
Just Hire Steve Jobs
Want to design a better library? Looking for an individual to help your library achieve new levels of creativity? Are you in need of an employee who can help your library innovate like Apple? The answer to all these questions has a single simple answer. Hire Steve Jobs. Sorry if you thought I had a better answer to those questions. But what if you can’t hire Steve Jobs. Then hire someone who works closely with him.
This sounds pretty silly because no one is going to hire Steve Jobs. For one thing he has a pretty good job right now. For another, you probably couldn’t afford him. I just bring this up because I’ve now recently twice encountered this exact recommendation in different readings, of course, in a facetious way. In the book Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World by designers from Adaptive Path the authors write:
There are a number of ways to encourage and maintain an experiential focus throughout your development process. One way is to hire Steve Jobs as your CEO. Apple’s success in delivering satisfying experiences stems directly from Jobs’ maniacal focus on customers’ interactions with products. As CEO, he ensures that Apple delivers only the best designs.
In an article titled “Design: A Better Path to Innovation” (subscription to Interactions needed) author Nathan Shedroff, experience designer, writes:
I got a call from an editor of one of the biggest business magazines in the U.S. What he said was “We’re planning on writing a book about how business can innovate like Apple does, and I was told to talk to you about it.” My answer stumped him. “You can’t write that book”. I had to explain that, no, the book wasn’t writeable. “It would consist of one sentence: Hire Steve Jobs.” I went on to explain their type of design, usually disastrous for most companies, works only when you have a leader with ultimate authority who also happens to have a keen sense of design and amazingly accurate understanding of what customers need and want.
The point of both sources is that many businesspeople want someone who can run their organization or company like Apple, and they are looking for the secrets that make Apple what it is – one of the most innovative and forward-design thinking companies on the planet. But Shedroff makes the point that Apple, right now, has a unique perspective that is is exceedingly difficult to achieve without Jobs. As an example he gives Microsoft. They do all the right design thinking things such as ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, user testings, etc. Yet many of their products yield a bad user experience. Shedroff goes on in his article to explain how design can lead to better innovation and meaningful user experiences.
So when you realize it’s not possible to hire Steve Jobs you may want to borrow your strategy from Sony. A recent BusinessWeek article detailed how Sony is working to catch up to Apple. The CEO of Sony couldn’t hire Jobs, but he did hire a top lieutentant of Steve Jobs. But even that move hasn’t had the expected payoff just yet. So what can libraries take away from this? Well, for one thing, if you can’t hire Steven Jobs don’t worry. You can still use design thinking to develop better processes in your library that will lead to more satisfying experiences for your users. But strong leadership, as Jobs demonstrates, is at the core of innovation and risk taking. It just may be the next best thing to hiring Steve Jobs.
Better Sleep On That
One of the roadblocks to designing better libraries can be our inability to creatively explore ways to achieve goals in non-traditional ways – or with radically different ideas. As past research has shown, as decision makers and idea generators we humans tend to rely on methods that have worked well for us in the past. The problems is that our old, reliable ways of getting things done may no longer be suitable for new times and new situations. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple way to open up our minds to fresh and untried strategies that would offer creative solutions.
A technique for doing just that may be closer at hand than we think. It’s called sleep. According to a recent NYT article, new research is showing that sleep – or the period directly after sleep – is one in which creative ideas and solutions can bubble up to the surface from the recesses of our minds. According to the article:
While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate. “Sleep makes a unique contribution,†explains Mark Jung-Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies the neural bases of insight and creative cognition. Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem. “When you think you’re not thinking about something, you probably are,†says Dr. Jung-Beeman, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology.
Scientists are learning more about the function of sleep. Once thought to be mostly about resting the body, current theories suggest that our bodies could move endlessly as long as we had the necessary energy but that it’s the brain that needs regular rest in order to process information and help us integrate it in ways that enable us to manage our existence. We could all likely share a story of waking up and just having a great idea pop into our heads in the shower. We may think it’s the shower but it may actually be our sleep refreshed brain feeding us the solution to a problem. Then again, there are other creativity theorists who believe that any period in which our mind is set free from routine activity and allowed to roam freely we may experience a bolt of genius – or just a simply good idea. My preferred method is a visit to the campus fitness center where I think about anything but work-related matters. It’s the post-workout shower where my best ideas are likely to emerge. Some of the toughest challenges are the type where an opposable mind is needed to develop a good solution to resolve two conflicting ideas that stand in opposition to each other. I can recall several instances where potential ideas emerged either right after sleep or an afternoon workout.
All this new knowledge about the value of sleep for priming our creativity should change our thinking about sleeping on the job. As the NTY article suggests, it may actually benefit organizations to promote daily naptime for staff. Some companies are even investing in hi-tech napping pods. It is ideas such as these that influence my thinking about how to create a library organization that is constantly engaged in the design of a better library. Encouraging library workers to take a 15-minute nap may sound outrageous, but it may just be the sort of radical thinking we need.
Latest IN (Inside Innovation) Now Available
The latest edition of BusinessWeek magazine’s design and innovation supplement, IN – Inside Innovation, is now available online. The focus is quite timely – how can America use “innovations economics” to restore and achieve sustainable global competitiveness. Despite nearly $5 trillion dedicated to research and development since 2000 the country is experiencing economic stagnation. Of course there are the usual charts and articles about innovation. It’s worth taking a look at.
Innovation Means Change And That’s Not Popular
My last post about Procter & Gamble and their Design Thinking Initiative was largely about change. If the people involved in the Initiative were resistant to change it would never happen. And that’s what sometimes, maybe frequently, happens in libraries. Resistance to change is a surefire innovation killer. Likewise, organizations can thwart innovation and change with questionable tactics. An article from the July 2008 issue of University Business titled “Stifling Initiative” provides 10 simple rules for crushing innovation and maintain a culture of inertia. Here are those 10 rules in summary format:
1. Request a formal written proposal – make the innovator meet as many administrative requirements as possible
2. Send the proposal to a committee – this ought to make it take as long as possible to get a show of support for an idea
3. Schedule meetings to discuss the concept – it’s important to make sure all the key players are involved in the decision
4. Lose the proposal – another stalling tactic to avoid making a decision on the proposal
5. No money for that project – “This is a great idea…but…there’s no money for it”
6. Have you talked to…about this – put the innovator on the bureaucracy merry-go-round
7. We don’t, haven’t, won’t, can’t… – just be completely inflexible
8. Sounds exciting but give more detail – a good tactic for wearing down the innovator
9. Yes, but – there’s always a catch and it’s usually not a good one
10. Go Nancy Reagan and just say no – the ultimate power play to stop innovation
There are abundant ways to destroy the spirit of innovation in an individual or an organization. This article provides a reminder that it’s not that difficult to find ways to make it happen.