Is there a large element of luck in radical innovation or is it directed by highly tuned intuition!
Is it the nature of radical innovations to be so far ahead of the market that market research can contribute nothing?
Can you think of an example from your experience that succeeded?
Can you think of another that failed?
With the benefit of hindsight could the success / failure be discerned at the time?
Think of examples of innovative practice in your workplace and decide where they might fit on Pearson's matrix.
Which type of innovation seems most vital to your organisation?
NOT exploratory like a pharmaceutical company doing R&S, whether big or baby bio.
PROBABLY development engineering in which, like Microsoft bringing out a new operating system, a new module takes years to realise.
NOT finding new ways to use old stuff, like for the most part 3m. Then again, reversioning content for the web, especially for social media is exactly what is going on. Like at the free accountancy course on Facebook.
REFERENCE
Pearson. P48 Book 3 reference pearson a w 1991:22 managing innovation: an uncertainty reduction process.inHenry,J and Wakker, D. (eds) 1991b
Think back to new products or services you have experienced.
What was the stimulus for their creation.
Intermitten wipers. A better and safer driving experience in light rain.
Stoppers on skis. I can remind having a strap around the ankle, which would snap or come lose. You'd fall over and the ski would vanish. Safer for people who used to be hit by skis ... though you still lose a ski a deep snow.
Contact lenses. Vanity. No more glasses to fog up. Sport (especially swimming). A market.
Amazon. Thought I was saving money by not shopping on the High Street at Christmas only to spend far too much online. The new way of doing things.
PayPal. Convenience of online payments. A need.
iPad. Online 24/7 Tried tablets before and failed, this works.
Kindle. Using 'The Swim Drills Book' and showing young swimmers images on the Kindle by the side of the pool. Reading The Isles by Norman Davies and able to carry it about. I'd like an A4 size version.
Sony Alpha digital camera body. It takes Minolta lenses I bought 25 years ago. Brilliant.
Brushes: iPad App used by David Hockney for 'painting'. It works. Brings painting and drawing up to date alongside wordprocessing.
Can you think of examples of suboptimization as a result of cost? Where concentrating on one local cost saving has ultimately resulted in a considerable cost saving elsewhere ?
I can't think of any, can you?
Though some 16 days behind with the next block (or book) I feel on familiar ground having done H807: Innovations in e-learning; indeed the more I read, the more that B822 (Book 3) and H807 (Innovations in e-learning) appear extraordinarily complementary.
As so many are currently blogging about H807 (as required) I look forward to tracking the course from their notes, as well as mine from 2010.
I often said I would have liked to have done H807 again, in this way I can.
Repeating a theme I developed in H800 too of personal development planning (PDP) I see this NOT as repetition but rather as akin to a glider rising on a thermal, so although I am going over old ground, I am doing so at a greater height.
(Maybe I am now seeing too how a Masters Degree advances on the undergraduate degree and the PhD on the Masters).
According to Michael Kirton's Adaptor-Innovator
Theory 'Innovators do things differently' while 'Adaptors do things better'. Kirton (2003)
B822 Book 2 Activity 1.1
Can you think of examples from your experience to illustrate each of the following cells?
Radical innovation :
Product (including services): iPod, Dyson (as presented to the public), QWERTY keyboard, Sony Walkman, Xylaphone, distance learning utilising TV and Radio (the OU), lynk digital phoning through the computer vs analogue phones.
Process: women doing men's work during the First World War, a country switching from driving on the left to the right (Sweden?),
Incremental improvement
Product (including services): Dyson (as developed), tyres, road surfaces, car phones to mobile phones, less sugar and salt in processed foods, the M25, eBooks, Virtual Learning Environments.
Process: Kaizan, Women in the Army, Navy and Airforce, Going Green, the rise of facism (retrospectively incremental demise), sorting recyclables and landfill,
31 entries here containing QWERTY fail to find this, which is my blogged late grandfather's memoir:
'One day J.G. had my father carry this ‘Blick’ up from the car; it was a German typewriter. J.G. tried to show me how to use this Blickenfurentstater. It was a portable affair with a wooden case. The top row of letters began ZXKGB so it came in before QWEERTY when they had to slow the action down on account of the metal keys getting jammed if you typed too fast. I did all the typing after that, up until the First War. We started out by doing the letters with carbon copies. During the war they got girls in for the first time doing that job'.
