Innovation, Creativity and Leadership

A tumblr blog charting discovery and disruption from the Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership

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Setting up my artefact for our "art show" exhibition. I didn't get a chance to pick up balloons but it looks good nevertheless. Some of the other exhibits are really impressive!

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Creativity and the Creative Industries: Week 8

This is our penultimate teaching lecture of the entire MICL course. Today we have author, artist, film-maker and general artsy guru Roma Tearne. She is talking to us and motivating the development of our personal artefacts. What are her key takeaway points? - Be obsessive, in everything that you do creatively - Understand that destruction is part of the creative process - Strive to create a sense of place and narrative She encourages us to customise our notebooks, using our childhood interests and create a mood board as the first page. To end off Roma shows us her beautiful notebooks, ones that she crates inflight with collages, nik-naks, illustrations, drawings and notes. Understandably, she’s set the bar pretty high. Next week is last minute preparations for our artefact show. Deadlines are just over the horizon.

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I'm hard at work designing my artefact for Creativity and Creative Industries, here's a sneak peek of a mid-stage prototype

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Creativity and the Creative Industries: Week 7

This week is our last opportunity to prepare for the performance next week; to start us off our tutor Mary Ann is just going through logistics and various timings for the show day. While we are receiving this brief, incubation has set in and I've come out the other side with inspiration: the theme of my artefact will be "Learning about innovation can be fun!". To accomplish this I aim to employ balloons, laminated cards. a playful table mat, red noses, board games, toy cars and Lego. Maybe if i feel particularly ambitious, a clown costume. But that's enough about the artefact, although I'm grateful for the inspiration, it's now full speed ahead with the performance next week.

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#themicl females participating in a improvisation and performance workshop. Notice the uncomfortable body language!

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Delivering Innovation: Reflection

There's never an inopportune moment, so let's dive into a quick reflection on Delivering Innovation and try to answer some key questions. A. What does it take to turn Developer ideas into action? - Focus, to know what the future state is and how we should get there - Stamina, the drive and tenacity to see ideas from concept through to reality B. What does it take to turn Explorer ideas into action? - Leadership Team buy-in, acceptance of idea and creator - Ideas that are generated will generally lie in the step-change camp and understandably, will draw some reluctance; remember that to Developers, all ideas will seem Explorer-like. - It's important to build acceptance of the ideas, if they should have any chance of being implemented successfully. C. What have we learnt from the close encounters (guest entrepreneur speakers): - Innovators will fail and need perseverance as a strong behaviour; ideas will be knocked down and may not succeed immediately, so resilience is paramount - Innovation is a contact sport and consequently, requires good relationships - We can accomplish innovation simply by varying the variables and blending inputs D. What attributes do we need to build credibility? - Honesty and Integrity (trust) - Competence (ability and aptitude) - Forward-looking (vision, strategy) - Inspiring (emotion, encouraging the heart) E. What are the three things that make up any creative product? - Newness: hasn't existed before - Usefulness: at least to the inventor - Elaboration & synthesis: this speaks to an old fashion sense of craft; something that is organic, well-crafted and elegant. Finally, after a discussion with one of my classmates, I discover that dometimes I get a bit impassioned if a person creates a model that goes against the laws of the logic and the universe. I find it hard to understand that a person can live in a world that is at an incompatible difference with the real world. This is my Delivering Innovation reflection.

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My classmates @camydeacon and @maeveos6 in the pub. No, I have no idea what they're doing either! #themicl

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Delivering Innovation: Day 5

Good morning, let's just remind ourselves what innovation means to us: - The classic definition of innovation: new and useful (at least to the creator) - There's also CPAM: being new, useful and well-crafted When we are writing our coursework assignment, I must just remember that there are two models of double-loop learning: - Unilateral Control model - Mutual Learning model We've discussed a lot about Stages & Gate models and noted that they are better suited for Developer ideas but will hit barriers with Explorer ideas. Why is this? Well, Explorer ideas cause headaches with organisation alignment, namely that new business models do not play well with Stagegate. If we are looking for exploratory ideas, they need to come from an external team but that's connected with an umbilical cord. Andy, our tutor asks us to check out Chocri and Mymuseli, who have a bespoke product business inside service wrappers; both are interesting new business models. Now we have a talk by Xoomworks, they've been chosen as one of the best small places to work for. They're here to talk about their small chunk theory - which, you know what, I can't actually remember. They seem to be doing quite well despite being here asking us for suggestions, which has confused everybody. And that's it for the Delivering Innovation taught lectures, now there's reflection and a lot of coursework.

