Suggestion for the title

How about adapting the "Guns, Germs and Steel" title.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, famously wrote about the differences across civilizations from the point of view of their different access to technologies.

A brief slice of the book, Guns (weapons), Germs (resistance) and Steel (industrial era tools), were the three key technologies that enabled the European conquistadores to defeat the native Americans.

What I'm getting at is something similar. Take a brief slice of our chapter, and use 3 key ingredients for an innovation climate as our title. So, something like "intrinsic motivation, openness and diversity" but more sticky and sexy. Any ideas?!

More content needed for the physical infrastructure and dynamics sections

We need more content for these sections. Currently, we don't seem to be saying anything original or interesting :(

The physical infrastructure section is conceptually easy, but I don't have time to read Santamaki's thesis or any new material at this point. Someone please improvise!

The dynamics section right now is very general and unless we find some concrete examples to make interesting/new points, I would suggest skipping it for next week's presentation. We could work on this for the chapter to be delivered in Jan 2010. Would you agree?

Suggested revisions for the Case Studies section

I feel that for the case studies we have to distinguish between (1) umbrella organizations such as the DF and (2) their success stories.

Since our major contribution concerns an innovation climate, I propose that we have three subsections discussion initiatives to create innovation climates in three countries.

1. In Finland we can discuss (1) DF, citing SEOS and Powerkiss success stories. (2) For MIDE we have a background and a list of projects but we don't know how successful any of them are. Olli, could you please comment on some of them: what has been accomplished? We still need to get a clear idea of how, as an innovation climate, MIDE is different from a typical academic granting agency. Yrjo said they have been very risk-taking with the MIDE funds and have weighted vision and ideas more than credentials. But that's what every granting agency says such as EU's FP7 :) So, the idea of ambitious/visionary alone makes me a bit skeptical ;)
   Also, I feel we could leave out EIT. It's a hot topic on one hand but on the other it's too early to tell.
   
   
2. I have an excellent example for US. I found this independent non-profit called Business Innovation Factory which is in the Boston area. Their philosophy ties in with 2 important issues we are discussing (1) open innovation concepts/ living labs and (2) a systems theoretic approach. They have two interesting 'customer centric' living labs which they call experience labs. One is an elder care experience project, for old-age homes, assisted living etc. The second is a student experience project. Do see their website! If you have time, you could also see a nice TED talk by their excutive director Mellisa Withers.
   
   
3. For India, I have a very good example as well. I thought of writing about grassroot innovations. One of the great post-colonial examples of 'user-driven innovation' is in the form of innovation taking place at the grassroots. These innovations are largely need-based and developed by people with no formal education. (A famous example from the TED era is a secondary school student William Kamkwamba who built a windmill from cycle parts to power his entire household). In the late 1980's, Anil Gupta, a professor working with sustainable energy resources in India got an idea to tap into these innovations, scale them up to reach the formal world of technology (grassroots -> global), and reward the innovators fairly. The result is the Honeybee Network which has identified and rewarded more than 10,000 grassroots innovations since 1989! Here's a 2006 BBC piece on this network.

So, now to allocate tasks! Could somebody volunteer to restructure the Finland cases in about 500 words in our google doc? I can write the BIF and the Honeybee cases.

Meeting notes from Thu 26 Nov 2009

Finalize your subsections ASAP so that Pavan can start editing!

Pauli starts a Google presentation, everyone contributes with their own slides!

Presentation rehersal on Tue 8 Dec 9:00-11:00 at DF

Notes from 19th of November

Hello!
After lectures we had a discussion with our group. Some notes I made:

-Text should be ready 24.11.2009 (tomorrow!!), so everyone could read it before 26.11.2009.

-Thursday 26.11.2009 at 10:00 we will meet at DF to check our text for book.

-Thursday 26.11.2009 book presentation. Pauli makes slides with google docs, everyone can partisipate, and Marja will present these.

-Seminar is 10.12.2009 10:00-14:30 at TU3-hall (Time changed!!) and Pavan is responsible for presentation. Time 25 min+discussion (60 min maximum)

-Ali leaves 27.11.09 for trip to home.

Anything else?

