Revelnnovation

So often we lose sight of what really matters in organizations when fostering creativity.  I've seen & experienced many organizational conditions that  in the way: too many rules, too much control, unnecessary complexity, too much worry, and complacency.

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"Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control.   Freedom is about what you can unleash.“  ~  Harriet Rubin

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What I've experienced fosters innovation: the right tension of trust and risk.  See:

Why Too Much Trust & the Wrong Tension Is Death to Innovation | MIT Sloan Mgmt. Review

A sense of breadth of wonder & play, along with experience and depth also helps.  See:

Classic John Cleese - Teachers, Space & Time Boundaries for Creativity, Video | Ewan McIntosh

What makes a difference where you are?   What has and does foster innovation and creativity?

--Deb

Excerpted: 

Library

This section contains reviews and references to recommended innovation books and articles. It also contains references to where literature can be bought or downloaded.

2010 –   Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Author(s): Shirky, Clay Year: 2010 Publisher: Penguin Press Category: Online communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.

 

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Author(s): Shirky, Clay Year: 2009 Publisher: Penguin Category: Online Communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that’s cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners.

 

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Author(s): Howe, Jeff Year: 2009 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Category: Online Communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: Beyond the wisdom of crowds is the work of crowds, a powerful and transformative source of creativity and an economic engine that defies traditional rules. Jeff Howe has captured a complex and vital change in the business landscape: in the next few years, your customers could become your collaborators, or your competitors.

 

We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production

Author(s): Leadbeater, Charles Year: 2009 Publisher: Profile Books Category: Online Communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: Society is no longer based on mass consumption but on mass participation. New forms of collaboration—such as Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—are paving the way for an age in which people want to be players, rather than mere spectators, in the production process. We-Think explains how the rise of mass collaboration will affect us and the world in which we live.

 

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

Author(s): McAfee, Andrew Year: 2009 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Category: Innovation Technologies Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web’s novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they’re doing this, and why it’s benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.

 

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results

Author(s): Hansen, Morten T. Year: 2009 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Category: Online Communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: In today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need? In this book, Hansen shows managers how to get collaboration right through ‘disciplined collaboration’.

 

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation

Author(s): Bacon, Jono Year: 2009 Publisher: O’Reilly Media Category: Online Communities Type: Book Purchase: Amazon Summary: Online communities offer a wide range of opportunities today, whether you’re supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or developing open source software. The Art of Community will help you develop the broad range of talents you need to recruit members to your community, motivate and manage them, and help them become active participants.

Free revealing and the private-collective model for innovation incentives

PDF article

Author(s): von Hippel, E. & von Krogh, G. Year: 2006 Publisher: Social Science Research Network Category: Innovation incentives Type: Article Purchase: Here Summary: Von Hippel and von Krogh summarizes a number of historical well-documented cases (steam engines, semi-conductors, medical machinery, sports equipment) for free revealing. Then pragmatically puts on the glasses of the entrepreneur/innovator and argue for how free revealing