This web site conveys the hypothesis that it's feasible to establish innovation's "organizing principles" as a public good and that doing so would provide the value of a high-leverage resource for learning about innovation and its methods, potentially for access among all students in years K-16.
As with any subject, such a framework would provide the value of facilitating understanding and engagement, including fostering learning trajectories by virtue of grounding and connecting students' learning experiences across time and place. However, for the subject of innovation -- representing a function that is crucial to the 21st century, including modifying virtually every role in the workplace throughout every economic sector and every industry -- the potential value of learning leverage from a framework of principles seems even more substantial:
- First, themes from expert resources indicate that innovation's organizing principles would shine light on its combination of forces, beginning with its unique force of catalyzing change by way of value. Such a framework would reveal that youth can experience the agency of harnessing innovation's forces in settings as small as a school or classroom (e.g., offering the value of ease of access to composting in the school cafeteria). It would reveal that youth can practice methods associated with the forces.
- Second, given that innovation's prime force may be practitioners' connection to purpose, a framework that shines light on this particular force would signal opportunity to incorporate early and continuing exploration of purpose within instruction. In fact, intentional attention to students' developing connection to purpose -- larger than the self but personally compelling -- may represent a particularly important element of innovation instruction.
This page --
This page features a three-part overview of the knowledge that signals the feasibility and associated opportunity for new value from establishing a framework of innovation's organizing principles:
- Part One -- Feasibility of Principles. In this section, themes from expert resources about innovation's essential purpose, forces, and methods are considered as a launching point for a framework. In particular, the themes are considered in relation to the equivalent for science and invention, highlighting both shared and distinguishing characteristics. This section concludes with a prototype of innovation's organizing principles, drawing on the themes and elaborated at a separate page of this site.
- Part Two -- Value of Learning Leverage. Drawing on expert resources from the fields of education, psychology, and more, this section posits three accumulating levels of learning leverage associated with the potential public good of innovation's organizing principles:
- the universal benefit associated with the framework of a subject's most fundamental structures, or principles
- added benefit from the mutually-reinforcing leverage points associated with innovation's particular organizing principles: intelligibility, access to engagement, and embedded personalized guidance
- the ultimate leverage of an "innovation learning system" for all students in grades K-16, akin to what exists now for science and its methods.
- Part Three -- Application Sketches. This section provides an overview of sample learning application sketches, for both K-12 and higher education. Each sketch is designed to benefit from the mutually-reinforcing leverage points that would be enabled by an established, high-quality framework of innovation's organizing principles.
This site --
In addition to the overview sections at this page, each of the above topics is elaborated at a separate page of this web site. These pages, accessible via links just below or at the site's main menu, incorporate associated sources:
- Prototype Principles
- Feasibility -- Narrative Account of Themes Spanning Sources
- Value -- Learning Leverage
- Applications -- Sample Sketches
Additionally, a Bibliography provides quick reference to the site's overall sources.
To demonstrate feasibility, a prototype of innovation's organizing principles is based on themes from expert resources regarding innovation's essential purpose and forces:
- The themes are not new; for example, they're in keeping with the work of Jean Baptiste Say and Joseph Schumpeter, from prior centuries. The volume of present-day resources makes the themes more visible.
- The themes are considered vis-a-vis the equivalent for science and invention, which share with innovation the essential creative structure of hypotheses.
By speaking to innovation's essential purpose and forces, the prototype principles aim to capture what is constant, or unifying, across innovation's unusually varied expression and also explanatory.
Although the prototype may fall well short of these criteria -- in substance and/or articulation -- the approximation aims to demonstrate fundamental feasibility of high-quality principles and the type of value that the principles might offer as a public good.
A summary of the prototype principles follows the launching point detailed below of innovation's essential purpose and characteristics vis-a-vis the same for science and invention.
Launching Point --
Although innovation's direct purpose, or function, is distinct from the respective purposes of science and invention, all three methodologies share the essential creative structure of hypotheses:
- For each of these three methodologies, the effect of change from a status quo is rooted in new connections of existing knowledge -- that is, in hypotheses.
- The imagination that produces these new connections of existing knowledge represents “the ability to see possible new connections before one is able prove them in any way.” [3-6]
Each methodology's direct purpose determines the fundamental nature of its hypotheses and additional fundamental distinctions. [4]These distinctions are summarized in the table just below, with innovation's characteristics drawn from the themes associated with expert resources:
Prototype: Innovation's Organizing Principles
Following from the launching point above of innovation's essential purpose and characteristics vis-a-vis the same for science and invention, a summary of this site's prototype set of innovation's organizing principles follows below. The prototype principles are elaborated in two ways at separate pages of this site:
- in association with a narrative account of themes drawn from expert resources at the site's Feasibility page, which led to the above table as a launching point for prototype principles.
