The Innovator's Cookbook Part 7

It really puts the students in the position of thinking like designers, and having to recruit all of the knowledge that you need to have as a designer. What does it mean to frame a problem? What does it mean to iterate and propose solutions to something and test it out and get feedback on it? And how do you refine solutions, how do you test them? We actually see tremendous creativity on the part of the kids in the school. We don't yet know if the school attracts kids that have that disposition already or whether there's something really robust about the curriculum that's leading kids into these incredibly creative but also really rigorous kinds of s.p.a.ces.

SJ: What's your own innovation process in terms of your collaborators and your own thoughts?

KS: What I find is that I tend to be very interested in types of collaboration with people that know stuff that I don't know. Even when I worked on Rules of Play, I was less interested in writing a book about game design for game designers to make more games; I was more interested in writing the book for people that weren't game designers-people who could make things that were influenced by the way that games work and the way that players think. So I've always been interested in connecting to people that are in adjacent domains to me. In some ways this work with the schools was a really natural progression from just trying to understand how games work, which was a body of work that I was doing for a while, and the interest I had in the transgressive qualities and transformative qualities in play. I then started to look at teachers as a kind of counterpart citizens to game designers. When you look at the process of what game designers do, it almost mimics, step for step, what great teachers do. Great teachers constantly think about how to engage their students. They're constantly thinking, what's an interesting problem s.p.a.ce that I then need to structure, that lets those kids feel like they're owning that s.p.a.ce and are learning and doing stuff and celebrating? Once you begin to see that connection in the disciplinary profiles, it just sort of made sense to say, "Well, couldn't we design something that would put all of this together?" And because I'm a designer, I think it's important to make things in the world. There's a lot of really interesting work that I've been a part of with the Mac-Arthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative-tons of interesting theory and research, that schools have for the most part, traditionally, been really hostile to . . . There's just infrastructures in place that don't allow for this outside work to come in, in ways that make sense.

I never aspired to open a school or work in secondary education. It was more that I felt we needed a demonstration in s.p.a.ce for all of this amazing work that people were doing, all of these ideas; it needed to be something that could be co-created with kids and teachers. And so the school itself has become an innovation s.p.a.ce for a number of different people. It has been one for me, but also for all of the people that work on my staff, who are reimagining roles for game designers. And it's repositioning the kind of creativity that teachers have but in many cases haven't been allowed to express.

SJ: Do you still meet teachers outside the school who are hostile to these ideas or is there some sense in everyone that the experimentation at least is worthwhile? Or are people still like: "Games? What the h.e.l.l are you doing?"

KS: I would say that it's [the] more inst.i.tutional structures that are hostile. And I just mean that in the way that it's oil and water. There's a way that they structurally just don't come together. I would say that in general . . . [with] almost anyone that I've interacted with in an education s.p.a.ce, there is at least a possibility, a possibility for something to happen around this work. I think they're quite open to it. Now, there's still a tremendously resilient mental model around games as a waste of time, and nonrigorous, and so that is still there. But all it takes is bringing someone into the school and actually putting them through an experience of what the kids are doing, then they're like, "Oh, okay, I get it." With the mixed-reality labs, Joel Klein, while he was Chancellor . . . he came to visit the school the day after it opened. And I said: "Come into the s.p.a.ce, you need to take off your shoes, come on the mat." I started saying, "Here's this problem. What do you want to do? What's your theory about what's going on?" And he got into it. He just understood the learning model in a way that he didn't before. Which is our whole theory of learning by doing. That's been, as you know, a problem with games, this over-the-shoulder critique in journalism. Sure, games actually do look like a waste of time if you're staring at them over the shoulder of a player. If you actually play the game, you realize there's a set of things going on there in terms of what your mind's doing, as well as the social dimension.

SJ: If you're getting the chancellor to take his shoes off, that's already progress!

KS: [Laughing] He was such a good sport about it.

A Conversation with Ray Ozzie Ray Ozzie has been one of the most influential innovators in the world of software for three decades now. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979, he worked on important early applications like Visicalc and Lotus Symphony, before setting out on his own to form Isis a.s.sociates, where he created the product that eventually became Lotus Notes. Ozzie then founded Groove Networks, which developed powerful collaboration tools before the term "social software" had even been coined. After Groove was acquired by Microsoft, Ozzie eventually took over the role of chief software architect from Bill Gates, where he served until late 2010.