Tue Nov. 10 Notes from DF: Some brainstorming

Next meeting: Tue next week Tue 9:00-11:00 17 Nov 2009

We talked about the future of the innovation climate from various angles. Ideas from today's meeting:

• Before, artists went to Paris. Where do the innovative people go in the future?
• Examples of systems theoretical approach for an innovation climate (New York in 1940's and '50s, Boulder colorado, examples from India and China)
• Physical infrsatructure influences in two ways: direct and indirect (self-esteem issues)
• Opening statement: First, second and third industrial revolution
• How does the process of innovatin change -- main focus of the 'vision 2030'?
• Distributed innovation into networks, hubs, open spaces (open living labs, http://owela.vtt.fi)
• Sustainability movements and its relationship to division of labour
• Decreasing of the scale, increasing of involvement, micro democracies
• IPR issues (who hold IPR in open spaces? open scientific publishing), changing of the business logic
• Lifecycle of innovations, different logics in business, science
• Need for attitute that accepts rapid processing of ideas (open living lab?)

Sorry if you can't follow these notes, you just had to be there :)

Meeting 3.11.09 Next meeting and Calendar

Next meeting 10.11.2009 9:30 at DF meeting room

Antti, we can´t edit calendar, can you somehow let us to edit it?

Calendar

Todays topics were:
-By the next meeting main texts should be delivered (allready now text is 10 pages long)
-After this text should be restructured to fit "intoro-stateofart-challenges...-visio 2030...
-at editing pahse references are moved at the end of the text.
-work of the group members should be finalised 22.november.

Motivation Management for Innovation

Section Title: Motivation Management for Innovation

Outline

1. What is motivation? Why is it important in innovation?

2. The Link Between Motivation and Innovation

3. Incentive schemes of motivation

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Section Title: Motivation Management for Innovation

There is an old saying you can take a horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink. It will drink only if it's thirsty. So with different participants in the innovation process, they will do what they want to do or motivated to do. In this motivation management section, we will talk about how to encourage different participants and convince them with motivation. For example, the manager should be able to motivate employees. The leaders should provide powerful incentive to get support from shareholders.

1. What is motivation? Why is it important in innovation?

Motivation is what we call our driving force, our ''get up and go''. It stimulates our senses into the achievement of goals that have been set out for us. Its ability to shape the workforce into its own driving force is what becomes important to the success of work organizations [3].

Motivation and innovation output are positively correlated. The more motivated an individual, the more likely he or she is to engage in the task at various cognitive levels until an outcome is achieved.

Factors that make up motivation can be isolated, motivated and measured using standard quantitative techniques which allow a leader, consultant or manager to measure and improve motivation with a corresponding rise in creative output.

There are broad and specific categories of motivation [1]:

Intrinsic motivation – Intrinsically motivated people include commitment to work, passionate involvement, total absorption and devotion to their work, interest and satisfaction in their work, challenged by their work.

Extrinsic motivation – It is the motivation to engage in an activity primarily in order to meet some goal external to the work itself, such as attaining an expected reward, winning a competition or meeting some requirement.

2. The Link Between Motivation and Innovation

Employees in most organizations would like to feel that their ideas can make a difference in their workplace. For many people, there are few things more motivating than seeing the successful implementation of an idea they suggested. The scarcity of this motivational force may be one of the biggest reasons why so many company employees feel that they are powerless and unable to change the ''system'' [2]. All too often, supervisors overlook the possibility that their employees may be an untapped gold mine of good ideas.

[2] outlines five practices which represent an integrated approach to innovation and employee motivation that has proven to be very effective.

Get to know every employee
It is virtually impossible for a mid-level manager to motivate his/her employees without getting to know them.
Challenge them to improve the operation
Managers should give each employee a clear mandate in their work requirements to take a hard look at the whole operation and make recommendations for improvements.
''Customer for a day''
Have each employee be ''customer for a day'' to took at the operation from the client's point of view.
The great idea award
Find a way to reward or recognize employees whose suggestions help improve the operation.
Don't forget the implementation
The actual implementation of the great ideas generated by employees.

3. Incentive schemes of motivation

Standard pay-for-performance schemes that punish failures with low wages and termination may have adverse effects on innovation [4].

[4] shows that incentive schemes that motivate innovation are fundamentally different from standard pay-for-performance schemes.


[1] http://ezinearticles.com/?Creativity-and-Innovation-Management---Motivation&id=21417
[2] http://govleaders.org/motivation.htm
[3] http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/7485.html
[4] 2009, motivation innovation book

Organizational culture

Section Title: Organizational culture

Outline

1. Definition of culture

What is culture concerned with?
Why does culture matter in a company?
How do cultures differ?
What level of culture does this chapter focus on?

