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Innovation's Organizing Principles

Expanded Description
of Prototype Principles

 

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QUICK LINKS TO SUBHEADINGS BELOW:

  • Principle #1 -- Innovation's change by way of value allows for the function of resource leverage. Its primary form is offerings, with customers serving as jurors of value and gatekeepers of change. This function and form relates to:
  • Principle #2 -- Innovation methodology's basic structural unit is an effective hypothesis about "what could be as new value" and "how it could become an offering accessible to customers and a catalyst of change."
  • Principle #3 -- Effective innovation hypotheses stem from creativity's "evaluative-generative" processing, drawing upon practitioners' understanding of innovation's resource-leverage purpose and dynamics along with knowledge that is pertinent to that purpose.
  • Principle #4 -- Passion and vision are fundamental to practitioners' personal-level "why" of pursuing innovation.

  • Concluding Principle -- "It is not exhortation they need but instruction."

 

This Expanded Description of the prototype principles includes sample sources, which the separate Sources section of the site takes further.

 

Principle #1

What is innovation? And why does it matter?

What matters is innovation's function of
resource leverage -- the change of greater yield from the same resources. Fundamentally, innovation is about making more fruitful use of resources, whether the fruit is gauged in terms of economics, sustainability, human well-being and capability, or other aspects of "yield."

Innovation's change dynamics are fundamental to the resource-oriented economic sectors -- commercial, social, and public.[4] For each sector, "customers" serve as the gatekeepers of change based on response to innovation's form of
offerings and medium of value.


On resource leverage as enduring function, sample statements:

  • From Jean Baptiste Say's early 19th century A Treatise on Political Economy, resource leverage is described as "the acme of industry."[1-1] Say offered the early example of silk fabric as a new offering that created commercial value beyond other uses of the resources (material and other) used to generate it.[1-2]

  • A century and a half later, from Peter Drucker:

    "It is the task of giving human and material resources new and greater wealth-producing capacity."[1-4]

    "An innovation is a change in market or society. It produces greater yield for the user, greater wealth-production for society, higher value or greater satisfaction. The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user."[1-3]


  • And at the start of the third millenium, from C.K. Prahalad: "All entrepreneurship is about aspirations greater than resources."[1-5]

 

On customers as the jurors of value and thus the gatekeepers of the change associated with resource leverage:

Present day statements such as:

"The customer is boss." [1-6]

"The thing an entrepreneur is inventing is of value to the degree it has lasting value. To whom? To the customer. To the one who consumes it. ... What an entrepreneur creates has meaning, and that's why it creates money." [1-7]

"The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user."[1-3]

... echo J. B. Say’s early 19th century A Treatise on Political Economy:

"It is universally true, that, when men attribute value to any thing, it is in consideration of its useful properties; what is good for nothing they set no price upon. To this inherent fitness of capability of certain things to satisfy the various wants of mankind, I shall take leave to affix the name of utility.*"

"(T)o create objects which have any kind of utility, is to create wealth; for the utility of things is the ground-work of their value, and their value constitutes wealth. ...(T)here is a creation, not of matter, but of utility; and this I call production of wealth."[1-8]

 

On offerings as innovation's most salient form:

Offerings relate resources to value in widely varying ways. Thought leaders over time have referred to innovation and entrepreneurship as a large genus.

From a 2012 edition of the publication "Popular Science," there is wide variation in the nature of value even within a gallery of science-oriented innovations judged by the magazine as the top 25 of the last 25 years. These examples range from a company's seedless watermelon to Apple's iPhone and the Mars rover "Curiosity."

Outside of science, the variation of offerings and value is reflected in the short list of examples below:

See more.

Each of the following offerings created sustained change as customers found new value. A particular purveyor may not have been first to create the offering, but was first to achieve widespread customer adoption and thus to shift resources to producing the newly expanded value. Further, although innovation's standard of excellence is transformation, varying magnitude of resource leverage is fundamental to the notion of the large genus.

    • Seeing-Eye guide dog
    • first community college
    • Netflix (DVDs online and delivery by mail)
    • Pampers disposable diapers
    • numeric codes on plastic containers offered the value of "intelligence" for recycling, and the first home pick-up services introduced the value of recycyling convenience.
    • Lasic eye surgery
    • Match.com
    • United Nations body for international governance.
    • fundraising events associated with running, biking, dancing for a cause (and obtaining pledges of support from personal networks)
    • Facebook
    • the standard shipping container offered the value of new levels of efficiency for the shipping industry, triggering many associated new resource leverage opportunities for a system of affected enterprises.