Wherein I'd say lie two innovations as responses to the problem of keys jamming and of, ironically, lack of manpower.
It's invaluable to be doing some e-training as compared to e-learning.
The Olympics lend themselves to actions and activities; learning goes on in your head whilst training involves your body as well as your mind.
It worked.
I know stuff about the Olympics and Paralympics that I did not know before. I have got my head around the role of Gamesmakers and have bought into the positive, inclusive, inspirational approach.
A workbook, a CD and links to a website is standard training fair. Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them, then tell them what you told them would sum it up.
But why change a format that works?
Seb Coe introduces then a series of vignettes and activities take you through loads of stuff, from background to specifics, using video here, click and view there as well as deeper engagement with a few Q&As too or typing up some ideas. It took me 90 minutes.
Already I have some of this knowledge effortlessly embedded.
Could you teach a degree or postgraduate degree in this way? Why do I imagine that learning design should be any more complicated?
Good execution, simple design, not too flash, or cheesy.
Done for the right price with a practical feel to it. In the past my involvement in such things was to go out and shoot the video, often with green screens and actors, helicopters and composed music, 3d graphics and interenational travel.
I've done an inadequate sweep of the 600+ entries here in order to select 7 entries and have it roughly down to these 27: If I do another sweep I'd find another 27 and be none the wiser. I have another blog with 16000+ entries and some 16 blogs. What interests me is what iWriter next.
I work in an Orchard Emotional intelligence means more ...
Is education a problem or a business opportunity?
Grayson Perry and Rose Tremain on creativity
Fingerspitzengefuegel How where and when do you learn?
152 blogs I try to keep an eye on
E-learning is just like Chicken Masala
Life according to Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Samuel Pepys
100 novels personally recommended
12 Metaphors visualised to aid with the brilliance of blogging
Prensky and the concept of the Digital Native deserves to be lampooned
The Contents of my brain : a screenplay
We can't help to think in metaphors it's what makes us human
Maketh up a quote at ye beginning of thy book
Personal development planning as a thermal
What makes an e-learning forum tick?
Social Media is knowledge sharing
Making sense of the complexities of e-learning
Social Learn (Like Open Learn but networked)
Twelve books that changed the world
Some thoughts on writing by Norman Mailer
Visualisation of the nurturing nature of education according to Vygotsky
Woe betide the Geordie linguist
Does mobile learning change everything?
The Digital Scholar. Martin Weller
The pain of writing and how the pain feeds the writing too
Digital Housekeeping and the Digital Brain
My heads like a hedgehog with its paws on a Van den Graff generator
Where's education in technical terms compared to the car?
My preference, having created an @random button for my original blog started in 1999 (and the first to do so) is to do exactly that: hit the 'enter@random' button 7 times and see where it takes me.
Noam Chomsky on the Purpose of Education
Average page views by month. Why not by week? Why not the daily figure. And how does viewing change during the day? (It's fairly obvious to get a fraction overnight compared to late afternoon and evenings when OU folk are online). As my tutor says repeatedly when it comes to marking a TMA he does not wanting to be asking himself 'so what?'
In WordPress you have a myriad of ways of understanding what is being read, how often and by whom. You know where people have come from, the search terms used and even what takes them away from your pages. And people leave comments, or subscribe or like.
Here you get a current no. of page views. Nothing else. No indication of which pages are being read.
This makes fascinating viewing.
The rhythm in a Tutor Group session on the MAODE. I doubt other courses get a fraction of this kind of activity. I also know tutor groups in H800 that are moribund by comparison, while others still get double the activity. It's down to the tutor, as well as the mix and ambition of the participants. It helps that many are 'digital residents' too, folk like me who are online for several hours a day in any case.