2. Build the Innovation Culture

Organizational Innovation Structures
Participation as a function of hierarchy

3. 24/7 innovation

Perpetual Innovation

4. Innovation Culture Evaluation

5. Innovation culture case analysis

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Section Title: Organizational culture

Today's organization depend upon innovations for their survival. Only innovators will survive in the global market. ''Innovate or die'' is a genuine proposition as well as a worn cliche. Are companies organized to innovate? In fact, it seems that the majority are organized to not innovate. In this section, we will explore the innovation culture in a corporation to figure out how does it impact the management, strategy, development & research and so on.

1. Definition of Culture

''Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.''

- Albert Camus

Culture is an integral part of every society. It is a term used by social scientists to depict a people's whole way of life in groups (e.g., a family, tribe, region, nation, company and profession). To social scientists, a culture is any way of life, simple or complex, consisting of learned ways of acting, feeling and thinking, and can be learned from his/her family and surrounding environment, rather than biologically determined ways.

According to British anthropologist Edward B Tylor, culture is defined as ''That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, moral, lay, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.'' Tylor's definition includes three of the most important characteristics of culture:

Culture is acquired by people. Because it consists of learned patterns of behavior rather than the biologically determined ones that are sometimes called instinctive;

A person acquires culture as a member of society

Culture is a complex whole so that it can be broken down into simple units called ''cultural traits.'' A trait may be a custom, such as burial of the dead; a device, such as chopsticks; a gesture, such as a handshake; and arts, such as abstract expressionism.

However, as Norihiko Shimizu said: ''Today's Taboos may be gone tomorrow''. A culture may be static within a short term but it can also change in the long run.

1.1 What does culture concern with?

According to Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, cultures vary in solutions to common problems. Cultures have dominant or preferred value orientations. The 5 basic problems that cultures concern with are:

1.Relational orientation: the relationship between individuals
2.Time orientation: temporal focus of human life
3.Activity orientation: modality of human activity
4.Man-nature orientation: relationship between human and nature
5.Human nature orientation: character of innate human nature

1.2 Why does culture matter in a company?

''If I were again facing the challenge to integrate Europe, I would probably start with culture.''

- Jean Monnet

Culture has explicit and implicit impact on decisions, which lies in: meeting interacting and conducting, negotiating and compromising, and leading and motivating. In addition, culture also has significant impact on performance, assessment and reward systems, marketing and advertising blunders, problems with cross-border alliances, integration of acquisitions, and frustration.
[...give some examples to this abstracted items in the following writing...]

1.3 How do cultures differ?

Culture differences distinguish groups from one another. All cultures are known to have a set of beliefs that define the code of conduct and values fro that particular culture. People within a same group share the same culture. Culture differs from each other in several ways, such as various greeting customs, moods and opinions shaped by the history events, business concepts, and stereotypes in different regions or countries.

1.4 What level of culture does this chapter focus on?

Culture is meaningful only if it is within a group. A culture group can be organized in various levels, such as national, corporate, professional, sub-groups level, and so on. In this chapter, we mainly focus on corporate culture.

2. Building the Innovation Culture

Innovation is not equal to creativity which is about coming up with clever ideas, but is about the ability to turn knowledge into values or bring creative new ideas to life.

Companies around the world are keen to innovate because innovative companies can benefit from it, such as enhancing brand and image, increasing shareholder wealth as return on investment support, and market share. But innovation is not a commodity that can be purchased or installed like a computer software. Rather it is mainly a culture which must be adopted and nurtured.

Our work on this section focuses on analyzing different types of organization innovation culture which contributes to the innovation work in a company.

2.1 Structure Your Company to Support Innovation

The style of organizational innovation structure is a key factor which can inhibit or foster creativity and innovation. It results from several sub factors including history, strategy, operational design, product diversity, logistics, marking, client base and supplier base. For leaders in a company, there is no recipe for complete structural change, but insights into the properties of nurturing structures are needed to update the existing structures.

There are two basic innovation structure in a corporation: bottom-up innovation structure and top-down innovation structure.

Bottom-up innovation involves decentralized authority, loosely defined tasks, horizontal communications, greater individual authority and flexibility.

[...Innovation is about how to turn ideas into value. While where do ideas come from? Often ideas come from insights... continue]

In contrast with bottom-up innovation, top-down innovation structure includes centralized command and control, clearly defined tasks, vertical communication links and obedience to supervisors usually with rigidity and inflexibility. Top-down innovation structure is usually not preferred. But experience shows that the above can be misleading. For example, flat organizations like bottom-up structure are generally preferred and hierarchical ones like top-down structure are not preferred. However, even flat organizations are in reality hierarchical. Because, there is no innovation without leadership[1] . Leaders are able to inspire innovation. This happens with the attitude they bring as manifested in their willingness and ability to listen, to encourage and to appreciate intelligent failure.

