Innovators Guide

How Governments Help Innovators

In the U.S., government needs to fix the public educational system first. That will resolve many innovator's problems. However, foreign governments are helping innovators more directly, and that will put pressure on the U.S. government to do more.

BusinessWeek: Innovate Out of the Economic Downturn.2008-Oct-27, by Sami Mahroum

In the short term, governments need to provide support to small companies to help them manage the crisis and continue to develop their portfolios of products and services. The British Innovation Advisory Services model, where government-supported consultants are paid for and loaned to companies, is one example of the type of thing that governments can do. Another is the Dutch voucher system, under which the government gives vouchers to small companies, allowing them to source the expertise (mostly consultants) they need from public research institutes. Some 80% of such voucher-supported projects otherwise would not have been undertaken. This type of support is critical to help many small, successful companies get through the crisis.

Complexity and Creativity

Creative people see too many possibilities, often frustrating their co-workers.

Psychology Today: The Creative Personality, 1996-Jul/Aug, from Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated.

A Place to Go When You're Stuck

Merlin Mann started a blog about productivity, developed it beautifully, then decided he'd come to the end of that road. Although he has not yet developed many new articles on his new theme, which is how to keep your attention on your creative work, he has reorganized the site to support his new endeavor, and it's a great place to go when you don't feel like working.

43 Folders: How to Use 43 Folders, 2008-Sep-5, by Merlin Mann:

Ask yourself… Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now? This is not an insult or put-down. It’s a useful question. Please, think about it, then search the site to see if we have anything that might inspire you to make something awesome today.

Pitfalls of Regulating the Future

I'm no libertarian, but in this Forbes article, I do see George Gilder's point that your can't regulate the future because you don't know what it will need. However, I'm determined that we will have enough government oversight that the future will be less about new ways to rip people off, and more about having safety to share our ideas.

Forbes: The Coming Creativity Boom, 2008-Nov-10, by George Gilder

Knowledge is about the past; entrepreneurship is about the future. In a crisis the world of expertise pulls the global economy ever deeper into the past, where accountant-economists ruminate on the labyrinthine statistics of leviathan trade gaps, tides of debt and deficits, political bailouts and rebates, regulatory clamps and controls, all propping up the past in the name of progress.

The crucial conflict in every economy, however, goes on. It is not between rich and poor, Main Street and Wall Street, or even government and the private sector. It is between the established system and the new forms of wealth rising up to displace it--all the entrenched knowledge of the past and the insurrections of futuristic enterprise and invention.

From Jim's to Drew's to my Mind

As Drew Neisser reminds us, some ideas need to be drilled into our head over and over again. Jim Collins might object ... I'm sure I could find a clean copy of his list ... but editing Drew's memory here, I can cement these ideas more firmly into my own mind.

The Drew Blog: Jim Collins’ To Do List, 2008-10-5, by Drew Neisser

I had the pleasure of seeing Jim Collins speak at the World Business Forum a week ago. Collins is the author of Good to Great, the only business book I actually read from cover to cover and then re-read. ...

He ended with a to do list for all the attendees, especially the CEO’s in the audience. Here’s his 10-point to do list that I somehow turned into 11 points:   

Here's my version, edited for my own situation (solo entrepreneur and innovator)

1. Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses.

2. Figure out what kind of help you need and where you can find it

3. Establish a personal 'board of directors' who can serve as tribal elders

4. Present your ideas to younger people who can more easily challenge them

5. For decision-making, have a circle you can consult (How is this different from 3?)

6. Ask twice a many questions and give half the number of statements (How can you police yourself of this?????? Oh well, I usually converse these days by asking questions and when someone asks what I do they usually aren't interested in my answer.)

7. Schedule time to think, away from electronic devices and interruptions

8. Create a stop doing list. (This is so hard for me. It means giving up either something I love doing or that is good for me and my family.)

9. When delegating, focus on responsibilities, not tasks.

10. Keep core values in the front of your mind and your teams'.

11. Set big, hairy audacious goals with 10-15-25 year horizons, figure out what the obstacles are and work on removing them.