SJ: Let's start with your own process. If you look back over your career, and think about ideas that you had on your own or in groups, do you see different patterns or processes in the way that you work, or the kind of environments that have been particularly fruitful?

RO: It feels as though it's a very personal thing, in terms of the different people I would cla.s.sify as innovators. For me, I've got to create white s.p.a.ce in some way that maps to my lifestyle, and that has varied based on how old my kids were, what stage my businesses were in. Everybody has to find some way of introducing that s.p.a.ce where you can get out of the day-to-day-to-day stuff that we all impose upon ourselves. For me, the consistent patterns are-and I know this is weird-we have a lake house and we have a place on the ocean, so getting out and boating by myself for a few hours, especially when the weather is rough, it helps. I don't know why, but when I'm doing something that's not putting my body into normal reactive patterns-I'm sure athletics would do the same thing-where I'm trying to deal with this wave, or something about the weather, it's freeing up some other part of my mind, and I come up with a bunch of ideas. I have to have a stack of notes while I'm out there.

SJ: That sounds dangerous!

RO: It is dangerous. I'll stop, I'll write some stuff down . . . so that's one kind of randomness. I don't know how many people do it, but while sleeping, those background threads are still running. This happened last night: I wake up at 2:30 A.M., or 3 A.M., and something is rolling around, some problem that I solved or that won't go away. And I have to find some notepad and write stuff down because during the day I'm just not solving it. The other thing is, and I guess this ties in with the boat in a little way, but I do well when I put myself into a disoriented or exhausted situation. International travel is one of best times for me to think differently. When I'm not so much time-zone confused, but when I'm in Asia in particular, and I can't really get around as well, it helps get me out of that normal pattern. And again, that's been a repeatable thing over the years.

SJ: It's the power of disorientation.

RO: Exactly.

SJ: I have this thing where I'm constantly going somewhere to give a speech, for two days or three days, and I'm dropped in a city in Asia or Europe or somewhere like that. And I'll be there for three days. And I'll have one day to just get adjusted. Then I give my speech, and then I have my bonus day. And I have this routine of just walking out and roaming around for three hours more or less without a map. And then finding someplace to have dinner kind of on my own. And then I sit there at dinner by myself with my little notebook. And there's some great ideation process that happens for me at those times-from the cultural disorientation as well as the time zone.

RO: I completely agree. For me, it's similar to that. But I also am fascinated by ma.s.s transit. Tokyo is amazing for this. I like looking at people, I like staring at them and wondering what they're doing with their lives. Looking at what they're using to communicate or entertain themselves, and then go from place to place in the city that I might not have been.

I like the word disorientation because the whole thing I'm trying to escape is orientation. In fact, this is what I'm doing at this moment in my career right now. For thirteen years, from 1984 till 1997, I worked on this thing that came to be called Lotus Notes. But it started as nothing, at zero, I started a little start-up, and it went up, up, up, and then at 1997, I left IBM and returned to zero. It was just a complete separation. Because I saw this Internet thing going on and I wanted to be part of it. And I knew I couldn't do it from the orientation that I was in. Nineteen ninety-seven happened to be thirteen years ago. I just returned to zero, and I am now disoriented, trying to find a good orientation to latch onto. It's just the way I work.

SJ: How did the idea for Lotus Notes come about?

RO: The Lotus Notes story is one of those situations where I and several other people-the people who ended up being my cofounders-were exposed to a system that we couldn't shake. It became an itch that we needed to scratch. And the thing that we ultimately built, both the ethos and the name itself, came from that thing that we were exposed to. The product we ultimately built was actually a lot different. But the original experience was the common thread between us.

This was in 1974 through 1977, and there was a group of us who were exposed to this Plato system at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois. This was on the early side of computer science; we were still using punch cards in our computer-science cla.s.ses. But this Plato system was built by this creative eccentric, Don Bitzer, who believed that computers could change education. He didn't know what couldn't be done. He wanted to build graphics terminals with multimedia, audio. He invented the plasma panel, in order to have a graphics terminal. He built an audio device for it. That left an imprint in and of itself. I love being around people who just don't believe things can't be done, or don't know that they can't be done, and just build whatever the concept requires. But on the software side, we were all exposed to things that ultimately we'd get used to in the Internet. It was the emergence of online community. And there was probably a community of ten thousand people, five thousand at Urbana, Illinois, and another five thousand around the world. There were online chats, online discussions, interactive gaming, news. It was a full-fledged community. And there was this thing called Notes that did e-mail, personal notes, and discussions, group notes. And after we left, and went into the real world and got our jobs (they went to DEC, I went to Data General), that was the thread that we kept coming back to. We were like: these are interesting computers, but where are the people? And so basically we would get together weekend after weekend, month after month, year after year, and say: "We have to bring the people back into the equation."

