Linking creativity to innovation Flashcards
Skunk works
Established by Lockheed in Burbank, California 1943. Lockheed were asked by the US air force to develop a jet fighter. They successfully set up a separate facility to design the plane quickly:
- There was a broad range of expertise - mini factory of people with different skills (understand technology, aeronautical engineers etc.)
- Focussed goal - a plane with a jet engine
- Insulated from bureaucracy
- Possible Hawthorne effect
Taking people with a variety of expertise and placing them all in one area with a common goal results in them all working collaboratively together.
Xerox PARC
1969: Xerox based in Rochester NY successful in photocopying, and then acquired SDS a computer manufacturer
1970: Established PARC in Palo Alto, California on Stanford University business park. They tapped into the intelligence of university students. Innovations included laser printers, bit mapped graphics, graphical user interfaces and mice.
It was multi-disciplinary including psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. Taken as evidence that setting up a group of multidisciplinary people is the way to generate new/interesting ideas
Failure or success: Xerox focussed on photocopiers so did not capitalise upon the PARC inventions, instead patenting them to Apple and Microsoft
Google used to have a policy whereby employees were allowed 20% of their own time to work on their own projects.
There is a huge emphasis on socialisation at Google: an approach to innovation that is embedded in the workplace and procedures. It empowered employees, promoting creativity and innovation. Operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management.
The 20% time model at Google brought us Google News and Gmail.
Knowledge spiral of Nonaka and Takeuchi
Internalisation - starts at the level of the individual, each individual has an inclination as to how things can be done better
Socialisation - someone thinks of a new way of doing something, chatting informally and interacting with others who then develop the idea. Still informal
Externalisation - taking something that has not been captured and turning it into something that has been. Someone sitting down and creating a description for the innovation. It becomes something material.
Combination - taking and reproducing the idea. Putting it on a website, broadcasting within the organisation and making sure there are mechanisms for the spread of the idea. Once this is done, new ideas will spend, starting the spiral again.