- described one at a time, incorporating select sources, at the site's Principles page
Prototype of Innovation's Organizing Principles:
For the purpose of catalyzing the change of more yield from the same resources (e.g., yield in terms of "profit, planet, and/or people"):
- Innovation's change catalyst is compelling new "value," beginning with the value of compelling purpose to innovation practitioners
- Innovation's catalyst of value is forcefully positive
- Innovation's essential creative structure is hypotheses
- Innovation's hypotheses amplify a force of integration
"The curriculum of a subject should be determined by the most fundamental understanding of the underlying principles that give structure to the subject."[28]
-- Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education
The feasibility of principles matters because of the hypothesized value associated with the potential public good of a developed, high-quality set of innovation's organizing principles.
Based on connecting existing knowledge about innovation with separate knowledge about teaching and learning, psychology, and more, the overall value that is hypothesized -- broad access to a resource for high-leverage learning about innovation and its methods -- can be viewed as three accumulating levels of learning leverage:
Level 1: Leverage from Principles AloneWhen education psychologist and cognitive learning theorist, Jerome Bruner, established the conceptualization of "structures of the discipline" he argued that "the curriculum of a subject should be determined by the most fundamental understanding of the underlying principles that give structure to the subject."
Overall, structures would facilitate students' access to, and engagement with, a subject. Using Algebra as an example, Bruner held that understanding Algebra's underlying principles, or structures, allows students to recognize myriad problems as but "variations on a small set of themes."[29] For innovation, a framework of structures (or principles) would allow students to recognize its wide-ranging examples as "variations on a small set of themes." It might also facilitate recognizing new opportunities.
Bruner held too that a framework of structures of a discipline "permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully." [42] In the case of innovation's purpose, forces, and methods -- in effect, a modifier of the 21st century's overall workplace -- there are indeed many things to which innovation relates. For example, a framework of innovation's structures or principles would:
- situate a treasure trove of innovation models and tools
- contextualize schooling's overall academic work
- reveal innovation's inclusiveness of varying types and levels of knowledge, varying human strengths, and more
- etc.
Overall, Bruner held that a framework of structures provides support for taking in "an enormous amount of information," akin to the cognitive science notion of "chunking."[30]
In a similar vein, Peter Drucker argued that it's a framework of "organizing principles" that permits "conversion of a skilled craft to a methodology or discipline" -- by making it "broadly teachable" -- as occurred in the past with engineering, the physician's differential diagnosis, and more (including the scientific method).[31] A framework of structures, or principles, provides not only for any individual learner's efficient access to the unifying concepts of innovation's driving purpose, forces, and methods, it allows too for the beneficial connection of shared understanding across learners.
Drucker made this argument within the context of describing the crucial need to convert innovation and entrepreneurship's skilled craft to methodology: He held into the early 21st century, up to his death, that a "post capitalist" society in which "knowledge is the only meaningful resource" means that: "Every organization … will have to learn how to innovate – and to learn that innovation can and should be organized as a systematic process." "What we need is an entrepreneurial society." [32]
Level 2: Leverage Points Associated with Innovation's Particular PrinciplesIn addition to the fundamental value of a framework, the particular content of innovation's organizing principles, at least according to the prototype principles, presents the additional value of the three complementary and mutually-reinforcing learning leverage points of Intelligibility, Engagement, and Embedded Personalized Guidance:
- Intelligibility --
By speaking to innovation's driving constants, principles provide a lens for seeing innovation throughout the world and recognizing its essential purpose, forces, and methods as a particular category of creativity -- one that "integrates and applies" knowledge, to produce new value that catalyzes societal benefits. The lens allows not only for seeing every innovation example as but a variation of the driving constants, this perspective allows for seeing how much and in what ways innovation does vary, including highlighting primary types of variation (e.g., the targeted societal-level change/s, practitioners' medium of expression, pathways to hypotheses, types of knowledge, etc.). The lens also supports seeing brand new opportunities for the methodology's effects, and it facilitates understanding the way that innovation relates to other methodologies, the array of academic fields, etc..
Additionally, the prototype principles highlight potential for beginning instruction early (e.g., no later than middle school), akin to beginning early for methods of science: Whereas the label "innovation" is associated with large scale transformation, its essential purpose and forces (and associated methods) pertain to "all but that which might be called existential."[3] The methods pertain to change at any scale, including scale as small as a classroom and including potential for catalyzing meaningful change even at a young age.