SJ: So what, that's seven years that the memory of the system is in your head before you actually started to build it?

RO: Well, it went kind of like this: '78 was when we left and came east from Illinois. Eighty-one was when I wrote the first business plan for it and tried to begin getting funding. Eightythree I realized I couldn't get funding, so I did a deal with Mitch Kapor, and '84 was when the deal with Mitch let me spin out and start working on it in earnest.

SJ: So six, seven years. It reminds me so much of something in my own life, although I didn't do anything nearly as epic. I was in college from '86 to '90 and HyperCard came out in '87. I've never really been a programmer, but I lost a whole semester trying to build this HyperCard application basically for keeping all my notes and research. (Which eventually fed into my interest in applications like DEVONthink and the commonplace-book tradition.) But the main thing I got out of HyperCard was that it really prepared me for the Web, by working in that hypertextual environment. So I dabbled with HyperCard and then I kind of put that experience away for seven or eight years-but then in '94, when the Web started to break, I was just prepared for it. The first time I saw it, I was like: oh, I know exactly what this is going to be.

RO: That's a reoccurring theme also. You are the sum in many ways of your experiences and you get these success patterns, failure patterns, sometimes those patterns help-like what you just described. But sometimes those patterns hurt, because they constrain your outlook. Something that might not have worked before might work now, because the environment has changed. But the innovators that I know that are successful keep testing those patterns over and over and over because people around them change and the technology environment changes. And so you might look at somebody and say: "You're a one-trick pony. You keep building the same thing over and over." But it's a good thing! That means you're taking those patterns and just recasting them continuously against changes in the environment. And if you believe pa.s.sionately in a pattern, it's great. Go for it!

I'm selfishly defending this viewpoint, because I am a one-trick pony. I believe in this social stuff and I'm out there right now trying to figure out how the mobile services world changes the way that we interact with one another. How has the embrace of this second life on the Internet changed the way that people will embrace interaction, where they might have rejected it before?

SJ: You used the phrase background process before. That strikes me as being really important. In my personal experience, the people I've been around that are good at innovating are able to just keep these background threads alive so that they can bring them to the foreground when they do become relevant. They're focused on one thing, but there are like nine things in the background. You never know when one of those things is going to suddenly jump to the foreground.

RO: Exactly. And just to geek out on computer architecture for one moment, I used to actually think of them as background threads, like threads of execution, but that actually doesn't scale, because you're exposed to many, many things, and you're not going to spin up a new thread every time you've got an idea-you'd run out of capacity. So what I think is going on, and there must be a physiological basis for this, I think it's more synchronous; it's more of a standing query. You have formulated a pattern, and you're looking for this and this within a set of knowns in the pattern. You've got all of these standing queries in your brain. And so when you are exposed to new things, they are new events that are being generated that are mapped against all the standing queries. And then something fires.

SJ: That's exactly what it is. I love that. So let's think about this sort of thing in an organizational context. You've talked about the difference between "emergent" and "directed" innovation.

RO: Sure, it's very simply that emergent is bottom up, like a coral reef that grows different things that mutate. It's basically building up capabilities from the ground up. It's a very inefficient process. It requires lots of failure for some success to pop up-but what pops up in an emergent basis generally takes shapes that people don't expect. Which is really cool. It combines X, Y, and Z in a way that, if you'd actually been thinking about it, you probably wouldn't have approached it because it wouldn't have matched a pattern that you had already had in your mind. And so, within corporate environments, things that really do resemble more basic research, not applied research, not product development, do add some level in intentional serendipity. That is an a.s.set that I did see that I respected within the Microsoft environment. And IBM. It's hard to foster that, and I don't know of a sustainable model, but it's helpful. It's clearly what's happening in the start-up ecosystem right now. I mean you have base technology improvements that are happening, and you've got little tiny tests, that are happening with one, two, three, four people that get angel-funded or not. Anything that can be done, will be done. Interesting tests emerge, or opportunities, from that kind of environment.

