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