12. Find a copy of John Gardner's Self-Renewal

Making Comedy Work for Innovators

I really struggle with this newsletter (not blog) because I plan to leverage these tools in an entirely different way than all the other internet entrepreneurs. People keep looking and telling me I'm 'doing it wrong.' No, I'm just doing it different, making me feel a connection with both Bill Taylor and George Carlin.

Practically Radical blog at Harvard Business Publishing: What George Carlin Taught Innovators—The Virtues of Vuja Dé,2008-Jun-23, by Bill C. Taylor

George Carlin made another contribution to the language—believe it or not, to the language of business and innovation. The term he coined was "vuja dé"—and it's become a battle cry of sorts for innovators who aspire to make big change by identifying opportunities that others don't see.

We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what's valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those fresh eyes developing a new line of sight into the future.

Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn't see?

Let Ugly Live

I have found that some people who believe in 'design thinking' have an inordinate craving for order and control. They want a solution that puts everything into slots were they can find it later. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences bites them every time. Thinking ugly is not just about avoiding pretty. It's about opening yourself up to the possibility of new values.

UGLY: How Unorthodox Thinking Will Save Design, by Tad Toulis - Core77. 2008-Oct-30

Truth and beauty are good things, right? Not necessarily. Design's traditional preference on establishing 'order' has had the consequence of driving a collateral and unchecked pursuit of beauty. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as such is subject to the vagaries of cultural bias and popular opinion. By degrees this pursuit of beauty has gradually been replaced with the much more predictable and less admirable accomplishment of achieving 'pretty'. And while consumer culture, planned obsolesce and design culture in general have benefited soundly from the creation, production and documentation of pretty things—the pursuit of pretty hasn't pushed the discipline of design into the tighter, less comfortable and ultimately more rigorous inquiries that outside forces (sustainability for example) are aligning to demand of us. How might product designers better position the discipline to take on the hairy problems of sustainability, economic uncertainty, global competition and the like? Well, one thing is for certain, simply co-opting present patterns of consumption into activities and services linked to conservation won't get us there. That path might work if the world population of 6.5 billion was to stay fixed, but with an additional 3 billion consumers arriving to the party by 2050 we'll need to find more expedient (read: more creative) solutions. ...

Don't rely on what you can anticipate; believe in the creative power of experimentation.

Good Time to Work on a Wild Idea

If you need investor capital, it's a terrible time to start a company. But if you are investing your time, it'll may never be cheaper!

Paul Graham: Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy, 2008-Oct

As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that they were the first investors in Google. And like any investor you should buy when times are bad.

Find Something Different to Read

Innovators are always under pressure to find new connections, new combinations. If you can't get out of the house, travel and explore, it can be difficult. Unless you get a fresh book. ... Some really surprising suggestions here:

Gdnss blog: Inspired Reading, 2008-Oct-11, from Goodness Graphic Design

I’m very excited to kick-off our new Goodness blog with this little project. I asked a group of outstanding graphic designers the following question…

Please recommend a book that you have found particularly inspiring or meaningful to your development as a creative person?

The one restriction: Please no books on graphic design.

I had a feeling that these artists would lead me to some new favorites. I enjoy following up on cross-referenced suggestions that lurk about in a lot of pop-culture. Watch almost any Scorsese film, and you’ll catch little snippets of his favorite movies. I found out about The Jazz Singer from Goodfellas. This sort of thing happens all the time once you keep an eye out for it. If you really connect with the source, you’ll probably really appreciate what they like too.

The responses I received form an all-together unexpected and intriguing reading list. One that should keep me busy for the next year or so. Also fascinating are the personal statements reflecting why their books are so meaningful to them.

Merlin Mann Buckles Down

A reminder that WHAT we do matters more than HOW we do it. Seriously.

43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work, 2008-Sep-10, by Merlin Mann:

If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.

But, then — and this is really important — if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we’ll have a lot to talk about.