Cult of Innovation

Not necessarily.

Our economic downturn has forced a lot of companies to reassess the types of incentives they use to motivate their workers. This seemingly bleak financial environment has proven to be a era of valuable lessons.

In a time when companies are struggling to motivate and retain top performers, an insightful article from McKinsey Quarterly cites studies that illustrate how praise from immediate managers, attention from leadership, and a chance to lead projects or task forces can be more motivating than many high-rated financial incentives.

It seems obvious that no matter what the economic environment, people need to feel recognized and valued, but companies sometimes overlook nonfinancial forms of engagement and retention, especially when they are struggling with other pressures.

As we look to the coming year amid rumors that some sectors are beginning to pick up, we hope that business leaders will remember these lessons and use all forms of incentive to motivate and retain employees, which should enrich both our economy and the dignity of all those in the workforce.

Here’s to 2010!

The New York Time’s writer’s list includes Droid docks, Bing’s pop-up previews, MiFi, and Arc90’s very own Readability as the very best tech idea of 2009.

Taking their cue from the open-source software movement, many major corporations are creating forums to promote environmentally-friendly innovation and sharing that information with others.

Not entirely idealistic, these corporations, which include IBM, Dupont, Nike and others, hope that by collaborating with others they can maximize the social benefit of their initiatives without sacrificing their competitive advantage.  Read more from the article in the NY Times.

In an article from this month’s Wired, Jonah Lehrer examines how smart researchers can turn failures into successes. He describes the findings of researcher Kevin Dunbar, who studied the way that scientists do research, the “messiness of real experiments,” and the neuroscience behind our brain’s ability to process dissonant information.

Dunbar discovered that about fifty percent of the scientists’ results were unexpected and, to many of them, disappointing.  They would consider unexpected results as failure.  But shouldn’t an experiment help us to discover unknown information, not just confirm what we already know?

Per Lehrer, “Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them:”

1. Check Your Assumptions

Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

2. Seek Out the Ignorant

Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

3. Encourage Diversity

If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

4. Beware of Failure-Blindness

It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

To read about fortunate mistakes made by six highly successful people, including Bill Clinton and Terry Gilliam, you can read My Greatest Mistake: Learn From Six Luminaries, also from Wired.

Michael Margolis, author of Believe Me: Why Your Brand, Vision, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story, shares his views on the importance of making your product or idea relevant to the people you’re pitching it to in this interview with Michelle James from the Innovation Tools blog.

“Anytime you’re introducing something new or different, you have to paint a picture that others can actually relate to. Otherwise, your idea is just plain dead on arrival.”

–Michael Margolis via Innovation Tools

Last night I was trying to coordinate plans with a friend visiting from Turkey.  After a number of text messages back and forth, he stopped responding to mine and I got frustrated, felt stood up, and began to make other plans.   Right before I was about to leave my apartment to meet someone else, something astonishing happened.  He called me.  As it turns out, he’d been responding to my text messages the entire time but I’d not been getting them.  Something to do with the international network I assume.  But when he called I felt really stupid because it never occurred to me to actually call him.  I’m so used to only communicating via text messaging that I’d pretty much forgotten that my device also acts as a telephone.

Apparently I’m not the only one.  According to an article from the Huffington Post, “Text messaging, BlackBerry messaging, instant messaging, Tweeting, Google Wave-ing, and emailing have taken over communication. The popularity of text messaging is gradually edging out calling.”

The article lists eleven other things, including fax machines and dial-up internet, that have gone the way of the dodo over the past decade.

What things are you happy to see go?  What do you think you might feel a bit nostalgic about and miss?

Recently, the 42nd President of the United States positioned himself to be one of the world’s largest influences on innovation.

At this year’s meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the four “action areas” was called “Harnessing Innovation for Development,” an initiative that calls for organizations to collaborate and develop strategies that solve social and environmental problems with technology, products, and businesses.

Read more about “Harnessing Innovation” on the CGI website.

Detroit has been in the news as of late, profiled in numerous articles and series in magazines and news sources such as Wired, Time Magazine and CNN, the Atlantic, the New Republic, so much so that someone I met randomly at the laundromat, a boy raised on chicken farm in upstate New York , was well-versed in how the Motor City has come to represent a microcosm of the ‘American Situation.’

Perhaps one of the worst victims of our economic downturn, this segregated, crime-ridden city can no longer depend on the failing auto industry, and now many are suggesting that the Detroit-knows-best model for auto making has broken down and that a solution to this country’s economic crises dwells in removing the auto industry from the region altogether and letting new, innovative startups take the wheel.

According to the Wired article Beyond Detroit: On the Road to Recovery, Let the Little Guys Drive by Charles C. Mann,  US automakers’ share of domestic market plummeted nearly 30 percentage points since early 80s.  Some analysts believe no one of the major US carmakers will exist a decade from now.

In order to survive, Mann says, we will have to engage in what Clayton Christensen called disruptive innovation.  Instead of  relegating the industry to a poorly performing regional monopoly, we need to  harness our nationwide entrepreneurial spirit to rise to the next level of breakthrough. His article and a recent article from Fortune Small Business describe how some new insurgent automakers are reinventing the industry by taking a page or two from  the computer industry of nearly thirty years ago.  By using modularity—shifting from a closed, proprietary model, to open, collaborative one–the industry is beginning to use the very best ideas and technologies from wherever they originate to revolutionize the industry.

This is very exciting news.  We have action plans in place to make inroads into automotive innovation and economic redevelopment for the nation as a whole. Yet I cannot help but wonder what will happen when there is nothing left for Detroit to do. If only some of these great entrepreneurial minds could be persuaded to focus some of their energies on creating solutions for what can no longer be the Motor City…

We here at the Cult of Innovation and Arc90 hope those of you who’ve been good get some cool new gadgets to show off and the rest of you get some quality time to share with those you love.

We’d be glad to hear from you if you’ve got anything to share.

See you next week!

Footwear designers Above+Below London really know how to recycle. They make cool, Chuck Taylor-style sneakers that incorporate vintage fabric from London Underground and bus seats, recycled tire rubber, and re-purposed wallet leather.

They ain’t cheap, but hey–they are built on sound ethical and environmental principles and allow you to wear a relic of a rather funky era in textile design.