A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan, in their book ''The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation'', point out that structuring for innovation is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. You need to design and install the right organization structures to suit the business strategy and innovation model… many companies make innovation happen through enabling structures of one form or another. Where they often fall short, surprisingly, is that most people in the company don't understand what, in fact, the structures are and how they actually work [4].


2.2 Participation as a Function of Hierarchy

Insights often come about as the result of individual effort; ideas are generally developed and improved in groups. Innovation is generally an organizational outcome [1]. The sheer complexity of today's technologies, and markets means that many people with multidisciplinary background must be engaged in transforming ideas into marketable products and services.

Innovation is not a one-off event nor even a series of one-off events, though such events are an integral part of innovation [3]. Innovation should be a sustainable process in which employees are always encouraged and inspired to think creatively and invited to take calculated risks with new ideas and concepts. Only if innovation becomes a way of life in a company, it becomes perpetual innovation.

3. 24/7 innovation

Innovation is not a one-off event nor even a series of one-off events, though such events are an integral part of innovation [3]. Innovation should be a sustainable process in which employees are always encouraged and inspired to think creatively and invited to take calculated risks with new ideas and concepts. Only if innovation becomes a way of life in a company, it becomes perpetual innovation, which is the key to long-term, sustainable success in these rapidly changing circumstances.

As said in the book ''24/7 innovation'' [5], innovation 24 hours a day 7days a week is no mystery: it is the ability of an organization and the people in it to come up with new ideas to satisfy the changing whims of ever-fickle customers without any special stimulation and without interruption. Innovation throughout the organization, everywhere, everyday, by everyone - 24/7 - to the point where innovation is as natural as breathing.

4. Innovation Culture Evaluation

It is relatively easy to generate ideas, most corporations lack processes to evaluate ideas and move them on to new product or service development.

We will evaluate the innovation culture in a company from several aspects as follows:

Communication distance: normal employees can knock the door of managers or leaders if they wish to talk with them about their ideas.
Long-term VS. short-term orientation: leaders should resist the temptation to look for immediate results
Buffer zones: the most innovative people should have enough buffer zones and innovation room for their ideas.
Commit: leaders should commit to driving the best ideas through to implementation.


5. Innovation culture case analysis


[1] http://www.realinnovation.com/content/c070528a.asp
[2] http://www.realinnovation.com/content/c070430a.asp
[3] http://www.jpb.com/report103/archive.php?issue_no=20090901
[4] http://www.innovationtools.com/Weblog/innovationblog-detail.asp?ArticleID=1149
[5] Book: 24/7 innovation

We really need google doc or similar system

Hello!
Sorry to spam so many mails, but I found out that there are some big problems putting in some edited text from word-program. If text includes some editing things, like bold text, headings etc, it will interfere when copy-pasteing into this blog. Like in my previous post, end chapter is in the blog written in bold letters, and I could not remove it or modify post anymore.

It could be also this computer only, but is seems that we do need some file-share systen, like google docs. Could you Pavan post first Google doc to all of us, so we can then learn to use that. Thanks!!

Pauli

6 The dynamics of the innovation process

Hello all!

Here is some raw text I wrote this week. Pavan, it would be good if you can sent the google doc we were talking about. It is propably better way to share documents and texts we write.

Pauli

6 The dynamics of the innovation process

6.1 Introduction

Creating an innovation is a dynamic process. It could start with an idea coming suddenly, or it could be a planned process. The more complex system involved, the more benefits could be achieved by using systematic way of working. The more people there is, more important it is to have comprehensive documentation and guidelines to keep project running in good order. Good organization system helps to reduce unnecessary work, and thus it gives more time for good design and creativity. Systematic approach to work also helps to bring forward some radical ideas. If design process is not documented and organized well, feel and emotion have more influence in decision-making process. Because many people are careful by their nature, this will lead to moderate results. With the help of the analytic design process, radical ideas will have more value, and are not so easily judged being naïve or immature.

6.2 Creativity

Creativity is one of the main components in designing new products, services, solutions and systems.