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My classmate @SzabiSteiner, who spliced myself and Corinna into Janus

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Delivering Innovation: Day 4

The key thought for this session is "what does it take to turn ideas into action?". A simple answer might be to focus on the 4Ps: people, press, product and process. Our tutor Andy starts us off with a quick recap: preparing for action can take a considerable amount of time, to move quickly we need to have data and understand the challenge. Andy points to Drucker's work and his belief that there are three hats in the innovation world, and even though these can be worn by the same person, often it will be three different people/groups: - Inventor (creativity) - Innovator (diffusion) - Entrepreneur (monetisation) If we were to see this in a model, we would be discussing the Strategic Innovator Grid: - X-axis: ability to generate new insights (weak vs. strong) - Y-axis: ability to turn ideas into value (weak vs. strong) - Clockwise: innovator, imitator, resistor-reactor, inventor Sometimes people feel overwhelmed by the expectation to be innovative, others feel like there is not enough innovation challenge in their roles. This relates to The Balance of Innovation, by van der Meer: - Innovation "fit" is in the middle, this is the ideal - X-axis: Innovation Need (low vs. high) - Y-axis: Innovation Capabilities (low vs. high) IBM notes that as a rule of thumb, companies in any sector that fail to replace 10% of their revenue stream annually through innovative new products are likely to be out of business in five years. Now we change the focus and start to learn about delivering innovation, aka diffusion. "Bridging the chasm" is a challenge for diffusion innovation; once that chasm has been bridged, critical mass is easier to attain. Finally we've got Bruce, creator of Abundance - the first new independent investment company; he also previously started Zopa. Both centre around new models for micro lending and investment. On reflection, he mentions that he rejected a lot of models (including cooperative) and instead decided to create their own. He notes that the status quo (especially in finance) tends to throw up barriers around smaller or more unusual business models. And that's it for Day 4, last and final day tomorrow.

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James from Platinum Guild International, talking to us about the Consumer Journey and creating the desire for a product

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Delivering Innovation: Day 3

This morning we're getting a talk by James, who started marketing diamonds and working with De Beers before joining the Platinum Guild International (started in 1975 by South African mines). Platinum is widely used in everyday industrial applications including Post-it notes, device screens and catalytic converters. Neat factoid: 71% of all platinum produced goes to China. He doesn't have any direct control of platinum sales but employs various techniques to increase the demand and in turn, the sales of the precious metal. He slowly walks us through increasing platinum sales in different regions including China, Japan, the U.S. and India. He wants to change the perception of platinum from Ferrari to BMW but we know that things often aren't accomplished instantly. Overall, it wasn't the most exciting presentation mostly due to the slow energy of the industry, which carried across into the performance. But here are the four stages of the Consumer Journey according to James: - Creating desire (his main challenge and the most important) - Gathering information out-of-store - Gathering information in-store - Advocacy That's it from the first lot of guest speakers, pretty interesting and now really looking forward to part two.

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Here is one of the beautiful journals of Roma Tearne; author, artist and film-maker. Today, she is talking to us to encourage the development of our personal artefacts. As you can see, she's set the bar pretty high.

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Creativity and the Creative Industries: Week 4

Today, we're talking about the coursework for the module. First up is the performance, the scary creative production which will be judged by three assessors. We need to think about consistency and the following key questions: - Who are we and do we look congruent? - Who is listening and are we aware of our intended audience? - What is our medium? Bang in the middle is our artefact, which is a very personal submission showing an embodiment of the course learnings. It needs to be art and more than that, needs to be convincing. We get extra credit for study exploration, including capturing and showing our influences. Lastly is the personal portfolio, showing our journey on the module; this needs to convey novelty, surprise and be well crafted. Bonus marks are earned by including stuff from the other course modules. Thats the expectation, now engines ready and shifting into first gear.

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The great thing about being at university is that you can wander into a room, randomly, and happen upon something truly great and interesting. This guy offered to teach me a little bit of Harp.

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Delivering Innovation: Day 2

Here I'm sat on a Reading-bound train in a unique interactive Volo TV entertainment carriage. Briefly, the idea is to offer the same screen-in-seatback experience that we see in aeroplanes in commuter trains. Honestly, I do not believe that this is the best way forward but will keep an open mind. Looking around the carriage, the passengers are momentarily captive but in this modern day world with smartphones in every pocket, if the entertainment system doesn't immediately offer the user what they want, why would they not just ignore the screen and use their personal devices? Although I have to say, the safety videos are interesting, being very much like an aeroplane video. The programming offers a range of TV dramas, factual, kids and audio programmes. Unfortunately there is no option to resume playback but at the moment, the programming is free of intrusive advertising. Now we're deep within Paddington rail station with Paul, the MD of Volo taking about innovation and passenger engagement on public transport. Quick factoid: it costs £6-10k per coach per month to rent rolling stock (trains). Paul found that due to a marked difference in safety standards, it wasn't possible to perform aggressive adoption from the aerospace industry, so he had to start from scratch. He has had a number of challenges over the last decade (including politics) in getting Volo to where they are now. He talks a lot about risk and I get a strong feeling that it is key to his journey. He hammers home the point that he had to be risky and try something different, in the end culminating in a "free" entertainment carriage trial, which eventually led to a new model. That's it for trains and day two; tomorrow we're back in the depths of City University for more innovation delivery.

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As part of the Creativity and Creative Industries lectures, we had an interesting talk by Roger Neill (who set up the MICL) and Marshall Marcus of El Sistema. They had a lot to talk about, especially around orchestra and musical innovation.