- Engagement --
By highlighting innovation's essential creative structure of hypotheses, the principles support a familiar on-ramp for engagement. Hands-on practice can combine the hypothesis structure with other benefits of the organizing principles framework, such as the authenticity of small scale (e.g., community benefits as "societal" benefits), plus existing pedagogical structures (e.g., project-based learning) and innovation models and tools (e.g., design thinking, customer development, and many more). Feedback from active engagement, including learners' direct experiences of agency, collaboration, and more, is integral to gradually deepening understanding of innovation's core concepts.
In general, the principles' provision for grounding shines light on the potential for scaffolding engagement. For example, the forces do not require advanced knowledge; they only require pertinent knowledge. (For the domain of a school, this might include knowledge of the operations of recess, the cafeteria, recyling practices, bullying, etc., combined with knowledge about the school community.) Also, scaffolded engagement might begin with activities such as: the "mental engagement" of considering examples, sample practices (e.g., observation log), generating and testing innovation hypotheses, and generally progressing one step at a time. As with science, students could return repeatedly to a framework of innovation's unifying concepts and driving forces and progress in hands-on practice with methods as they incorporate parallel growth in overall knowledge, skills, and interests.
- Embedded Personalized Guidance --
By highlighting the methodology's essential "force" of value to practitioners (the value of personally-compelling purpose), the principles reveal that innovation instruction both calls for and provides structure for students' exploration of a personal sense of direction. For example, as Intelligibility supports taking in innovation's overall purpose and variation, and Engagement supports experience-based learning, the combination facilitates informed consciousness and discovery regarding questions such as: What types of change in the world do I think matter most? What types of value? How can I help create it? Hands-on innovation practice can help clarify purpose leanings that fit within innovation's direct purpose and methods and/or leanings that are complementary. Either way, learners have the benefit of understanding the overarching context established by the 21st century's need for innovation, including context for their schooling experiences.
In light of the rare quality of value that is represented by support for exploring/discovering a personal sense of direction, or purpose, this site's page on Learning Leverage includes a section that elaborates this element of value, including sources.
The complementary and mutually reinforcing nature of these three learning leverage points provides a fundamental resource for learner development. For example: Intelligibility supports personalized guidance, which supports engagement, which supports deepening intelligibility, personalized connection, and engagement.With time and intentional learning structures, the combination of these learning leverage points can train the eye, develop discerning imagination associated with pertinent knowledge, cultivate innovation consciousness and its day-to-day impetus, cultivate personal purpose and signature strengths, and more.
Overall, a student is learning innovation's version of creativity, which includes understanding the present-day need for its expression:
- Within the 21st century, intelligibility of innovation's creative expression and its function of allowing for a sustainable world could be considered a type of literacy that is relevant to all.
- Beyond intelligibility, developing personal innovation capability calls not only for developing personal connection to types of purpose, it also calls for developing pertinent knowledge and skills, as discussed in sections below. The force of purpose can naturally motivate development of the knowledge and skills, much of which fits directly within the U.S. Common Core State Standards for grades K-12.
Level 3: Leverage from an Innovation Learning System
By allowing for broad access to innovation instruction that is grounded and connected across time and place, organizing principles provide for an innovation learning system, similar to the existing system for science. John W. Gardner provided an early voice for such a system. In a book about "the individual and the innovative society," Gardner framed innovation's instructional challenge in a way that remains pertinent over fifty years later:
"The classic question of [societal renewal] has been: How can we cure this or that specifiable ill? Now, another question: How can we design a system that will continuously reform (i.e., renew) itself, beginning with the present specifiable (ills) … (to the) ills (we) cannot foresee?" ... "Like a scientist in a lab, part of enduring tradition/system …"[35]
In the way that the scientific method has established an enduring tradition and broadly-accessible system for over a century of learning and practice, toward the purpose of advancing what is known about our world, innovation's organizing principles could establish such a tradition and system for the 21st century's urgently needed societal effects associated with innovation's function of resource leverage.
Leverage from an innovation learning system extends, or amplifies, Drucker's notion of converting a skilled craft to a discipline or methodology:
- First, since innovation's methodology is broadly pertinent as a modifier of the vast majority of disciplines and the vast majority of 21st century workplace roles, breadth of access is especially pertinent:
- Again, Drucker held that: "Every organization … will have to learn how to innovate – and to learn that innovation can and should be organized as a systematic process." "What we need is an entrepreneurial society." [32]
- For students within K-12 and into higher education, broad access would allow for trajectories of learning as students move from one teacher/grade/school to another. Again, akin to learning trajectories for the methods of science, a system allows for learning that is grounded and connected across time and place and also personalized.
