James Drogan

I and many, many others have blogged (enter "innovation" into this site's search box), written papers, and otherwise discussed the relevance of innovation to the advancement of society.

For the most part I think that much of the time innovation has been more-or-less equated to invention.  My view is a bit more expansive than that, but I don't think I've ever made that clear.

At any rate, Steve Lohr's article, "Do We Overrate Basic Research?" in today's New York Times reminds me innovation does not necessarily equate to invention.

Two quick side points here.

1. The printed version of the article is title "Fear Not Where The Ideas Come From."  I wonder about the editorial decision associated with the name change?  And which title came first?
2. Invention does not equal innovation.  See, as an example, recent patents granted IBM.
   

Anyway, Lohr talks about Prof. Amar Bhide of the Columbia Business School and his book, "The Ventursome Economy."  The thrust is article seems to me to be that innovation can be small as well as large, and that it can arise from individuals deeply embedded in in what may be considered to be rather mundane organizations as well as from companies generally considered to be innovative.  Bhide calls out "midlevel innovation."

"What gets short shrift, Mr. Bhidé said, is “midlevel innovation.” The category, by his definition, is a broad one, ranging from a venture capitalist tweaking a business model to trim costs by a few percent to a technician fine-tuning his company’s business software to save a couple of data-entry steps in the accounting department.

These midlevel innovations, Mr. Bhidé said, do not show up in patent counts, and individually they are small steps indeed. But they add up, especially because there is so much of that kind of unsung innovation across the American economy."

I regularly bring to the attention of my students Rudyard Kipling's Six Best Friends; who, what, where, when, how, and why.  My assertion is that if one can take an issue and answer the six questions, then one is likely to have a pretty good grasp of what is going on.

I bring these up because my sense is that innovation can and does occur in all of these six areas.  Sometime ago, for example, it was modish to assert that "know-how" was as equally important as "know-what."

Here's the last sentence of the article.

"'And our supply of high-level science and ideas in most fields far exceeds our capacity to use it.'"

This brings to mind a slide from Notes from the IT Frontline - 1965-2003 - From Punched Card to PDAs.

Your attention is called to the last two items on each list.

I'm in league with Bhide.  We need to get to the application of innovation in order to produce real impact.

Another of my favorite bloggers is Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  This morning he has posted an interesting examination of management and management education.  It's worth a read and some subsequent thinking about what we, as educators, and we, as students, ought to do to continue this journey on Spaceship Earth.

"You cannot solve a problem with the same type of thinking that is creating it." Albert Einstein

I don't direct you to "The Auto Industry Bailout: Thoughts About Why GM Executives Are Clueless And Their Destructive “No We Can’t” Mindset" by Bob Sutton in order to bash GM, but rather as an example of corporate culture that has, in my view, little chance of succeeding in the world of today and tomorrow.  Sutton's post identifies indicators of management failure to which we need to be alert.

Are any of these apparent in your organization?

"Ford’s Most Advanced Assembly Plant (Rural Brazil)" is a video also related to the current troubles in automobile manufacturing in the US.

One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Pollard, has posted this evocative image.

I was immediatly drawn to it, I suspect, because of its abstract similarity to an image I use in introductory presentations in all my courses (see any of the Lecture Notes pages on this site).

Pollard's image captures what we are all about as educators, parents, mentors, and leaders.

And to my friends at the Schwartz Communication Institute, give some thought to this as input into discussions regarding the your roles and responsibilities in the community.

I bring this Gill Corkindale item to your attention not as an endorsement of Obama, but rather as a succinct examination of the qualities of leadership required in the current and emerging world.

I agree with Corkindale's view on the necessary qualities.

We would be well-served by examining what we should do to imbue these qualities in as many leaders, small as well as big, as possible.

This is for my students and any other interested parties.

I've posted this item especially for my students in System Design and Control, but others may also find it of interest under the general heading of When Technology Fails.

When Technology Fails is the title of a forthcoming lecture note to be published in Lecture Notes: MIS in Transportation.

The title of this post is taken from a post of the same name in Economic Principals. I cite two paragraphs from this piece in hopes it will encourage you to read the item.

"In the spirit of thinking back on watchdogs who warned us, let me resurrect another sage: Jane Jacobs, the citizen economist, philosopher, journalist and activist who died in 2006. In Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics , in 1992, she left behind a provocative set of clues to what went wrong."

...

"All the rest of Systems of Survival is an inventive and high-spirited speculation on how these two approaches, commercial and guardian, collide and interact in the modern world. “[M]any of us have taken on casts of mind so skewed toward one set of morals and values that we have little understanding of the other, and little if any appreciation of its integrity too,” Jacobs writes in a brief preface — an especially helpful observation to remember in the present situation. There’s not much that escaped her attention – from global warming to national security to greed and fraud in business."

It's all to easy and all to non-productive to expend energies on assigning blame in the event of failure.  Marshall Goldsmith, writing in HarvardBusinessOnline has some good ideas for getting to the main focus of the resolution of issues.

From Paul Valery by way of Quotes of the Day.