This is what I became part of today picking up my Gamesmaker training pack and attending one of a series of morning or afternoon Jamborees at Wembley Arena.
Imagine getting this brief?
Imagine writing a course knowing that in one go, with one event in mind, 200,000 will read and digest. We've come awat with some key guiding points wrapped up in a mnenomic delivered by Eddie Izzard.
And on the Jubilee Line from Willesden, to Kilburn, to Finchley Road, to St John's Wood, even down to Green Park memories came back of, in turn: 1985, 1987, 1982, 1992-1996 and 1984. Undergraduate and graduate, husband and parent to be. With heartache at one end and a move to the Cotswolds with the birth of our first child at the other.
I've missed London; I shouldn't shy away from picking up my career here.
Follow up: http://www.london2012.com/videos/2012/london-2012-games-maker-training-begins.phpThe most massive blended learning experience ever.
A gamesmaker pack, the website and however many thousands (6,000) are in Wembley Arena this afternoon for the next three hours. Training as a rock concert? Sounds cheesy but as I got on the train this morning I thought to myself 'doing my bit for the Nation'. Not just e-learning, but mega-learning, enormous and extraordinary learning.
In a moment of possible abject folly a conversation that spiralled into something else earlier this week prompted me to set up a discussion group 'Dead Persons Talking' (on Linkedin) and a website www.deadpersontalking.com.
A year ago I set up a Book of Condolences website which drew over 100 responses.
What struck me, on a personal level, is my love for a long gone grandfather and the desire to continue conversations with my late father too.
What if they were still around and could join discussions?
I feel I knew both well, indeed I interviewed my late grandfather at length, transcribed this and put it in the blog www.getjackback.wordpress.com
Let's see.
The idea is to open the blog www.deadpersontalking.com to many authors who may wish to come in.
On verra.
The membership of this group continues to grow at a rapid speed and we get a healthy stream of postings of discussions and news.
1. The discussions board is primarily intended to start discussions therefore please take some effort to phrase your idea, thought or observation in such a way that responses are encouraged.
2. Don’t make multiple posts of the same item.
3. Don’t blatantly promote your company, product, weblog or yourself.
4. Please do not promote other groups (unless of course they are one of ours!) or simply provide links to external reports (though of course we all have some of these to share from time to time). Rather, if there is something worthwhile to be found elsewhere, please post the premise so it can be discussed here.
5. Posts that are off-topic will be removed.
6. Multiple off topic/solicitation postings will result in removal from the group. Indeed, if any members flag a discussion three times it is automatically removed.
I champion this OU Student Blog platform thingey because it is aking to the Bulletin Boards of a decade ago. You post your stuff and others may spot it vicariously or tune in. I love the stuff I am introduced to that would never otherwise pass before my eyes. I want to sudy Art History, I can't get enough of the MAODE of coourse ... I even quite enjoy the enthusiasm some people have for poetry and maths.
As they're not offered in any detail I don't fret, but for the first time in 2 years, in fact in after about 735 days blogging on this OU platform (most days, sometimes more than once) I thought I start taking a look at what is going in.
I need to pull this apart a but further. I need to look at year on year, at course starts, particularly MAODE modules as well as seasonal and weekly shifts. Perhaps time of day.
Not that anyone needs to know 'when is the best time to blog on the OU Student platform'.
The answer is a little and often (and never miss more than 2 or 3 days in a row)
I know when my mood has swung toward the positive because I do this kind of thing. Having got a piece of writing done last night I ran off to Tesco to get the ingredients for a chocolate cake. Search 'chocolate cake' in this blog for the recipe from Nina Dunne.
Today’s Creative Problem Solving workshop went well.
Why?
I planned, but didn’t over plan. I kept it simple, doing a combination of what I know, what I’ve done or had done to me, with an intuitive inclination to two straightforward exercises that I stumbled upon in the B822 Techniques Library: ‘Advantages, Limits and Unique Qualities’ is the first exercise in the book. This sounded like my people, something they’d be familiar with. That they could do. I had it down as an opening exercise, then rejigged it to the end of the cession to assess our plan of action. Then there was Help/Hinder, I’m glad to say a ‘pure OUBS’ exercise as if was devised by Jane Henry and John Martin in 1997 for the Creative Problem-solving Guide.