6.3 Analytical approach for creating innovations.

-Concepting

-

problem analysis

problem formulation

system synthesis

system analysis

evaluation

desicion

-

6.4 Motivation for innovative climate (or Creativity and motivation

By nature human is creative, but some people are more creative than others. Throughout their lives, creative persons exhibit childlike curiosity and interest in their domains, value their work above conventional monetary or status rewards, and enjoy it primarily for intrinsic reasons. For them, creativity is its own reward. /MIT/

If organization is made of creative people, their motivation is not only monetary, but also based on creative work. They would work more happily if they can use their creativity. And even better it is if they can use creativity a lot, and see it make results reasonably fast. If they got stuck with repeating and monotone work, they can became unmotivated.
Analytical ways help to make product design faster with better result. These techniques could be applied also to other system designs

References:

/MIT/ Mit Encyclopedia Of The Cognitive science

/P&B/ Pahl&Beitz - Engineerign design 3^rd Ed.

Innovation is a dynamic process, going through various stages from conceptualization to realization, experimentation to focused implementation, etc. How are the tasks distributed, how is goal setting done, how does it evolve, what are the characteristics of these dynamics? Some aspects:

How do multidisciplinary teams contribute at various stages of the process?

What are the various stages from invention to realization?

What is the role of hard work vs. ideas?

Promising innovators, buffer zones, long term vs short term focus...

22.10.2009 presentation comments

Hello!

From the last week we got some comments after our presentation, and here are important ones:
-More vision for 2030
-Virtual spaces
-Living labs
-More?

More information:
-LINK for VTT´s (VTT=national research institute of Finland) Open WEb LAb for more information. Unfortunately only some text is in english.

-What was this OECD report about innovation or something? I missed that point.

Tue Oct 20 Notes

Here are quick notes from today's meeting. We mainly discussed the next Thursday's project slides.

1. Paper & material distribution (e.g. a nice article you found)

If available, put a reference to the blog. If not, send via email.

2. Thursday's slides

Who will present? How we will present?

Maria will present, sends the slides before Thursday. Others participate when details are discussed.

3. About the required structure of the chapter

How does our sections fit into:

- Introduction

- State of the art

- Challenges today

- Development to the year 2030

- Conclusions

?

- Introduction as a stand-alone section

- State of the art and Challenges today to each sections, is possible

- Development (to the year 2030) and Conclusions as a wrap-up section in the end

4. Current state and plan to completion

- 6-7 weeks to go

- weekly meetings

- subgroups meet/discuss more often

5. Next meeting

- Thu 22 Oct 12:00 before the lecture

- Tue 3 Nov 9:00 to 11:30 at DF (before the case study interviews)

Innovation climate chapter presentation

Next week Thursday (Oct 22) we have the book chapter presentation. The duration of the presentation is 20 minutes, and we have to present the following:

1. Working name and the theme
2. Focus area, key constructs
3. Outline and work distribution
4. Current state and plan to completion
5. Questions-areas where feedback and guidance is desired

Some of the original post-it items are below, and the photos can be again found at: http://aokarila.1g.fi/kuvat/bit_bang/.




INTRO (Pavan)

SYSTEMIC APPROACH (Pavan & Marja)

MOTIVATION (Ming & Pavan)

MINDSET (Pavan & Marja)

CULTURE (Ali & Ming)

Innovation culture:
- leadership & management
- organizational structure
- working culture
- hierrachy
- participation
- make innovation a daily life
- role of hierarchy for innovation
- working style
- bottom up & vs. top down aproaches
- raw materials
- infrastructure
- peaple/teams/cultures


PHYSICAL (Antti & Ali)

- Innovative spaces / creative workplace
- Influence of Architecture (Alan de Botton)
- Pleasures & Sorrows of Work (Alan de Botton
- Physical space for innovation
- Design of the working environment
- Physical infrastructure


PROCESS OF INNOVATION (Pauli)

- Innovation, Ideas or hard work? (Systematic approach)
- Structure of innovation
- promising innovators
- buffer zones
- long term focus
- implementation
- Innovation types
- Technological
- Social
- Financial
- More???
- The Process of innovation culture
- discovery and conversion of ideas to reality
- cross-department, multidisciplinary
- Issues advancing creativity


CASE STUDIES (Antti, Marja & Ali)

Meeting summary from Tue 6 Oct

Meeting summary

Tue 6 Oct 2009, 14 o'clock at Design Factory

1 Book Chapter Project

Antti was chosen to be the coordinator for the project, and Pavan as the scientific editor. Pavan drafted already a preliminary layout for the chapter: Editorial overview version 0.1.

However, while having coffee on last Thursday we stumbled upon the first lecture's slides where a structure of the chapters was given:

• Introduction
• State of the art
• Challenges today
• Dovelopement to the year 2030
• Conclusions

Let's find out how strict a rule this is...

