Culture and innovation

I received a couple of books on innovation in the past few months. I'm currently reading Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinkingand will soon read Strategic Insight: The Creative Spark in Human Achievment. Both these books look at innovation but from very different perspectives. Think Better looks at the process of innovation (i.e. the steps and activities required to take ideas from mind to market) and offers some very detailed, practical suggestions on how to do it -- quite refreshing to have a book that gives you concrete tips from the trenches. The book places a lot of emphasis on the distinction between making lists (creative thinking: generative, nonjudgmental, expansive) and making choices (critical thinking: analytic, judgmental, selective) and how these need to be kept separate.

The book gives some great tips on brainstorming: I particularly liked the notion of turning on a tap (faucet) and letting it run for a few seconds before drinking as metaphor for looking beyond the first or obvious answer. This book is very useful for people who want to add discipline to the ideation (initiation) end of the innovation process.

I haven't read Strategic Insight: The creative spark in human achievment yet, but there is an interview with the author, William Duggan, HERE. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this one.

I've also been reading a few books that are not -- on the surface -- related to innovation, but offer valuable insights into the human and national psyche. These are interesting if you are wondering why some countries seem to be better at innovating than others.

Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich identified two characteristics that can hinder one's path to success: fear and selfishness. The first of these, fear, gets a lot of coverage in all areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. But there is less discussion on the origins of that fear: Is it school? Is it the family? Is it the state? Imagine the impact of Stalin's state on individuals, families and culture in the Soviet Union:

"According to the Bolsheviks, the idea of “private life” as separate from the realm of politics was nonsensical, for politics affected everything; there was nothing in a person’s so-called personal life that was non-political. The personal sphere should thus be subject to public supervision and control. Private spaces beyond the state’s control were regarded by the Bolsheviks as dangerous breeding grounds for counterrevolutionaries, who had to be exposed and rooted out." -- The Whisperers (2007), p. 4



Try volunteering ideas in that environment.

The Chinese have also had their fair share of "red" (Communist) and "white" (KMT) terror. These political and historical events shape a people's collective conscience, and this doesn't disappear overnight. Even this week here in Taiwan I was surprised to hear the response to the following question, "Why don't many people here like to wear cologne?" The response: "People don't like to draw attention to themselves."

And what about selfishness? This one is more to do with why people want to innovate in the first place: is it just money? If it is, why do entrepreneurs continue to innovate long after they become independently wealthy? And isn't it ironic when companies, once they start to place too much attention on profits, start to lose staff and, quite soon thereafter, their paying customers. It brings to mind this comment by George W. Merck, founder of Merck, a drug company: “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for profits . . . if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear.”

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Innovation ramblings

1. Intellectual Property: Okay, everybody knows that firms need some protection if they are to be rewarded for their innovation efforts, but this is often taken too far. People often can't pay $30 for a DVD -- even if they want to "do the right thing." And people are dying as a result of not being able to pay for medicines, well . . . ? And companies invest more on cures for male-pattern baldness than cures for diseases that affect undeveloped countries? Don't be surpised if you start to see drugs coming on the market as a result of a Wikipedia-type lab.

Sharing Intellectual Property -- giving it away -- has hidden benefits for those who do so: it forces you to keep on innovating -- it ups the ante; it also keeps those firms and nations that are eager to "steal" IP or don't enforce their IP laws gorged: too busy enjoying the fruits of other people's labor to bother coming up with anything worthwhile themselves.


2. Innovation is more roll up the sleeves than button down the shirt. More Mike Tyson than Barbra Streisand.

3. Don't compare yourself to what's around you. Seek out the most competitive area in which you want to hone your craft. Methinks you would have seen much better costumes at a drag queen Halloween party in New York than what you had in your local neighborhood.

4. Innovation should be, as Schumpeter said, more like poker than roulette.

5. Though the outcomes of successful innovation often appear glamorous, the process can be mindnumbingly dull and frustrating.

Image courtesy of: Antirka