In The Innovator’s Cookbook, Johnson compiles the best an
d most influential foundational texts and essays from field leaders including Stewart Brand, Clayton Christensen, Richard Florida, Teresa Amabile, Peter Drucker, Amar Bhide, and many more.
The key to winning the future is encouraging America innovation
That’s President Obama from this year’s State of the Union address. He’s right of course. In fact, the importance of innovation may be the one thing that both parties actually agree on right now.
But of course innovation is unjust key to America’s future. It’s key to the future of the planet and it’s not just about inventing new iPad’s, starting up new Facebook’s, it’s about innovation in the sciences and healthcare and education and the way we build our cities in our transportation systems.
Innovative Environments
And the good news is that thanks to an explosion of an important research over the past two decades we now know a great deal about the rules and patterns and strategies that lead to innovative environments.We understand why some companies or industries are brilliant at coming up with breakthrough products or services, why others get stuck in their old routines and one of those key strategies is the importance of getting a little lost
Trying to disorient yourself
The great software innovator Ray Ozzie talks about deliberately trying to disorient yourself, put yourself in a new situation, a new cit,y a new field, and allow yourself to explore little, lose your bearings.
There are times when you want to be an expert and have total focus on a problem you’ve worked on for years but there are also times when you need to stumble across new problems and to do that you have to get out if your normal environment.
An example
Pick someone like Brian Eno who among as many interests produces albums for massively successful bands like The Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay. These are artists that don’t necessarily need to innovate on their music. They could keep playing the same songs for the rest of their lives and sell out stadiums every night.
So one of the strategies you know has to disorient them in the studio. The city has the band switch instruments, so the drummer plays guitar, the keyboard plays bass and so on. On the one hand it makes for less polished, less sophisticated music but new things happen, as he now says getting largest the space of possibility.
[bluebox]If we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder, we also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.[/bluebox]