2 Timeline

Some important dates coming up:

• Thu 15.10. Chapters presentation: Ali promised to present chapter 9 and Pauli chapter 10. Let's send our own notes ASAP to them, and meet quickly before the lecture
• Tue 20.10. 14 o'clock meeting on the Innovation climate chapter, place: Design Factory (Pauli Reserves).
• Thu 22.10. Preliminary chapter presentation
• Thu 10.12. Bit Bang seminar at TUAS. The current deadline for the chapter.

3 Calendar issues

• Antti is away for a week in 16-20.11.
• Pavan is away 14-26.10.
• Ali is away from the beginning of december to the start of january

4 Next meeting

Let's go thru the slides before the next lecture, i.e. on Thursday 22 Oct at 12:00 at TUAS.

Editorial overview version 0.1

[Based on the brainstorming session on 6.10.2009, this is a first attempt at creating an overview/layout of the book chapter to be completed by 10.12.2009. Please feel free to comment, complete, edit, review etc.]

1 Introduction

1.1 In this chapter, we will focus on [...].
1.2 Glossary of terms [organization, innovation, ...].
1.3 Brief discussion of innovation [from wikipedia: goals of innovation, sources of innovation, ...].
1.4 This chapter attempts to set up and answer questions of the following nature:

1. What are certain best practices than may be adopted to maximally incentivize innovation within an organization?
2. How do these practices vary as a function of the size, culture, diversity, goals etc. of the organization?
   
3. ...
4. ...
   

2 A systems-theoretic approach to innovation

As such, the main focus of this chapter and indeed this book, is on organizational innovation. However, we must recognize that organizations do not operate in vacuum. In order to fully understand the impact of innovation policies, organizations must be studied in the context of their interactions with other organizations in a larger eco-system. Thus for instance, two comparable high-tech companies in two different cities (say, A and B) with identical innovation policies might perform vastly differently due to their differing proximity to good technical universities, the different capacities of cities A and B to attract and retain a talent pool of employees, the number of competing tech-companies in the two cities, the different levels of motivation that the cultural milieu inspires, and so on.

Approaches from systems theory, network theory etc. may be useful.

We could start by describing the eco-system of various types of organizations and their influence. For e.g.,

Organization: Tech-company
Eco-system: Tech-university, partners, competitors, markets, city, external culture, macroeconomics of the city and country, talent pool...

Organization: School
Eco-system: Families, students, teachers, boards of education, public infrastructure such as transport, proximity to homes, hospitals, sister institutions...

Once we have described such an eco-system, we can begin to ask questions about causal relationships within the eco-system and define potential goals of these organizations e.g. how to make innovation appetite of the company independent of the macroeconomics?

Relevant literature:

1. Ambition and cities, Paul Graham
2. ...

3 Mental models and motivation management

In this section, we must answer the following questions pertaining to motivation and motivation management.

1. What factors motivate employees to innovate? [intrinsic vs. extrinsic factors]
   
2. How can the management enhance these factors?
3. Is it worth considering individual differences between employees' aptitude for a specific type of problem solving? If so, how? [nature vs. nurture]
   

I understand that a useful tool to analyze motivation is using the theory of mental models [CITATION NEEDED]. This theory ascribes to each employee, a set of mental models with which he/she understands his/her relationships with fellow co-workers. It turns out that certain classes of mental models are better suited to certain types of organizational culture etc. [Marja, please correct me here]

Relevant literature:

1. Motivation on wikipedia. Do pay particular attention to the section on business.
   
2. Mental models?
3. The links in this earlier post

4 Physical infrastructure

In this section, we must discuss the influence of physical spaces on motivation, creativity and efficiency. We must address the role of physical spaces from the scale of the office, up to the city.

Relevant literature:

1. Esa Santamaki's masters thesis
2. Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness

5 Organizational culture

In this section, we must discuss the various aspects of work culture as a function of the structure and principles of the organization. Specific issues include:

1. Various organizational structure
   
2. The role of leadership
3. Participation as a function of hierarchy
4. Bottom up vs. top down innovation as a function of raw materials, infrastructure, goals, people and teams etc.
5. Working for the week vs. the weekend
6. How to inspire the ideology of 24/7 innovation mindset? etc.

