Beyond Creativity

Snow Flakes - Dreaming of a White Christmas

Snow, the Scarce Resource.

While Europe (even the Alps and Nordic countries) is lacking snow in December 2006, there is plenty of time to dream about snow and skiing adventures. Children and adults alike are eagerly waiting  for snow (and Santa Claus = Joulupukki = Julbock) to appear. I am personally suffering from this lack of snow and therefore I am planning to take a splash  by practising outdoor winter swimming and visit Lapland early next year with my family.   

As an Official Christmas Task I welcome you all to create snowflakes with this web tool ! Mindless work at best! BTW, did you know that the form of snowflakes is like a fractal and it is based on a mathematical formula!

My Christmas Reading Recommendation shall be "Enhancing Creativity Through “Mindless” Work: A Framework of Workday Design" by Kimberly Elsbach and Andrew Hargadon.

Highlights: "To enhance creativity among chronically overworked professionals, workdays should be designed to alternate between bouts of cognitively challenging and high-pressure work (as suggested in the original model by Hackman et al. 1975), and bouts of mindless work." . I hope that this article will make you and I  to change our working habits ;-)

Thank you for reading this blog. Many e-mails and phone calls have made me happy. It seems to me that this Typepad-In-Blog-Commenting-System is not perfect, it is just great there are other channels as well.

I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !

Mikko

What Drives Innovation - Heuristic Framework

I have been reading and enjoying the IdeaFlow blog by Renee Hopkins Callahan for some time. Renee is an excellent writer and she is truly an expert in the creativity and innovation area.

Lately, Renee Hopkins Callahan and her colleagues presented a heuristic framework in the article "What Drives Innovation". I would recommend that article as a check-list for every organisation that is / will be planning innovation strategy. The article is very easy to read, very concrete and it includes planning tools to spot weaknesses in the innovation process. The open innovation aspect is addressed as well: "Can we build it ourselves? Do we need to partner with some other company in order to produce it?"

Still, there is something I could add to that framework. First, the support of employees' (and customers') problem-finding is not very clearly targeted. I see that the 'Fuzzy Front-End' could be supported better. For a organisation it would be beneficial if its employees and workgroups would have better mental and technical tools to prepare their idea suggestions. Submitting idea in a form is not enough ;-) When the 'Fuzzy Front-End' is better supported, maybe employees have then better skills to recognise a good idea from bad ones? Jakob Rabinow sees this as one of the most important skills of an innovator. I tried to address this earlier in my (clumsy) Frontiers of eBusiness Research -paper and in my and Antti Syvänen's Mobile Learning 2006 IdeaPortfolio -paper.  Secondly, the innovation process should let those ideas live that do not immediately pass those evaluation gates. Andrew Hargadon and Robert (Bob) Sutton claim:

"Valuable solutions seldom arrive at the same time as the problems they solve, they seldom arrive at the same time as the problems they solve, they seldom arrive to the people working on those problems, and they seldom arrive in forms that are readily recognizable or easily adaptable.”  

What a challenge for all developers of Innovation Strategies and Innovation Management Information Systems !

P.S. Check also Renee's and Corante's Innovation Hub
 

Idea-Portfolios in the Innovation Process: IADIS Mobile Learning Dublin

What portfolios have to do with innovation? Do ideas just pop up to our mind or are they nurtured somewhere? Which confidentiality levels are needed in business and academic organisations? How technologies like electronic portfolios, blogs and wikis can support reflection, learning and problem-finding? Does the following kind of architecture sustain or obstruct creativity?

With Antti Syvänen we wrote a paper inspecting a new kind of artefact: Idea-Portfolio.

This paper will be presented at the IADIS Mobile Learning -conference in Dublin in July 2006. There will be a track called Creativity and Mobile Learning.

It would be great to receive comments from the attached draft ;-) Download iadis_mobile_learning_dublin_ahonen_syvnen_creativity_portfolios_final.pdf .            

Electronic Portfolios and Blogs - How are they interlinked?

In 2004 I visited the ePortfolio conference in La Rouchelle and presented an idea-process portfolio paper written by myself and Hanne Murto. Since  then I have had interest in combined ePortfolio-Blogs.

There is an open source project called SAKAI . They have created an ePortfolio system that handles RSS-feeds (including blogs). SAKAI is a huge project integrating many (especially) US universities. Although it has an administrative focus, the platform has some interesting collaboration features.

