Category Archives: MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change

My Brain Hurts

Business, Managing Information and Finance, MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change, Software Development March 23, 2013 Leave a comment

Yep, it does and I thought I’d sum up a little bit how my day was. It all started slowly and gently with a sushi lunch meeting with Jörg vom Capnamic on wednesday. Then came a family thursday that was just wonderful. Next up, friday.

I started the day with Marc Kley from the Cologne University, responsible for “Transfer” … making real startups out of ideas in the university. He is also handling the HGNC and for today explained to me a little bit the structure of the university and the startup ecosystem there. This 9:30 to 10:00 and from then until 12:30 Marc had scheduled 30 minute talks with 5 Startups from the University. I will take a bit more time to possibly go deeper into them but my expectations were exceeded. I learned about the food industry and innovations in data tagging, got to know more about forestry and drones, helped further develop an interesting recruiting idea, discussed risk related graphdb topics and brainstormed the connection of ecommerce and local stores. Extreme fun and I am looking forward to the next one.

Then I ran and got to my next meeting where I learned more than I expected about the energie and smarthome market. I will need to go through my long notes to get that one down to paper. And with that discussion still eating away in my head, I ended up talking about innovation with somebody with lots of experience in that space.

I think I now need a weekend to really reorder my braincells. At the moment I have high hopes that next week will be a bit more focussed on order instead of more chaos. :)

The Real Life Gunter Dueck

Business, Investing, Managing, Managing People, MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change, MBA Knowledge Management March 20, 2013 Leave a comment

On the 18th of March I was fortunate enough to see Gunter Dueck aka wilddueck at an event organised by Startplatz. Thanks a lot for Lorenz and Matthias for inviting me! I actually have to give it to the two, they are making great strides with Startplatz. I am still missing real offices instead of open space, but other than that, what a great place to be. I am already looking forward to spending some time in the coming weeks.

But back to the subject at hand. The KOMED Hall was packed and after a Startplatz Intro by Matthias, Gunter Dueck came to the stage and started well. Lots of anecdotes, the stuff he is good at. I actually put a few things into tweets which I will list here.

He really said that this was his greatest learning after 5 years.

Ok, that one is obvious and often said, but needs repeating. You still need to make a plan by the way as it helps you think, but then you can put it away.

It’s really looking at Crossing the Chasm a little bit differently, but he emphasised that this middle part needs the entrepreneurs that will be willing to go through these hard times. He is not one of them by the way. He repeated that often.

This was actually very valuable as it is so simple. It was told to him by somebody that listed a lot of startups at the NASDAQ and others. It is just that a VC knows that 10% of his investments will have to pay for the entire portfolio more or less. So they need to big bets. Making 100 million EURs on a 10 million EUR investment just makes you break even. To understand this portion from the getgo and build the really big ones, always think that each cost has a 40% interest. It’s really scary, but a good frame of reference. Also Gunter Dueck said that there really only is a hockeystick. All other graphs for company growths are meaningless and not really existent in terms of breakthrough products, and that what innovation is about.

This was agreed upon by many. We actually had an entire team doing those fights for us at Adcloud, and they did a great job. But in the end you need a sponsor at the top. And btw, this is not something that is bad or good or anything, it is just like this. There are budgets, and sales people, and stories, and whatnot inside a company that all naturally is against rocking the boat. This makes it really hard.

Well put.

This again is really important and really true. Same as saying that you need to be orders of a magnitude better. I actually don’t even think consultants CAN get you to a 2+.

Then to end this one slide of what you really have to do for innovation.

A few words on those. Agile is becoming a buzzword but really looking at the core values of agile, and lean for that matter, leads to a change in how you really work. This is especially hard for established players that have clear data on their old business on what to do next, that do not exist in the world we are in today, especially in younger companies. And you need an entrepreneurial spirit and you need risk taking. I wondered recently if a team inside a big company could say that they will forgo 6 months salary for a matching investment of e.g. 5 or 10 times the salary they give up and get a share in the business. This would be a lot more startup like. You have pain on the founder side then, but by making sure that they can have their job back after 6 months you allow them to take risks.

I will leave you at that and let you think for yourselves. It is a really tough subject I am thinking more and more about.

Creating Chance

Business, Managing People, MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change October 30, 2012 Leave a comment

The wonderful Change This has a good presentation by Peter Sims, entitled “Little Bets: Think Differently“, which is largely about entrepreneurship and finding your idea and business model. He starts of with some good examples, e.g.: Google didn’t begin with a brilliant vision, but as a project to improve library searches, followed by a series of small discoveries that unlocked a revolutionary business model. Larry Page and Sergei Brin did not begin with an ingenious idea. But they certainly discovered one.

Examples rock and this makes it clear that a lot of building a company is luck, but as they say, you can only stumble if you’re walking and…  you need to iterate. I love his example of Starbucks, which started out as with an italian coffee shop model (good), including no chairs, menues in italian and constant opera music (bad ;) ).

The important thing for this kind of iterative innovation is:

Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work iteratively toward their goals.

He suggests to flip the switch, saying to change the matra “from expected gains to affordable losses”. As Jeff Bezos seems to have said: “You can’t put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product.”

That really means you need to look at failure differently, and this is hard. You need to see failure as something that innovation and creativity comes from. Sadly, this is just not in our normal DNA. Hunting deer and failing to kill one will not make you go home to your tribe and say “Boy I missed, go creativity.”

What I find interesting is that you read about stuff like this again and again, but still many people are not following it with their heart. Kevin Rose tried it with Milk but then got bought by Google and is now planting many seeds as investor at Google Ventures.