When I say directed what I mean is this: You have either an existing, successful approach, or an existing high-value problem that you know you need to solve. You know generally how to solve it. Let's say it's: I have people who need to work together; I need people to work together who are far apart; I have people that need to work together that use doc.u.ments. You start introducing a few constraints, or a few known models, and try to innovate around the edges, using those core constraints. Or it's something like: We need to go to the moon. We can break that down into ten pieces, each of those submissions, and go ahead and innovate around that constraint. And you can get some amazing stuff. And both of them are tremendously important, but they're both better when combined, I think. I think the directed approach accelerates fles.h.i.+ng out which of the emergent ones are useful, and can be brought forth very quickly. And without the emergent, you keep thinking about things the same way, over and over and over.

SJ: That's one of the questions that I got that kind of surprised me when I was out promoting Good Ideas. In fact I still get it when I'm talking about it. Which is, people say, all this stuff is really helpful and interesting for generating ideas and stumbling across new things, but how do you tell when an idea is a good one. And I'm always a little stumped.

RO: I'm just so excited, so enamored with how things have evolved, because of the Internet and because of open source and because of services that now let us get out there with ideas, and test them in public with real people. Historically, a lot of our industries, especially any IP-based industry, grew up with heavy constraints on the distribution chain-broadcast television, print books, shrink-wrapped software, music on vinyl discs. The distribution mechanism defined a lot going all the way back to the creation of the work itself. And again, sometimes that helped because constraints having two sides of an LP with end songs, say-sometimes can actually help shape the medium. Or help shape the content. But it also introduced that ma.s.sive constraint. So in software, the whole notion of product planning, and research, and all this stuff, was all based on the fact that you knew you could only get something out there once every two or three years, because of the nature of the distribution channels. So you'd better do the best job you can at incorporating what you know from the outside. That's just so different now. It's tremendous.

SJ: I agree, but one of the questions I've always had is how portable are these kinds of innovations and new models of collaboration outside the world of software?

RO: I actually believe that most IP-based product development falls into the same general category of software. If you're building a drug compound, for instance, the same laws should apply. The basic innovation here tends to be that more complex things can be developed by more people who are not in the same place at the same time, which is really neat. For good, bad, and ugly, thanks to the Internet, we're exposed to all these different ways that other people think, and we have lots of capacity to that can be brought together to solve problems-across all industries. So that's a fundamentally transformative thing.

SJ: So it's a great time to be back at zero and trying to get disoriented . . .

RO: Oh, it is. It sure is.

Click here for more books by this author.

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS.

"The Discipline of Innovation" by Peter F. Drucker. Reprinted with permission. Harvard Business Review, August 2002. Copyright 2002 by Harvard Business Publis.h.i.+ng. All rights reserved.

"'n.o.body Cares What You Do in There': The Low Road," from How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. Copyright 1994 by Stewart Brand. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

"How to Kill Creativity" by Teresa M. Amabile. Reprinted with permission. Harvard Business Review, September 1998. Copyright 1998 by Harvard Business Publis.h.i.+ng. All rights reserved.

"The Rise of the Creative Cla.s.s" by Richard Florida. Reprinted with permission from The Was.h.i.+ngton Monthly. Copyright Was.h.i.+ngton Monthly Publis.h.i.+ng, LLC, 1200 18th Street NW, Suite 330, Was.h.i.+ngton, DC 20036. (202) 966-9010, www.was.h.i.+ngtonmonthly.com "The Rules of Innovation" by Clayton M. Christensen. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2011 Technology Review by MIT 062002.

"Customers as Innovators: A New Way to Create Value" by Stefan Thomke and Eric Von Hippel. Reprintd with permission. Harvard Business Review, April 2002. Copyright 2002 by Harvard Business Publis.h.i.+ng. All rights reserved.

"Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia" by John Seely Brown and John Hagel III. This article was originally published in McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com. Copyright 2005 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

"The Process of Social Innovation by Geoff Mulgan. Reprinted by permission of Geoff Mulgan.

"Venturesome Consumption" from The Venturesome Economy by Amar Bhide. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS.

A writer, management consultant, and social ecologist, Peter Drucker was one of the most influential figures in the field of management theory and practice. Called the "man who invented management" by BusinessWeek , Drucker developed one of the country's first executive MBA programs at Claremont Graduate University, where he taught until 2002. He was the author of many books, including The Daily Drucker and The Effective Executive. Drucker received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2002 and pa.s.sed away at age ninety-five in 2005.

