Importance of INNOVATION
July 21, 2002
Outline:
Define INNOVATION
Needs to be used
Importance of INNOVATION in disturbed environments
Stress, predictable pressure can be dealt with adaptation
Ability to respond to unpredictable combinations of stresses
INNOVATION is transferred to free sites (
Notes from my notebook:
Look at importance of innovation and transfer of innovation in different ways,
in particular, how we can manage intellectual assets and the complex network
with which they are transferred. This is related to knowledge management strategies.
The ideas about the stability of a system relate to how changes propagate through systems. Those changes can be in the internal logic or they can be external conditions. Feedback systems have both levels. Hofstadter talks about creativity as being the ability to make variations. Others talk about innovations as requiring in implementation, it’s not an innovation unless it is used by someone else. These ideas are related through the ability of someone who innovates to embed a path for using the product in the whole package of innovation. The innovation is both part physical and part information/knowledge that allows it to be used. This information has to be sensed and then constructed into knowledge by the user. So, the idea of understanding conditions that lead to slippage in your target audience is key for a successful innovation.
Slippability is what this "concept" almost is. A fish is almost a submarine.
The other conditions that I workd on before were conditions that are necessary (such as an "open" state of the user and some type of reward for action by the adaptor.
Hofstadter (pg 247) relates this to the implicosphere. Innovations shouldn’t aim for the the middle of a target audience need (i.e. shouldn’t try to hit a bullseye), but rather should try to aim to have the minimum amount of overlap that still makes sense to the user/adopter.
Maybe CAE should work on a book that addresses a topic such as "Managing creative assets of your faculty". We could have authors such as Feyerherm, Sestak, Lieberman and Rueter.
Definitions:
Innovation
Invention
Adaptation
Disturbance
Stress
Address the possible negative effects of innovation.
Disruptive innovation
Disinnovation
The disruptive innovation represents the easy path, that may be bad for some of the current users. This can also interfere with building better resources or tools.
Examples of innovations at PSU:
WebCT disruptive and centralized
Digital cameras – so popular that PSU budget process obstructed purchase of these
Laptops
Dreamweaver – supported by workshops
Streaming video –
PowerPoint – growing into a defacto standard for meeting presentations
Forms data collection tools -
Importance of innovation in management of intellectual assets
Stickiness
Transfer
ROI
As an innovator
Conditions
Open sites = time
Target audience
How will the adopters and innovators be rewarded
Time line for adoption
Disruption à immediate
The innovator needs to understand the knowledge constructs of the audience
This is like assessment
Range and diversity
One way to do this is to model concept linkages
Tie to frequency and association paper
The innovator needs to understand how the adaptors’network works
Range of professional linkages
See Holly Arrow’s typology of groups
The number and type of connections per individual (this is the research that I wanted to do for the FIRT2002
Innovation could be related to the problem of financial responsibility/understanding for an instituion as suggested by Marvin.
ESR220 and ESR221 are instances of the general problem of the transfer of innovation. The innovations are the problem solving mechanisms and euristics. These have forms, concepts that are part of these forms. The simple concepts are related but need to be abstracted before they can be applied to other problems.
Innovators are people who create other usable tools and ideas, play the defining role in the spread of innovation. They must create a produc t orf idea that can be passed AND used by a target audience. Other treatments of this process, such as the diffusion of innovation, assume that there is a pool of innovators and early adopters that start these seeds. There probably is such a pool of candidates to be innovators but they may not be effective.
To efficiently innovate, the creator must understand the target audience. In this paper, the innovator is seen as being aware of this audience and working to understand their processes and understanding. The innovator is not working in a vacuum at one end of a diffusion gradient. The metaphors of mass diffusion and cellular automata processes (such as a forest fire in a mosaic landscape) should be replaced with the image of a teacher who is trying to help students learn. The spread of innovation has much in common with good pedagogical practices the include assessment, motivation, feedback and communication.
The ability of an institution to deal creatively with financial stress and disturbance will require innovation. This problem has all the key characteristics of innovation:
The academic definition of creative contributions to scholarship seems to come under scholarship, but there maybe other activities that have impact on the academic community. There is, of course, service and other activities that maintain the system. Then there are activities that are essentially creative but don’t end in a product or a product that can be measured annually.
I think a good portion of what I do falls in this category, for example:"