It helps that
a) I am a professional (though part time) swimming coach.
b) As a director, often working with members of the public of client members of staff, I can give clear direction and put people at their ease
It matters enormously when you stand up in front of 10, 20 sometimes 60 young athletes that you know, to the minute what you want to do (and know why it has to be done). It matters to your assistant coaches too. This isn’t so different. I will be on my feet for 90 minutes (a senior squad group runs 2 hours, the junior swimmers an hour). A handwritten plan might suffice, often put into a day per page diary. This gets written up on a large whiteboard poolside. With swimmers this is very much for them to see bit by bit what is expected of them, but it also provides for the stressed-out coach with a million things on their mind with an immediate aide memoire. Swimmers perform to the second. At the top level we expect them to swim within the tinniest of tolerances, hitting during training a specific, personal time of Personal Best (PB) + a number of seconds. The expert amongst them do it.
I digress.
This was a different kind of class entirely. Adult swimmers, I could say. Not a group of unknowns though, with strangers I may have thrown them in a the deep end, but I knew with my colleagues that resting their legs in the water, a Jacuzzi perhaps or floating around in the shallow end would be enough. I was right, finger-painting, super-hero role play, or hypnosis would have been the equivalent of Mr Bean on the High Diving Board.
It would be egalitarian, whatever their position (we had directors, managers and officers). In this respect, I would have to take it carefully, advancing them into exercises and responding as they do. In practice each planned exercise came off and with care I kept people engaged in what I wanted them to do, even where I sensed they were feeling a little uncomfortable.
Laughter in the warm-up exercise helped.
WARM UP
It felt appropriate as someone they know to be a swimming coach to do a short ‘poolside’ swimming related practical. My initial thought had been ‘hot potato’ a version of what we did at Residential School and I see trotted out all the time, the throw the ball, say your name add an adjective pass it on. Exactly what I do with young swimmers as they join a squad for the first time and will soon be competing together. In this case, with one exception everyone knew each other very well. To begin to form a bond between strangers yes.
To teach sculling I get swimmers to place their hands on their face, look at the shape of their hands, then describe ‘infinity’ elbows in hands in front of them. They did a bit of this and I added floating off the bottom of the pool, making whirlpools and polishing a bald man’s head.
We did Samurai Mother-in-law, Tiger in a Tutorial. I felt a quick team go of Paper, Scissors, Stone would be a valuable intermediary step. I can see now that I have this set of steps I want them to take with me, and that I have to be the judge of how to place the ‘stones’. Here I am still looking for an easy buy in.
Team Game : Paper Scissors Stone
Two goes at this and we were ready for the next one.
Team Game : Samurai Mother-in-law, Tiger
The first of these drew laughter, the second fits of giggles. I don’t know what the scores were and didn’t want to start thinking about doing it often enough to find a winning team so swiftly moved on.
(More to follow once I have extracted the confidential or the controversial)
I can't help thinking about this one and visualising how a colleague feels: being pulled limb from limb, like one of those stretchy toys.
I am looking forward to applying the ideas to all manner of practical problems, at work, in the home and at the swimmign club. At work it will be about social media. At home it will be about gettin repairs done and an extension built. At the swimming club the messiest problem I can think of is 'flippers' how we want to use them as they are excellent to develop the long leg kick and particularly good for Butterfly, but the kids never put them away, flippers go missing and they are always left in a mess.
Interested in swimming? Interested in being a swimming teacher or coach? What about water-polo? Once again I am blogging about my poolside/teaching experiences in my swim teach / swim coach blog.
(Named thus because I also used to instruct sailing and took to wearing sailing wellies poolside. They keep you feet dry, unlike trainers and are more comfortable than flip-flops. I was nicknamed 'the welly-boot man' by the young swimmers).
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