6 The dynamics of the innovation process

Innovation is a dynamic process, going through various stages from conceptualization to realization, experimentation to focused implementation, etc. How are the tasks distributed, how is goal setting done, how does it evolve, what are the characteristics of these dynamics? Some aspects:

1. How do multidisciplinary teams contribute at various stages of the process?
2. What are the various stages from invention to realization?
3. What is the role of hard work vs. ideas?
4. Promising innovators, buffer zones, long term vs short term focus...
   

7 Case studies

A few case studies will be compiled by surveying startups from the design factory, and they will in turn be analyzed according to the parameters defined in the rest of the text.

Design factor visit on 1 Oct 2009: Some links

We wisited the Design Factory (DF) and got a walking tour around the premises with Jussi Hannula. We also had the chance to talk to Esa Santamäki about the DF as an innovation climate.

http://aaltodesignfactory.fi/

Esa's Master's thesis can be found e.g. here.

I also took some pictures, all of them here.

The importance of understanding Social Darwinism and its flaws

In today's class I brought up social Darwinism to make the point that loose applications of Darwinian thought to spheres of human life may result in dangerous consequences.

It is important to recognize that social Darwinism is now largely debunked and Darwin himself did not advocate any such thing.

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless; it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.

- Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man, 1871

If you're interested to know more, do read the wiki entry on Evolution and Ethics

Tuesday 6.10.09 14:00

Next meeting Tuesday 6.10.09 14:00 at the design factory. I can make reservation for space. And Pavan will also see the place.
For tuesday everyone should make topics under our theme "creating a flourishing...". You can post our own suggestion here, and/or bring notes to meeting. On tuesday we can manage those in groups, and then we can create "final" topics for our writing work.

And next week we will be opponents on thursday.

pauli

Fashion in electronics -- electronics in fashion at ELKOM

OK, I just remembered to take my notes from my laptop from the session we participated. Here's some text that was worth writing down, understandable and somehow connected to our course.

SUUNTO

Fashion in sports: functionality with design

Relevant functionality and design

"To stand out but no too much", important especially women with fashionable products

Professional gear/tools matter, passion -> design and materials are important

Three important factors were presented for product developement:

- Design thinking: courage for disruptive innovation, bravery

- Emotion: people's needs and desires, build character into products

- Interpreter: From invention to innovation

At least the first bullet rings (disrupive innovation) a bell. The second is about the social side of the innovation (Jacobs 2007). Well, the third bullet is about the well-known path onwards from invention.

The there was some case examples:

Kill your own product icon (diving: Stinger)

Outdoor instrument (Vector)

Core (Vector product family), stronger style, succesful

Keys for success:

- User insight collection (multi-disciplinary teams!)

- Close interaction with marketing, product management, R&D teams and manufacturing

- Iterative working methods

And then some:

Lifetime vs. fashionability

Annual cycles with 'women's products'

Distributed products

Web based solution, sharing coming

VERTU

How to create a new category?

Then something about the current economical state of the world:

Growth of discount and value segement, AND growth of premium and luxury markets

Long-term prospects for the luxury markets remain strong

Then back to the beginning:

Vision to create a (product) category: brings other players as well

Key success factors: brand positioning, etc.

hand made, materials

products that are loved may have a long lifetime

design is critical

Sell in luxury street (?) so that customers understand the value

GENELEC

Role of design in the corporate image strong

But however, the firm is strong in professional audio scene

Technological requirement is a must

Shape of the boxes came from physics along the years (not from industrial design originally!)

Then, the developement of the current product line:

In 1987: good performance, but different shapes, not congruent resemblance

Bring in people from outside:

Harri Koskinen (HK, a Finnish designer) remembered the 80's shapes of the speakers

New models starting 2000, by HK

"Why did you stop the previous models", from the field...

Obviously:

Design and marketing

Advertisement campaign, visual messages strong

What is design thinking?

At the ELKOM fair last week in the luxury electronics seminar, we briefly entered into a discussion about the role of design in technology. I tried to make the point that design is not fundamentally different from engineering and both could be considered as a constrained optimization problem. The gentleman from Vertu emphasized that it is important not to solve a very narrow design problem that may not generalize very well.

Here is a TED talk I watched in which the speaker attempts to describe the kinds of principles that go into innovative designs and urges designers to think big.

Design Factory 1.10.2009

Excursion to Design Factory

When: Thursday 1.10.2009
Time: 10:00
Where: Here

After the going around the Factory we can have a lunch and have a discussion about our work related to BitBang course. If you have some literature allready related to "creating a flourishing innovation climate", please bring it with you!?
I hope that Design Factory will create some ideas about "innovation climate". Of course innovation climate can be more about mental state, rather than some building with nice colours on the walls. But, I think it can help. :)

Pauli, testing this blog same time..

