Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Timely Innovation

Okay, let's give the session on "How To Innovate on Time" by Scott Berkun a try.
Innovation is relative and is relative to the audience.  Being Good can lead to Innovation as a by-product of the effort of being good. The advice is to pick a hard problem to solve and focus on it.
This is an engaging interactive workshop looking at the process of innovation. Creativity is not necessarily hard. It can be hard to be creative inside precise boundaries.   
To increase innovation:
  • Make the team smaller
  • Give more authority
  • Increase trust
There are three phases to innovation:
  1. Inspiration
  2. Incubation
  3. Execution
It is the incubation phase that is where most people hit trouble.
Interesting questions surrounding incubation:
  • Where is it safe to play with ideas at work?
Inversion can be an invigorating approach to innovation. For example, what would the worst possible web site look like. You can invert these bad features to create ideas that can be exploited.