Innovators squirrel away things they don't know how to use. Designers and sculptors collect photos and keep warehouses or cabinets full of things they can't use (yet). Painters and product developers keep sketchbooks. Innovators of all stripes keep "junk," as one designer called it, against the day when, leafing through a notebook or tidying a shelf, they have an "Aha!" moment.
Managers should support those tendencies—both by providing space for the collections and by endorsing the practice, instead of making it seem peripheral to "real" work.
Managers also shouldn't interfere by insisting on, say, an efficient storage system. Finding things too easily could mean missing an accidentally valuable idea.
From
INNOVATION
Oops!
Accidents lead to innovations. So, how do you create more accidents?
By Robert D. Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan
Dr. Austin is professor, managing creativity and innovation, at the Copenhagen Business School and an associate professor of technology and operations at Harvard Business School. Dr. Devin is a professor emeritus of theater and a senior research scholar at Swarthmore College. Dr. Sullivan is a senior research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health's Global Health Delivery Project.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/innovation/2008/07/07/?display=print
Printed in Campaign, Mint, India dated 21 July 2008
Showing posts with label Technology management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology management. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Deploy, innovate, and propagate - Technology
Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference.
By: McAfee, Andres, Brynjolfsson, Erik,
Harvard Business Review,
Jul-Aug 2008, Vol. 86, Issue 7/8
To survive, or better yet thrive, in this more competitive environment, the mantra for any CEO should be, "Deploy, innovate, and propagate": First, deploy a consistent technology platform. Then separate yourself from the pack by coming up with better ways of working. Finally, use the platform to propagate these business innovations widely and reliably. In this regard, deploying IT serves two distinct roles -- as a catalyst for innovative ideas and as an engine for delivering them. Each of the three steps in the mantra presents different and critical management challenges, not least of which have to do with questions of centralization and autonomy.
Andrew McAfee (amcafee@hbs.edu) is an associate professor at Harvard Business School in Boston. He is the author of "Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology" (HBR November 2006) and has a blog at andrewmcafee.org/blog.
Erik Brynjolfsson (erikb@mit.edu) is the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT's Center for Digital Business in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More of the author's research is available at digital.mit.edu/erik.
By: McAfee, Andres, Brynjolfsson, Erik,
Harvard Business Review,
Jul-Aug 2008, Vol. 86, Issue 7/8
To survive, or better yet thrive, in this more competitive environment, the mantra for any CEO should be, "Deploy, innovate, and propagate": First, deploy a consistent technology platform. Then separate yourself from the pack by coming up with better ways of working. Finally, use the platform to propagate these business innovations widely and reliably. In this regard, deploying IT serves two distinct roles -- as a catalyst for innovative ideas and as an engine for delivering them. Each of the three steps in the mantra presents different and critical management challenges, not least of which have to do with questions of centralization and autonomy.
Andrew McAfee (amcafee@hbs.edu) is an associate professor at Harvard Business School in Boston. He is the author of "Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology" (HBR November 2006) and has a blog at andrewmcafee.org/blog.
Erik Brynjolfsson (erikb@mit.edu) is the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT's Center for Digital Business in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More of the author's research is available at digital.mit.edu/erik.
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