Take this quote from Thomas A. Edison: Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.

There are also lots of tools to help you get your creative juices flowing and I have an entire book about them, but you need the basic company culture to really make it happen. And you also need a rough but basic vision of where you want to go, because only that will allow you to have the stamina and funding to go through lots of small dips and see them as opportunities. This commitment to an idea that is not proven yet, is what is really rare.

Now go create and don’t give us so easily.

Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes; privided that one can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and try again. – Dee Hock

Solve that Problem

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change October 20, 2004 Leave a comment

The wonderful David Weeks has contacted me again in relation to some further stuff about creativity he has put on his web site. I have just been a bit slow (almost a month ;) ) to post about it. Sorry everyone. What he did was create an on-line creativity techniques notebook called Solve that Problem. Nice url to keep handy.

Organizing for Innovation

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change, OUBS October 16, 2004 Leave a comment

This will be a very short item this time, summarizing the third book of this course. I am actually done but I’d like to have some things online searchable so I can find them. There we go. This one is about innovation in general and how to set up a corporation for it.
Continue reading →

Organizing for Innovation: Understanding Innovation

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change September 25, 2004 Leave a comment

Organizations need to innovate. But how do you manage and develop innovation? You can do radical and incremental innovation. Radical is often in impact and is mostly made up of lots of incremental steps though and then they will likely need further incremental steps to blossom and sometimes they depend on the right environment to work out. Another thing is to use technological fusion to bolt different things together to a new whole. Product and service innovation will later need a lot of enhancements to flourish. Process improvements often reduce costs and improve performance.

Managing Problems Creatively: Methods and Frameworks

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change August 30, 2004 Comments: 2

Here the look goes into the overall methods and frameworks within which techniques can be deployed. In general you are working to come from confusion to clarity. This can just happen because you let it, you can make it happen or you can help it happen. It’s hard to classify the different methods that can be used because they are evolving. All this goes back to Socrates (400BC). Slowly ideas were written down and with it problem solving techniques. Now lots of the techniques have matured. Some are even old and might be replaced or improved.
Continue reading →

Managing Problems Creatively: Precepts

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change, OUBS August 30, 2004 Comments: 2

(comment: As originally posted on the OUBS Blog)

There are a lot of different techniques you can use, and some ordering is needed. For the OUBS this is done with 12 precepts as a framework. These can be grouped together further in terms of their giving a sense of direction, or being part of Handy’s creative climate (Curiosity, Forgiveness, Love). Underpinning all of this is Schon’s idea of the “reflective practitioner”, meaning somebody that goes into deep double-loop learning.
I’ll now give a very short overview over these. While they are easy to grasp as a first step. Most of them have some deeper meaning that needs some thinking on your part. I highly suggest taking each part and think about what this really means for you, potentially going back to the book to get some insight.

Curiosity

Precept 1: Adopt a ‘set to break sets’: Think different, get people that think different, take different perspective, different different different

Precept 2: Explore the ‘givens’: Context is important for a problem. Maybe the context was wrong. Use Assumption surfacing or Reversals to get behind it. Get a fresh view on it. Try being very clear about your environment, trying to notice things you take for granted.

Precept 3: Broad picture, local detail: You can store an enormous amount of information, but only very few items at a time. Use mind maps or similar techniques to go broad and deep at the same time or rather one after the other.

Forgiveness

Precept 4: Value play: Play is central to learning, just think about being a kid. You learn by trial and error. It loosens things up if you can just play with a problem. For this you need to create a special settings, choose team members that trust each other and you can simply use such techniques as a way to build a team.
Precept 5: Build up, don’t knock down: Go from ‘Yes, but…’ to ‘Yes, and…’. Value people.
Precept 6: Live with Looseness: Things will be confusing, uncertain, contradictory, sceptical and more. Especially in whicked problems you need to live with it and let go to have a map built over time.

Love

Precept 7: It is there already – nurture it: Creativity is probably already there, well below its potential. Try removing soem barriers. Delegate, make ideas welcome, schedule idea time.
Precept 8: Involve others: We all have different view, and something normal for us might not be for somebody else. New ideas come from this. Enjoy the differences.
Precept 9: Connect and be receptive: ideas can be triggered from your environment. These can be related to the problem or not. You need to link problems and triggers.

A sense of direction

Precept 10: Know what you really want: As they say “if you don’t know where you want to go, you probably won’t get there”. The way is not important, or rather needs to be loose, but the goal should be clear.
Precept 11: Cycle often and close late: Try not to appear decisive, or stop at the first solution. Cycle a few times to allow extra deeper information to filter in.
Precept 12: Manage the process: People, Place and Process. These are important and should be managed.

Being a reflective practitioner

  • Plan
  • Keep creativity and analysis apart
  • Review
  • Keep records
  • Understand what you are doing and why
  • Learn from the experience of others

There is a nice checklist on page 113 of the book for self-evaluation.

Managing Problems Creatively: Concepts

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change August 21, 2004 Leave a comment

Wonderful. Finally on to the next book. It’s about time. This one will focus more on techniques that can be useful to manage creativity or creative management or managing creatively or something else with creative in it.
Continue reading →

Creativity and Perception in Management: Responsibilitly

MBA Creativity, Innovation and Change August 17, 2004 Leave a comment

We now had economics concern. We all agreed that environmental ones are important too. So what about the social ones? This is something that will grow of importance and boy did I have some fights at residential school about this. What is more important, making money or that the company and the employees share their values? Might some values be more important than money?
Continue reading →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,881 other followers

%d bloggers like this: