If you’ve ever watched a road bike race like the Tour de France, you know the peloton is the big group of riders that cluster together during the race to reduce drag. It’s a great example of collaboration in action. But let’s face it: the people in the middle of the peloton may go faster than they would otherwise, but they don’t win the race.

When it comes to creating and innovating, most companies (and employees) are in the peloton. They are doing enough to survive, but they are stuck in the pack. And if they stay in the pack too long, they lose.

Escaping the peloton is tough. Often, you see a cyclist break away, sprint for a while, only to get sucked back into the main group over time as the pressures of making a go independently prove too much.

You’ve probably felt this way at work. You come up with an amazing idea, one that will change the company forever. But little by little, people—even the well-meaning ones—chip away at its soul, until the idea goes from being amazing to, well, average. You end up being sucked back into the peloton.

After this happens one too many times, you may feel like you want to stop collaborating and try to make things happen on your own. Don’t do it. Even Lance Armstrong could rarely break away from the peloton without his teammates’ help.

Instead, here are three tips to help you escape the creativity peloton without giving up on collaboration.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

Earlier this week some colleagues and I attended a fantastic gathering of business and political leaders called the Emerging Issues Forum. The theme of the forum—interestingly enough for a bunch of business folks—was creativity, and speakers included some of my favorite thinkers/authors who analyze the future of business:

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rottman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of The Responsibility Virus, The Opposable Mind, and a new book on design thinking called The Design of Business.

Tom Kelley, General Manager of legendary design firm IDEO, and author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown also has a book out on the subject on Design Thinking, called Change by Design, which my friend Jonathan Opp wrote a nice review of here.

Daniel Pink, bestselling author of A Whole New Mind, a book that has been extremely influential in my thinking about how the left brain and right brain can play nice in the business world. Pink also has a new book out, called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

During their talks, I couldn’t help but notice all three touched on a similar thematic: the crucial role that inspiring creativity plays in driving innovation.

[Read the rest of this post over at opensource.com]

Today I spent a great day at the Emerging Issues Forum, where I’m proud to say my home state of North Carolina attracted some of the top business minds in the world (the Twitter stream is going crazy here). This morning featured two Dark Matter Matters all stars, Roger Martin and Tom Kelley (who I have written about previously here and here), but there was also an incredible lunch session where Charlie Rose interviewed husband and wife creative geniuses Nnenna Freelon (the 5-time Grammy nominated jazz vocalist) and Philip Freelon (architect extraordinaire), and plenty of other enlightening stuff.

The theme of the conference is Creativity, Inc., and from what I can tell from many of the attendee and host comments, the theme of this year’s event is very different than years past. But the undercurrent of many of the comments from this morning seemed to take a clear point of view on this theme.

My interpretation? For years the business world has been waging a war against creativity… and creativity is beginning to fight back.

It’s about damn time.

Read the rest of this post at Dark Matter Matters.

We can talk about creativity and innovation all day long, meld the culture, design the space, set up the infrastructure, and have a repeatable process for bringing ideas to market; but, the ultimate constraint and arbiter — making all other efforts useless — is the legal system.

Protecting something as intellectual property is about balancing returns to society and compensation to a creator. We want society to benefit from a creator’s creation, but enough incentive must compel creators to do their thing.

Enough being the key word and one big, gray space. If a government misses that mark of protection in either direction, society can lose out on innovation. The issue is this mark changes based on the type of intellectual property. Business methods, when protected, have a different balance of returns to society and creator, than software, and pharmaceuticals.

Not that everyone views it that way or the law treats it that way, which is why a current Supreme Court case is important to watch.

Monday, the Court heard Bilski v. Kappos, a case that brings business method patents to the forefront. Previously, the Federal Circuit ruled Bilski’s business method wasn’t patentable because it wasn’t “…tied to a particular machine or apparatus, [nor did it] transform a particular article into a different state or thing.”

Bilski is calling into question the efficacy and legitimacy of what’s called the “machine-or-transformation” test. By telling Bilski his business method wasn’t protected, the Federal Circuit may have invalidated existing patents for business methods.

But, bringing into question the machine-or-transformation test may also have implications for the software industry. At one end, since source code must be run on a machine to do anything, it could be interpreted all software is patentable.

Or, in the view of the Software Freedom Law Center, source code is simply an algorithm we can comprehend, and algorithms themselves aren’t patentable.

Additionally, there are economic arguments that creativity and innovation in software just doesn’t really work that way. Allowing patenting of software led to significant societal inefficiencies like patent thickets, bloated legal departments, patent trolls, and risk-averse companies—all wasting money and limiting innovation.

Just thinking about business methods, does having a legal-based incentive to come up with a new way of doing business increase the rate of new business creation or improve the quality of innovation?

Without the protection, does the effect of essentially forcing businesses to compete on other aspects (really, compete at all), rather than just on who did it first, outweigh what we would gain from preserving/expanding business method patents?

(Of course, this is the economic view, and potentially only figures into a portion of court decision making.)

Leaving the issue of software aside, the Justices showed quite some skepticism of Bilski’s claims yesterday:

“Let’s take training horses,” said Justice Antonin Scalia. “Don’t you think that some people, horse whisperers or others, had some … insights into the best way to train horses? Why didn’t anybody patent those things?”

“I think our economy was based on industrial processes,” responded [Bilski's lawyer].

“It was based on horses, for Pete’s sake!” said Scalia.  “I would really have thought somebody would have patented that.”
(Joe Mullins Reports in American Lawyer)

It’s predictable, but still interesting to see who lines up on each side, or who actively doesn’t choose a side in the amicus briefs.

For a longer treatment on the economics of innovation, check out this book.

Twenty-five years ago, Governor Jim Hunt initiated the annual Emerging Issues Forum focusing on the topic of innovation. This February, the Forum will come full circle as his think-and-do tank, the Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI), prepares for the 25th Annual Forum: Creativity, Inc.

As the IEI began to dive into the topics of innovation and creativity, they quickly found a collaborative partner right in their own backyard. The IEI called on New Kind to bring expertise in collaboration, innovation and design throughout the IEI’s public policy process and especially during the Forum itself.

As always, the Forum will be full of thought-provoking discussions, including presentations from Daniel Pink, best-selling author and expert on innovation and competition, and Bill Strickland, President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation.

However, in keeping with the spirit of innovation, this year the Forum experience will extend beyond the two days at the Raleigh Convention Center. New Kind and the IEI have developed an online community to promote a statewide exchange of ideas, and are working to establish a Forum alumni network so the conversations begun in Raleigh can continue long after.

New Kind is honored and invigorated by its partnership with the Institute. Together, we will take our discussions and research into action, finding ways to nurture creativity in North Carolina.

In the software development industry the results are in and open source is the winner. As Matt Asay predicts in a recent blog, future dialogues about open source will be less about evangelism and there will be more focus on putting open source into practice.

Which forces us to look, fundamentally, at exactly what we’re putting into practice? Open source software? Or open source itself? What do we mean when we say open source?

At New Kind, we believe that open source is— simply stated—  a beautiful and effective way to scale creative thinking and culture. What is amazing is the rapid acceptance of “open source” beyond software development. Today businesses are looking at open source as a way to create new business models, new management strategies, new marketing, innovation and community-building paradigms.

As we’ve noted before (and will, no doubt continue to note) evangelists in this broader understanding of open source include many of the world’s most influential business thinkers including Gary Hamel, Roger Martin and Tom Peters. Two weeks ago I watched Coke’s VP of Global Branding— David Butler— introduce open source as a powerful branding/design concept to AIGA’s national conference for professional designers. These speakers are not referring to open source software.

But, through the proven success of the open source software development model, in part, they have discovered the competitive power of such creative collaborative, design thinking cultures. And they are advising today’s business leaders to rapidly adopt these new kinds of models across their organizations; internally and externally.

Acceptance will be slow among executives who are just now being introduced to open source creative models. Hamel says they are locked into “archaic beliefs” that must be changed if they are to remain competitive. It took nearly 15 years for the technology acceptance; how long will this take?

The time is now. For organizations where innovation is now a strategic necessity, open source creative cultures are a powerful if frightening alternative to the habitual thinking of analytical-driven, MBA-type cultures. As Martin’s book The Responsibility Virus makes clear, fear is a powerful force that shuts down innovation. Most executives and senior managers have little clue how strongly fear influences their thinking and actions, and the effect that has on the competitive positioning of the organizations they lead.

Open source and design thinking are anecdotes. But there are countless traditional players— individuals and corporations; large and powerful— who have no interest in seeing new competitive threats to their status quo arise. Open source is revolutionary change; landowners seldom start revolutions. These players will not welcome the change open source promises. And they will not play nicely.

Such opposition will look for evidence that open source doesn’t work. To borrow Roger Martin’s language, “reliable” actions will trump more “viable” solutions. When they find ‘reliable’ evidence, they can and will be ruthless adversaries. Open source practitioners must not be naive; evangelism can become a detriment in this environment. Even the Christian Bible (a fair prophet on evangelism) warns, “Faith without works is dead.”

In that context, Matt Asay is correct. Evangelist must begin to play a secondary role to the practitioner. And if Malcolm Gladwell is right, then it takes 10,000 hours for an individual to grasp the nuance and expertise necessary to play that role. That’s a small community of practitioners.

That’s the next challenge for open source.

……………………..

additional resources:

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ghost.aspx?ID=/Strategy/Innovation/Innovative_management_A_conversation_between_Gary_Hamel_and_Lowell_Bryan_2065

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/publications.htm

This blog has been too idle too long.

I’ve been reading the book Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently written by Emory professor of neuroeconomics, Gregory Berns. Berns uses brain-scanning technologies to explain the decision-making process of human minds. As such he is a highly respected researcher and speaker on the science of innovation.

According to his publicist, his book asks these questions:
+   what makes true innovators so creative, so successful — and so rare?
+   what makes them tick?
+   how can we learn to be a little more like them?’

Here’s more from Berns’ publicist:
Gregory Berns is the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, where he is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Economics, and at the Gouzueta Business School. The field he has helped put on the map, Neuroeconomics, is, fittingly, a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology. In his work, he is breaking ground in everything from the biological roots of political conflict to predicting which teenagers are likely to make fatally bad judgments. Even better, he possesses a rare ability to translate dense technical material for a general audience. He has been profiled — and his work has been ecstatically reviewed — in The New York Times, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, as well as other leading business and science publications. In addition to Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, he is also the author of Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment.

I’m digging the book. Great research and surprising observations. It will sit proudly on my shelf next to the books of Roger Martin, Gary Hamel, and Rollo May’s classic The Courage to Create. Well written and funny. Here are a few of my favorite lines:

“This is a story of the search for the holy grail of creativity,
an almost childlike imagination and willful abandonment to dream crazy thoughts.”

“Before one can muster the strength to tear down conventional thinking,
one must first imagine the possibility that conventional thinking is wrong.”

“The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat.” You gotta love that.

“The brain takes shortcuts whenever it can.” Well, that would explain a lot, wouldn’t it.

Business leaders looking to compete by being more innovative would do well to read and follow the professor’s advice. Or they could ask an  artist or designer who’s experienced in managing creative teams.