How to approach the subject of innovation?

I am rather pleased that we picked this topic as the notion of creativity and what engenders creativity is one of my personal favourites at the moment.

In an attempt to dive right in, here are three angles to approach the subject innovation: the management angle, the psychological angle (theories of motivation) and the social philosophy angle.

For a management approach, I found this rather old piece (1996) published in the R&D Innovator Magazine. Basically, the author attempts to paramterize and study (using a survey) what are the most important aspects in the work environment that foster innovation.

For another management approach, here is another blog post by the London based Finnish thinker Cecila Weckstrom on how to lead creative people.

Here is a TED talk by a failed lawyer Dan Pink, who takes a more psychological approach and asks the question: what is it that creative people feel most rewarded by?

For a very broad sociological approach, you may be interested in the wonderfully eloquent, Swiss-born English writer Alain de Botton and his thoughts on the pleasures and sorrows of work.

Welcome!

A warm welcome to the blog authors in no particular order: Antti, Pauli, Ali, Marja, Aira, Ming and Olli: Tervetuloa!

I'm assuming that all of you have to some extent participated either actively or passively in the blogosphere. Nervertheless, I will begin from the beginning. This post is mostly a how-to manual for the contributors to this blog. It is intended as a non-exhaustive set of guidelines for effective categorization of content, uniformity of visual and writing styles, effective searchability etc.

Getting Started

The basic structure of this blog is as follows. It contains a central frame, consisting of ‘posts’ which are articles of varied length, written by (usually one of the) authors of the blog. Posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, contain a time-stamp, a byline, and a link to its comments page. In addition to a central frame, the blog also contains a frame to the left, which consists of several widgets that serve to summarize the blog. Examples of widgets include: a search form, links to a post-archive, a tag cloud, a category list, an author list, a blogroll, a list of recent comments, an admin panel etc. Currently I have left the default settings as is, but please feel free to suggest or add your own widgets as the blog evolves!

To start writing on this blog, please get yourself a google account and email your ID to pavan ramkumar gmail com. You will be added as one of the authors of this blog. After this, you can login to this blog with your account each time you want to read, write, or discuss.

It is generally accepted that the author of each post owns the intellectual property contained in that post. The gray areas concerning ownership, are the comments section, and posts that are built on previous posts.

Labels

Each post must be filed under one or more labels, for effective organization of information. Readers of the blog can selectively read posts filed under a particular label.

I could suggest the following labels for illustration. Feel free to suggest changes by email, or in the comments section below.

1. Ideas: Discussion of ideas, debates, etc. usually involving some kind of original thought process on behalf of the author such as reflections, reviews, vision articulation etc.

2. News: Quick news reports, including sharing of links such as news of developments in the general outside world, such as interesting papers, inventions, blog communities, contests, awards, conferences, video lectures, etc.

3. Tasks: News of developments within the BitBang community such as upcoming meetings, TODO lists, sharing of responsibilities etc.

4. Meta: About the blog itself and how to improve it.

Linking and Embedding

While writing a new post, which is closely related to a previous post, it is important to mention the previous post, and link it in your post for the sake of continuity and credit attribution, especially in case the previous post was written by a different author.

While writing a post to share a link, please write a short 2-3 line summary of the message, and then present or embed a link/image/video etc. rather than simply presenting the link itself. For aesthetic reasons, please hyperlink to a relevant keyword in your summary, rather than pasting the URL as-is.

For example, instead of saying:

Hey guys, check out this new exciting blog http://innovationclimate.blogspot.com/

please say:

Hey guys, check out this new exciting blog about innovation. It seems to be a group blog based in Helsinki and writing mostly about how to create a welcoming climate for innovation.

Comment Policy

Readers (and other co-authors of the blog) are free to leave comments on all posts. Currently, comments are set to non-anonymous. The author of the post, and the blog administrator(s) reserve the right to delete comments.

Here is a brief, non-exhaustive set of guidelines for readers and participants on how to comment and discuss. Please

1. be polite.
2. be skeptical about the content, not the author.
3. be optimistic about the will of the author, and skeptical about the accomplishment.
4. stay relevant to the main theme of the post as far as possible.
5. in the process, try to have fun!
   

I humbly recommend an essay by Paul Graham titled “How to Disagree“. In this essay, he presents a taxonomy of disagreements, and notes several common cognitive biases in argument.