IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

This is the third post, and last for now, looking at ways that a business could be blocking its own potential and making suggestions for unblocking the ideas, creativity and innovation that fuels future business success. 3. Arrogance ‘Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine.‘ Ron Johnson All businesses have, or should have a business plan.  This plan represents the strategic vision of the organization and its goals over the next three or five years.  Some companies take this plan altogether too seriously and. by sticking too rigidly to plan, stifle creativity and innovation and miss opportunities for growth.  There are some tell-tale signs that the company has arrogantly assumed its plans are close to perfect and should not be strayed from...

This is the second post where I am looking at ways that a business could be blocking its own potential and making suggestions for unblocking the ideas, creativity and innovation that fuels future business success. 2.      Internal risks ‘Safe is risky’ Seth Godin Business Intelligence has become big business.   Companies, quite rightly, want to analyse data they collect from customers, suppliers, distributors and employees so that they make informed decisions about investment in products and services and sales and marketing strategies.   Business systems age and are replaced b ever more sophisticated and expensive back-end software that integrates everything from financial reporting to inventory control. Some businesses spend so much time and effort focusing on improving business intelligence systems and analyzing data to within an inch of its existence in order to try to reduce or even ...

Over the next few posts I am going to be looking at ways that a business could be blocking its own potential and making suggestions for unblocking the ideas, creativity and innovation that fuels future business success. 1.      Aversion to risk In an episode of ‘The Big Bang Theory’, Sheldon learns to swim by studying techniques on the Internet.  He does not see the need to test these in actual water, preferring to claim that the skills he ‘learns’ in his living room are transferable should he ever need to actually swim!  Those of us who can swim know this to be nonsense, and that learning to swim involves learning by doing.  In the process of learning it is likely that we will swallow some water, flail about helplessly and maybe shed a few tears before we finally work up the courage to take the risk and trust ourselves not to drown. In business we have to go through similar steps to success.  Granted, knowing your market and analyzi...

   “Give them a mile and they’ll take an inch”     Seth Godin   It would be hard not to contend that technology is having an impact on how we communicate, how we interact with content and how we learn. Businesses across the globe race to keep up with advances, use social media to market their wares and hire armies of technology and information specialists. Yet despite the rapid growth of the technology available to enhance education many businesses complain that they find it hard to find truly innovative staff. Why is that?  For 150 years, education systems around the world have worked like a production line. Children are fed into the production line based on the date they were born – or date of manufacture. They move from year to year and then from classroom to classroom having ‘knowledge’ poured into their heads by ‘experts’. Some children have room in their heads to take in more ‘knowledge’ than others and these are sent off to university...

The Innovative Educator: Suffering in Silence… Standardized testing from the view of an educator & parent : Guest post by Renny Fong ( TimeOutDad ) As our children are undergoing the gruel of the high stakes standardized tests in New York...

   "The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed"     William Gibson Is the release of iBooks Author and a growing range of commercial textbooks available on iBooks part of a transformation of Education or is it just a step along the road to a digital education revolution? In ‘new learning’ classrooms, teachers have embraced technology, have questioned the norms of teacher-student interaction and source content that suits need from multiple resources. The trend is to use technology to free student learning from narrow views of what Education is about and to free teachers where possible from some of the marking, progress reporting and assessment so that they can spend more time facilitating learning. Here are a few things that technology can be used to improve: 1. Instructional content Content is what traditional print textbooks deliver – and in most cases deliver well. Content is generally written by teachers and experts ...

In my opinion the biggest issue in the school system is that it has outlived its design. The whole system of teaching young people the same thing at the same time and at the same pace was designed to prepare a compliant workforce and willing consumers to staff and fuel Europe’s industrial revolution. Because it succeeded in its primary purpose it has been used as the model ever since. This is a ‘one size fits all’ view of Education. We continue to head down the road that is standardized testing, drill and practice and one-size-fits-all schooling. Schools are not measured on students’ ability to think critically, to be creative or expressive. They are measured by the number of students that have performed to minimum levels against standardized tests. For many of us who have been through the system, our memories of the classroom are often of boredom, repetition and a sense that we couldn’t get out of there soon enough. Given the wealth of resources available for the modern cla...

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Benjamin Franklin All my professional life I have been struck by the difference between remembering and learning . This may not be that surprising for someone who has been at various times a teacher, an author and a publisher. But there is a truth in the difference that continues to inspire me. While we are growing up we are taught to remember - to churn out facts or apply formulae that get us through exams. We are not taught to learn - at least not in formal education. Learning and remembering are not the same. Anything remembered can be forgotten. Anything learned is for life. Is it possible to 'un-learn’ how to ride a bicycle for example? Real learning comes when we take risks. We have to fall off a bicycle before we learn to ride. Sadly, we are taught not to take risks, but rather to give the expected answers that we have remembered by rote. If we left it to schools to teach us how ...

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” Albert Einstein For someone with a physics degree, who has nothing but respect for the great man, attempting to improve on something that Einstein said is tantamount to heresy. But here’s what I want to do and my justification for it. In the quote above, I want to replace ‘learned’ with ‘remembered’ or ‘memorised’. I think it is useful to make a distinction between remembering and learning . We can all recall memorising (or failing to memorise in my case!) lists of foreign language vocabulary for the next test. But how much good did it really do us? What percentage of the words on those lists is still with us now – or was even still with us a week after the test? The truth is that although we remembered the words on the list for the test – and some of us may have even passed the tests – we had learned little or nothing. Now I know there will be someone reading this who says ‘...