Currently there is a lot of discussion whether collection of blogs actually create an ePortfolio. And what Persistent Identity really means! See for example Nils Peterson's blog.

It would be great to hear your comments about this topic.

Afterword: I tried to locate Das Boot in wonderful La Rochelle. Hopeless, I took a long walk along the seashore and when I arrived at the shipyard it was closed. The movie replica is available in Munich, Bavaria Studios. In 2000 I had a funny experience to walk through it and wonder why it is in the middle of Derrick settings ;-)

Blogs connecting small worlds

Do you ever feel like being a speaker who looses the contact to audience after a succesful and interactive presentation?

I have had that kind of feeling several times. You are invited as a speaker to an exotic location, during and after the presentation you have many interesting conversations and you exchange business cards. BUT, keeping contact to those interesting people is a pain, it is delayed and sometimes you even forget the whole thing.

I have not been very systematic in my (people) networking strategies. Therefore, the article by Uzzi and Dunlap in the recent HBR was an eye-opener to me. It helped me to map my contact network and deficiencies in my networking strategies. It also brought valuable insights to my research and artefact building. I have earlier written about Technology Brokering and had interesting discussions with Andrew Hargadon. This brokering process is not always simple in a chaotic business/research world, therefore we had also discussions about teams and their time management. Techology Brokering is very much about utilising people networks as a source of new ideas. Similarly, Peter Denning wrote about Social Life of Innovation and his "Personal Foundational Practices of Innovation" may provide a functional networking strategy?!

Are there technological solutions to ease this (people) networking process? How about:

- Your blog would answer those questions that were left unanswered in in your keynote

- The recorded session of your presentation in the organisations's video database would include your  blog trackback and latest posts. (My thanks to Conor Vibert, who is an expert in this area and who helped me see the big picture :-)

- Pod-casting  would enable you to comment directly to those people who are in the listening mode

- Your blog reader would enable you to read and comment blog messages offline.

- All this would minimise your stay-in-touch efforts and let you work without extra e-mail and phone call burdens.

I may be too (techno-)optimistic here ;-)

Meditation and Creative Thinking Skills

So, what is the link between creativity and meditation? Some hunches:

- Meditation can be seen as one way of reflection. As Dawson (2003) in Reflective Practice, Vol. 4, No. 1 writes about meditation: "..while educational discourse pays considerable theoretical attention to critical reflection and creativity, the working reality of everyday life in many educational settings seldom affords the kind of ‘space for silence’ that allows them to be nourished or extended.". So, how much 'space' do you have in your work place for silence? Are techniques and thinking processes that support reflection really valued?

- Amabile (1983) has seen Creative Thinking Skills as one of three components of creativity. Could meditation be included in those Creative Thinking Skills?

- I personally have experienced that with meditation you are able to get an open, positive attitude towards yourself and other people and this in turn may help you to get better connections to the Field (In terms of Csikszentmihalyi's Systems Model of Creativity). However, this process is not immediate, it takes many years.

- Emotions are related to the theme. Lex(is) Higgins, Sara Qualls and J. Daniel Couger wrote in 1992 an article " The Role of Emotions in Employee Creativity" for The Journal of Creative Behaviour. (Good work, Lex! Happy to continue in the future about this topic!). Their findigs were : "Emotional states with influence creativity at work may be stimulated by the immediate work environment (proximal causes) or by events, relationships or thoughts in non-work contexts (distal causes) ... Managers will also need to develop skills to address proximal causes of disruptive emotions as well as distally-caused emotional distress". Their article was not about meditation, but the topic: 'handling your and your colleagues emotions' may be closely linked to mediation?!

- Managers need to understand better and better human needs and respond in a proper way. There are some interesting new management & leadership programs like Intelligent Leadership from Pertti Sydänmaanlakka, Pertec Consulting Ltd. Meditation itself is not integrated in them, but some ideas of it may be?!

- See the excellent Meditation Blog and some critical views (including my comment ;-) about mixing belief systems and meditation techniques.

- Is meditation just self-suggestion? This question has come up to my mind many times ;-)

I am still wondering how meditation could be included in creativity and innovativeness training programs in a proper way. As a technique, not as weird all-solving-mumbo-jumbo :-)