- An innovation learning system also would provide for broad student access to the embedded structure of support for exploring and developing a personal sense of direction.
- What's more, innovation's methodology is fundamentally cross-functional and cross-disciplinary, making shared roots of understanding especially valuable.
Shared understanding of concepts and language would support individuals in nimbly "plugging into" innovation's instruction and practice across time and place.
From creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: "What makes (the) breakdown in communication among disciplines so dangerous is that, as we have repeatedly seen, most creative achievements depend on making connections among disparate domains." [34]
- Indeed, it seems only a matter of time until the majority of a university's departments, or disciplines, will include "Innovation Methods" curricula in parallel to ~universal "Research Methods" curricula, including the parallel of beginning with organizing principles.
“Class of 2017, you are graduating into a world that needs purpose. It’s up to you to create it.”
-- Mark Zuckerberg, at Harvard University
"No amount of doubling down on math and science courses is going to produce the innovators we need in the 21st century ... The key is engagement." [35-1]
Richard K. Miller
President, Olin College of Engineering
Each of several learning application sketches is to demonstrate how organizing principles could support innovation instruction, including the principles' overall provision for an innovation learning system, whereby learning experiences across time and place are grounded and connected by the framework of principles.
Within such a system, applications like the ones below are intended to help harness the three mutually-reinforcing learning leverage points that are made visible by the prototype principles (intelligibility, engagement, embedded personalized guidance).
Described in brief just below, each application sketch is elaborated at this site's separate Learning Applications page.
For Youth --
The first 2-3 applications sketched are envisioned as fitting together for K-12 learners (e.g., beginning by middle school years), with the idea that high digital support facilitates productive hands-on engagement and supports teachers in establishing roots of an innovation learning system at this schooling level:
Online video "lecture/s."
Short of an online course, this sketch of instructional videos borrows from the Khan Academy's example and philosophy. A brief series of video lectures is to capture a developed version of innovation's most fundamental principles incisively and elegantly. Ideally, videos would be a part of the broad-reaching Khan Academy or another venue for Open Educational Resources.
- A template-based online gallery of successful offering profiles.
In this sketch, widely-varying concrete examples of innovation offerings are presented via a profile template that highlights the fit of innovation's essential purpose and forces within each example, including the methodology's essential creative structure of hypotheses. Tags highlight the many types of variations of the fundamentals, allowing users to search for examples that reflect their interests (e.g., youth/female initiators, particular purpose such as transportation, clean water, education, etc.) and simultaneously support learning about the nature of innovation's variation. For each offering profile, the gallery features two vantage points: the offering that customers see vs. the behind-the-scenes methods that brought the offering to the world and keep it there. See a prototype gallery (rudimentary) at InnovationAgents.org.
- Project-based Learning.
Custom projects, designed according to the best of what is known about effective project-based learning, are to facilitate hands-on engagement with innovation's purpose, methods, and forces.
For Social Innovation within Higher Education --
Separate sketches feature social innovation and the higher education level:
- A Social Innovation Differential. Key conceptual amplification is associated directly with the prototype of innovation's organizing principles.
- Innovation Methods. This sketch is conceived as parallel to higher innovation's established "research methods" curricula. It's based on three fundamental ideas:
- that the power of social challenges calls for innovation methodology's full power, and thus for intentional, structured development of practitioners
- that important knowledge of social system "industries" (e.g., public health, education, natural resources, and economic development), which innovation's methodology can leverage, is located throughout existing university schools and departments
- that a sub-set of faculty and post-baccalaureate students in these areas are drawn to innovation methodology's focus on "integrating and applying knowledge," as a direct complement to research methods.[37]
- Case Studies Viewed Through Lens of Organizing Principles
- Three different cases of social innovation offerings are viewed through the lens of innovation's essential purpose and forces (including a "social differential").
- Like the searchable gallery of offering profiles, but with greater depth, case studies are to support intelligibility of the constants and variables associated with innovation's offerings and its practice.
As the 21st century calls for converting innovation's methods from a skilled craft practiced by a sliver of society to a methodology practiced broadly, capably, and collaboratively, the time seems fully ripe for exploring the hypothesis:
- that it is feasible to develop a high-quality set of innovation's organizing principles;
- that such principles could provide traction for developing what Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad called “deeply embedded capability," not a "buzzword.”[39]
This site's overall hypothesis is that there is opportunity for society to leverage the expert resources that imply these principles toward a framework for systemic learning and practice that can in turn leverage individual strengths and motivation -- toward win-win gain:
- Learner "customers" gain access to understanding innovation's essential purpose, forces, and methods, including as these relate to the economy and society and including support for progress in a personal sense of direction that is both grounded and compelling.
