Tag Archives: innovation

Jonah Lehrer on creativity

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A select assortment of (probably imperfect) notes from the OHSU Brain Awareness series lecture I attended tonight.

“Ideas are non-rival goods.” There is no cost to sharing them.

“Like a Rolling Stone” from Dylan was written in five hours of insight and produced in four cuts.

On moments of insight: “As soon as the answer arrives, it feels like this answer.” Scientists simulate these moments of insight by having people complete word puzzles. When you get undergraduates too drunk to drive, they solve 30% more of these problems.

Researchers using EEG machines could predict the moment of epiphany up to 8 seconds in advance.

Insights come mostly commonly from states of unfocus and relaxation.

“Creativity is residue of wasted time.” – Albert Einstein

What defines successful creativity? Not IQ or something that can be measured with a personality test. “Grit. Persistence, stubbornness, and the unwillingness to quit.”

“We live in a world obsessed with maximal tests.” In study after study, maximal tests have failed to correlate with typical, real-world performance. It’s more reliable to look at the historical data for the subject (e.g scanning frequency on electronic checkouts vs. running the cashier through a test).

“Making something new is really, really hard.” Grit is especially important in the creative domain.

“How do you know that you actually know something if you don’t actually know it?” A hunch is a “feeling of knowing.”

“The era of the line genius is over.” In the 1950′s, the most highly-cited research papers came from scientists working on their own. Now, the papers come from teams.

What are the ideal templates for group creativity? Steve Jobs restricted Pixar (a large-ish company) to two bathrooms in the atrium to force connection and random conversations. Physical location matters a lot. “Our most important new ideas appear in idle conversation from too many people occupying the same space.”

“Attendance at business conferences has almost doubled since the invention of Skype.”

Geoffrey West asks in his research: Why are cities so durable and companies so fragile? As a city gets bigger, everyone in the city becomes more productive. Companies do the exact opposite, and this becomes dangerous in the long term.

Later: here’s a great lecture by West on the topic

“The magic of a city is that it’s a freewheeling, chaotic place.” The walking speed of pedestrians is the single most predictive variable of patents (innovation) per capita.

Jeff Jarvis again on disruption

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Elizabeth Eisenstein, our leading Gutenberg scholar, says that after the press, people no longer needed to use rhyme as a tool to memorize recipes and other such information. Instead, we now relied on text printed on paper. I have no doubt that curmudgeons at the time lamented lost skills. Text became our new collective memory. Sound familiar? Google is simply an even more effective cultural memory machine. I think it has already made us a more fact-based; when in doubt about a fact, we no longer have to trudge to the library but can expect to find the answer in seconds.

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The real need for education in the economy will be re-education. As industries go through disruption and jobs are lost forever, people will need to be retrained for new roles. Our present educational structure is not built for that but in that I see great entrepreneurial opportunity.

Jeff Jarvis — Rewired youth?

Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

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Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.

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Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

Neal Stephenson — Innovation Starvation.

Data centres: Social desert

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Data centres: Social desert. Facebook’s building a datacenter in Prineville to leverage the natural climate cycle for cooling. I think that’s what you’d call “natural capitalism.”

Colleges in crisis

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The success of these online competitors and the crisis among many of higher education’s traditional institutions are far from unique. These are familiar steps in a process known as “disruptive innovation” that has occurred in many industries, from accounting and music to communications and computers. It is the process by which products and services that were once so expensive, complicated, inaccessible, and inconvenient that only a small fraction of people could access them, are transformed into simpler, more accessible and convenient forms that are also, ultimately, lower in cost. We are seeing it happen more rapidly than one could have imagined in higher education, as online learning has exploded: roughly 10 percent of students took at least one online course in 2003, 25 percent in 2008, and nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009.

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Although this transition has begun, much of online learning’s promise for higher education is still on the horizon. For example, online learning has not yet led to lower prices from the perspective of many students—even though many of the online universities operate at lower costs than the traditional universities and enable students to fit coursework around existing jobs or other responsibilities. To date, moreover, significant portions of online learning have not taken advantage of this new medium to personalize instruction and create new, dynamic and individualized learning pathways within a course for students.

Clayton Christensen — Colleges in crisis. Emphasis mine.

Subverting newsroom culture

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One of the partially useful things the Knight-Mozilla challenge has done thus far is start a list serv where the bulk of the conversation focuses on legacy culture and technology, and how to change them. Obviously, the context is supposed to be one of three challenges. In the course of addressing those questions, I think valuable background knowledge is introduced (and I wish I could link to individual emails).

Last week, I said:

I think I’ve solved journalism. Based on my experience as a newsroom & J-School developer who’s had repeat experience with crappy vendor software, this Knight-Mozilla challenge needs to do to crappy CMSes & support ticketing software what Google Chrome Frame has done to IE6,7,8. We must subvert corporate IT like nobody’s business.

Initially a semi-sarcastic remark, this comment started an off-list conversation that I’d like to bring public again, at least on my side. I do believe ground-up subversion can be an effective way of getting things improved when legacy culture presents such a formidable challenge. Here are a few things we’re doing at the J-School:

One: Everyone that works with me on a project has to use Basecamp. Email is not a collaboration tool, nor is it a project management tool. If a new collaborator haven’t used Basecamp, I give them a short introduction during the kick-off meeting and follow up with written documentation. I’ve had almost 100% success in shifting project conversations to Basecamp, but only about 50% success with getting people to check off tasks and milestones. Baby steps. The rest of IT has more or less adopted it, and there are a few people who have expressed using Basecamp in other contexts. Most of the core faculty have accounts now too. A summer goal is to introduce ways in which they can use it for fall courses.

Two: We’re writing documentation for everything. Use of new technology is dropped if the user gets frustrated with it, or forgets or doesn’t know how to use certain pieces of it. As such, we’re trying to prepare a piece of documentation for every support ticket we handle. Users should be empowered to learn for themselves. Technologists’ roles should focus on creating environments where experimentation by non-technologists is easy.

Three: Support requests are funneled through our (terrible) help desk software. If a user needs help, the current culture is either to email or go try and find the person they think can help them. I can’t even tell you how many questions I’ve gotten about Flash because I’m the “internet guy.” And I’m still reminding three or more people per day to file a support request instead of interrupting me while I’m in the zone. We’ll be a lot more effective at answering questions if we can instill a new culture that leverages technology to find people and resources (e.g. “go to Russell instead of me for Flash questions” and “the answer to your question is available on the tech website“)

Four: I’m pushing for more accountability. Use of project management software like Basecamp and collaboratively creating meeting notes in Google Docs are two ways of ensuring everything is written down. The sheer number of things that simply aren’t done because of miscommunication, poor planning, or lack of accountability has surprised me significantly.

When I use the word “subversive” in this context, I really mean “just do it. Have a vision for what you want your future to be, and hack the people and technology systems necessary to make it a reality. Pad next year’s budget by 10% so you can hire the contractor you need for that neat, untested idea. You don’t need anyone’s approval.