Stewart Brand is cofounder and president of the Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network. He also founded and edited the Whole Earth Catalog and has written several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, where she also serves as Director of Research. Currently teaching Leaders.h.i.+p and Organizational Behavior at HBS, Amabile was the host and instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a twenty-six-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She is the author of Creativity in Context and The Progress Principle.

American urban studies theorist Richard Florida is a professor and the head of the Martin Prosperity Inst.i.tute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Named one of Esquire's Best and Brightest alongside venerable figures like Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Sachs, Florida heads the private consulting firm Creative Cla.s.s Group and is senior editor at the Atlantic. He was appointed to Business Innovation Factory's Research Advisory Council and was recently named European Amba.s.sador for Creativity and Innovation. He is the bestselling author of The Great Reset, The Rise of the Creative Cla.s.s, Who's Your City, and many other books.

Clayton Christensen is the leading authority on the theory of disruptive innovation, an innovation that helps create a new market and value network while disrupting the existing network. A four-time recipient of the McKinsey Award by the Harvard Business Review, Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He cofounded the management consultancy Innosight and investment firm Rose Parks Advisors in 2007, followed by nonprofit think tank Innosight Inst.i.tute in 2008. He is the author of Disrupting Cla.s.s, The Innovator's Prescription, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.

Eric Von Hippel is a professor of technological innovation in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor in MIT's Engineering Systems Division. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is the author of Democratizing Innovation and The Sources of Innovation.

Stefan Thomke, an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has worked with U.S., European, and Asian firms on product, process, and technology development, organizational design and change, and strategy. He is chair of the Executive Education Program Leading Product Innovation, which helps business leaders in revamping their product development processes for greater compet.i.tive advantage, and is faculty chair of HBS executive education in India. Professor Thomke is also on the core faculty of the Advanced Management Program where he teaches the course Leading Innovation. He is the author of the books Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation and Managing Product and Service Development.

John Seely Brown is the former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and was the chief scientist at Xerox. He is the independent cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. He is coauthor of the bestselling book The Social Life of Information. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

John Hagel III is the cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is the author of a series of bestselling business books, including Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box and The Only Sustainable Edge. An alumnus of McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, he lives in Burlingame, California.

Geoff Mulgan recently became the CEO of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts after acting as chief executive of the Young Foundation, a center for social innovation in the UK. A visiting professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne, Mulgan was the director of Policy and director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit under British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He is an adviser to many governments around the world and the author of several books including Connexity, Good and Bad Power, and The Art of Public Strategy.

With more than twenty years of research behind him, Amar Bhide is a leading authority on innovation and entrepreneurs.h.i.+p. The Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Bhide is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He previously served as Laurence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University and as a faculty member of Harvard Business School and University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. He is the author of A Call for Judgment, The Venturesome Economy, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses and Of Politics and Economic Reality.

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You, and Mind Wide Open, as well as Emergence and Interface Culture. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites-most recently, outside.in-and writes for Time, Wired, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.

Also by Steven Johnson.

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.

Where Good Ideas Come From.

a.

Roughly 25,000 square meters, if you use the rule of thumb: 10 square feet almost equals 1 square meter (0.929 square meters, to be exact).

b.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961, 1993), p. 245 c.

The Urban Land Inst.i.tute reported: "With ever-increasing household mobility, a growing national preoccupation with possessions, and escalating demand for low-rent storage s.p.a.ces (for records, data, and inventory) from businesses and professional offices operating out of relatively high-rent s.p.a.ce, demand for self-storage is now equivalent to 2 to 3 square feet per person." "Self-Storage Adaptations," Urban Land (Oct. 1991), p.28. In the early 1990s, self-storage facilities were beginning to include climate control, security, multistory buildings, and "acceptable" design on the exterior. It was a $2 billion-a-year industry, complete with its own trade magazine, Inside Self-Storage.

d.

I don't want to exaggerate this effect, however-many, possibly most, of the new critical applications for crucial general-purpose technologies such as steam engines and electric dynamos were not initiated by users (except in some all-inclusive sense of the term).

e.

Bresnahan and Greenstein distinguish between "invention" by producers and "co-invention" by users. Their distinction corresponds to higher and lower levels of know-how in my framework. In principle, I ought to defer to Bresnahan and Greenstein's prior terminology, especially since virtually everything in their paper is congruent with my thesis. Their language makes me uncomfortable, however, as I have said (and as Bresnahan and Greeinstein note), innovations such as client/ server technology are also "co-invented" by producers and users.

end.