- Society gains benefits associated with a workforce that is not only more purpose-driven but also empowered via greater collective innovation understanding and capability, as the fundamental means to the 21st century's large and urgent need for innovation's effects.
It's a "what could be" innovation hypothesis, for the prospect of win-win yield that features more flourishing human beings and the leveraging of individual strengths and purpose toward more societal flourishing -- indeed toward "creating a sustainable world." [40]
InnovationAgents.org
A "minimum viable" version of the searchable online gallery application described above is presented at a separate url: InnovationAgents.org.This protoype version of the learning application is based on the prototype principles, reflecting the idea that the more expeditious route to high-quality principles may involve experimenting with prototype applications of the principles, with concrete experiments prompting critique.
I welcome feedback on all aspects of this site.
With appreciation,
Karen Gates
Ann Arbor, Michigan
NOTES:
[1] See this web site's Learning Leverage page, under "The Special Value of Purpose."
[2] Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, (Harper Press, 1993), p 46. Drucker held that this conversion is made possible for any skilled craft by way of explicating "organizing principles" and thereby making a practice broadly teachable. Drucker cited the prior examples of engineering and the physician's differential diagnosis.
[3] Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (HarperBusiness, 1985), p 27
[3-6] Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, (Harvard University Press, 1986), p 13. Bruner differentiates between "paradigmatic imagination" -- "the ability to see possible formal connections (of existing knowledge) before one is able to prove them in any way" -- and "narrative imagination" (e.g., gripping drama). Although "paradigmatic" implies hypotheses of science, with respect to an existing formal system of reality, the new connections of existing knowledge fits also with descriptions of innovation's ideas for new opportunities.
[4] This overall premise and the summary of distinctions stems from a combination of many sources. For example:
[28] Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education, (Harvard University Press, 1960), p 31
[29] Bruner, 1960, p 7
[30] Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?, (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2009), p 17
[31] See Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, (Harper Press, 1993), p 46. In this text, Drucker cited the examples of engineering and the physician's differential diagnosis.
[32] Drucker, 1993, p 46
[33] Regarding the principles as modular interface, see Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, & Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2011). On page 32, Christensen, et. al., describe Dell computers "under the lid" as a collection of separately manufactured parts that are configurable to each customer's specifications based on a modular interface among the parts.
Here the suggestion is that If innovation learners, teachers, and practitioners are viewed as "parts" that come together within and across venues of learning and practice, shared reference to the methodology's fundamentals can provide the modular interface that connects participants within otherwise varying venues.
[34] Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p 338
[35] Gardner, 1963, p 5, p 7
[35-1] T-Summit 2016, Video: National Town Hall, https://www.uidp.org/t-summit-2016-videos/
[36] See James J. Duderstadt, Glenn F. Knoll, George S. Springer, Principles of Engineering (John Wiley & Sons: New York, Toronto,1982)
For discussion of Khan's philosophy about learning, see Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse, (Twelve, Hachette Book Group: New York, 2012)
[37] The expression and concept of "integrating and applying knowledge" (as opposed to the university's traditional focus on generating knowledge, with attendant reward systems) comes from Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2011).
[38] John W. Gardner,Self-renewal; the individual and the innovative society (Harper & Rowe, New York, 1963), p 12.
This quote in its original context referred to the necessary role of individuals within societal renewal: “(W)e must help the individual to re-establish a meaningful relationship with a larger context of purpose. … (O)ne of the reasons young people do not commit themselves to the larger social enterprise is that they are genuinely baffled as to the nature of that enterprise. … They do not see where they fit in. If they are to commit themselves to the best in their own society, it is not exhortation they need but instruction. … We must also help the individual to discover how such commitments may be made without surrendering individuality."
In 2017, there may be formidable strengths associated with the broad appeal of innovation among young people and the appeal of social innovation in particular -- strengths that can be built upon toward "deeply embedded capability." Further, value for "leverage" in and of itself may be of the type of "middle-level" value that Gardner associated with near universal resonance.
Gardner's idea from 1963 was reinforced in 2008 by editors Anne Craft, Howard Gardner, and Guy Claxton throughout Creativity, Wisdom, and Trusteeship: Exploring the Role of Education, (Corwin Press: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2008). For example:
[39] Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), p vii
[40] Hoffman, 2016
[42] Bruner, 1960
