by John Brooker | Apr 28, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Tools
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by John Brooker | Apr 27, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Collaborate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla #107 How might you use prizes to inspire innovation in companies? “Proactive prizes are phenomenally powerful tools. They circumvent bureaucracy, investment anxiety and, where necessary, ideology. They exploit the human will to take part, compete and win.” Bryan Appleyard, Journalist: “The mother of invention: cash” UK Sunday Times News Review, 13 December 2009. How might your organisation use prizes for innovation? In 1714, the British government offered a £20,000 Longitude Prize, for “a simple and practical method to determine a ship’s longitude”. The eventual winner, John Harrison, started work in 1730 and eventually received his prize (or part of it) in 1773! Despite Harrison’s experience, journalist Bryan Appleyard writes that prizes for innovation are still popular. (Please see the source in the quotation above. Unfortunately, the article is not available on the “TimesOnline” website). In his article, Appleyard cites (among others): The Ansari X $10million prize for the development of a private sector spacecraft (now put in to production for Virgin Galactic) The DARPA $40,000 prize for finding ten red weather balloons across the USA, an experiment to test the power of networks for gathering accurate information The Mprize, an unknown amount to develop a longer living mouse Agencies use these prizes to promote innovation in a cost effective way. As the promoters of the Mprize state on their site, “The Mprize springs from a simple truth: The greatest innovations in human history have always been fueled by three things … competition, imagination, and the entrepreneurial spirit.” So prizes work, however, the prize that interested me most was a $1 million prize offered by Netflix, a DVD distribution web site. Its prize was awarded...
by John Brooker | Mar 14, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla #74 If you want technology to be successful, you have to ensure it meets a few clear criteria… “New technology turns adult and child roles on their head. If technology is easy to use now, we should say “it’s adult’s play” not “child’s play”. John Brooker ~ Adult player What makes a new technology product successful? I’m writing this in my hotel room in Morocco, having just finished my first ever video call to my family. This excited me so much that I was jumping up and down and clapping with excitement when we connected. We used Windows Live Messenger to make the call, which my daughter showed me how to use at the weekend. Once I had connected to the hotel’s internet (two minutes), it took me just a minute to set up the video call, with a bit of on line coaching from my children. This technology has given me the opportunity to see and talk to my family, easily, simply and for free (hotel internet prices aside!). They can show me their homework, we can play games and generally have fun, so much so that we spent forty minutes on the call. On the telephone, it is usually a couple of minutes’ chat and then they get bored. It also costs me £1.25 a minute. Some of you with a key driver (e.g. speaking to relatives overseas) may have been making video calls from your PC for quite a while, many more of you will use video conferencing at work so what is the big deal about my experience? Well, I think...
by John Brooker | Mar 8, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
Creative Gorilla #68 If you are careful about the rules and policies you set, you can help stimulate innovation… “As innovation is hard to micromanage, the best policy is to attract smart people and get out of their way!” Edward L. Glaeser ~ Glimp Professor of Economics and director of the Rappaport Institute at Harvard University Are you getting out of the way of your smart people? Taking a paddle on the Internet recently (at my line speeds it’s hardly surfing), I found an article in the Boston Globe by Edward Glaeser, a Profeesor of Economics at Harvard University. In the article he outlines how Massachusetts might reinvent itself again and how the state government could help or hinder this. His driving idea is that the government should have policies to attract smart and talented people and then get out of their way so that they can innovate. Unfortunately recent government policy has had the reverse effect. They introduced onerous business regulations that deterred organisations from setting up in the state and heavy taxation for high earners, which drove them away. It reminded me of a workshop that I ran which we designed to encourage individuals to be more innovative. It was a young, enthusiastic and talented group and a significant number cited company rules and bureaucracy as a deterrent to their innovation, this in a company that positively encourages innovation! So If you work in an organisation, it probably invests a great deal to attract, keep and develop talented staff. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cost much to set up the needless rules and policies that then drive them...
by John Brooker | Feb 12, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 43 Creative people tend to have certain traits or characteristics. You can seek to emulate these… “This led me to reflect on the pictures (from a Camera Obscura). It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible I asked myself?” William Henry Fox Talbot (inventor of modern photography) Please click here for link. Can you develop the characteristics of a creative person? This week we had a few days on a farm in Wiltshire and visited Lacock Abbey. My children were keen to see the cloisters where several Harry Potter scenes were filmed and I spent some time looking at the Fox-Talbot Museum of Photography. Fox-Talbot invented the positive / negative photographic system in 1840 at Lacock Abbey, his family home. Here we have a wealthy Member of Parliament, an eminent mathematician, a translator of ancient texts with a keen interest in physics and other sciences. He had so many abilities but could not draw. Thus he found himself on honeymoon in 1835, on Lake Como in Italy, experimenting, as you do on honeymoon, using tracing paper with a portable Camera Obscura to draw pictures. [Please click here to understand the Camera Obscura]. This led to him recording the quotation above in his journal. His invention arose due to developments in two areas of science in which Fox Talbot was interested: Optics, which led to the portable Camera Obscura and Photochemistry, in which...