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Comments -- The Fit of Innovation's Function & Form

Innovation's function of resource leverage and form of offerings fits:

These relations are discussed in turn:


a. Within the Domains of the Commercial and Social Production Systems

Innovation's function of resource leverage has been most developed within the commercial production system. However, the fundamental human dynamics of "change by way of value" are not unique to the commercial system. Drucker held that innovation is pertinent to all except "that which might be labeled existential rather than social."

Innovation's visibility within the social production system has accelerated significantly within the start of the 21st century and is likely to continue on that steep curve.

It is within (and across) the resource-oriented commercial and social systems of production that innovation's function is most salient.

As the direct catalyst of change within these domains, "innovation" might be viewed as the domains' particular label for "creativity." For these domains, It is noteworthy and perhaps unique that customers, rather than experts, serve as the jurors of value and arbiters of change.


i. In the commercial production system

The measure of yield on resources is in financial terms of wealth.

Change occurs by way of transactions, when customers respond positively to an offering's expanded "value proposition."

Within this system, the offering itself typically embodies the greater value, such that transactions alone generate new yield on resources.


ii. In the social production system

In the social system, yield on resources is associated with the status of societal "good" -- in accord with societal goals or collective ends (e.g., for public health, education, economic development, natural resource stewardship, well-being).[2-1]

However, measures of yield have not been as visible, standardized, or distilled as for the commercial system. In this system, too, transactions are necessary if an offering is to produce positive change; however, transactions often are insufficient. That's because the resources associated with new value, or yield, often are the "human resource" customers of a new offering.

Peter Drucker related "social innovation" to offerings "that change people." He used the term throughout his 1985 primer on innovation and entrepreneurship and in other publications, too, well before the term's current visibility.

For this system, new yield often requires that offerings catalyze change in customer behavior and/or capability, beyond the change of transactions. Moreover, the end user often is not the purchasing customer. As a part of this site's prototype of first principles, these additional factors comprise a social innovation differential as summarized just below and described further here.

See more.


First, in addition to adoption, advances may require sustained change in customer behavior and/or change in customer capability.

For example: To serve as a lever for advancing public health, a newly conceived home exercise offering would need to catalyze sustained change in behavior in addition to adoption (transactions).

Similarly, to advance public education results, offerings adopted by an educational system typically seek to catalyze new capability among student customers and/or teacher customers.

All three types of change -- adoption, behavior, and capability -- may require that an offering provide the change catalyst of an especially high degree of utility and/or of learning.


Second, the end-user often is not the purchasing (decision-making) customer. Compensating for this missing market force can involve special considerations such as:

  • including change catalysts for multiple customer levels or segments, often within complex systems of social service delivery;
  • co-creating offerings with end-user customers.

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Offerings that seek to catalyze high-leverage advances toward societal ends can be situated in organizations of varying size and type, including large government agencies, for-profit businesses, and more. In fact, Drucker argued in 2002 that "Government … is going to be the most important area of entrepreneurship and innovation over the next twenty-five years." [2-2]

In keeping with innovation overall, for social innovation the common factor is an effect of resource leverage.

Further, regardless of channel, innovation's methodology and the social production system can represent a meeting of two super powers -- where the social challenge is one super power and innovation's methodology in top form is another.

Again, see more about the prototype's "social innovation differential," including a sample successful offering viewed through the lens of this differential here.

 

iii. Commercial and Social Systems in Combination

A social innovation differential means that it matters to know which production goals -- commercial, societal, or both -- one seeks to affect.

Resource leverage toward societal ends may involve demands beyond commercial goals, even as the two systems overlap and even as a combination of goals may be pursued. Moreover, commercial yield can be in conflict with collective good.

Increasing visibility of sustainable development has prompted calls for a new level of consciousness regarding the fit of these two interrelated production systems within society overall, including within a global society.

The collective context is not a new consideration. When Say argued that the utility of an offering is determined fully by customers, he noted that this called for social complements such as “… leaving it to the moralist and the practical man the several duties of enlightening and of guiding their fellow-creatures ….” and for public management to steward national resources.[3-1]

See more.

Modern thought leaders have highlighted urgent societal issues associated with transition to a knowledge-based economy (e.g., education and labor force issues) and with dynamics of sustainable development. One fundamental aspect of this topic is innovation's function of resource leverage. For example:

Within a 2007 panel discussion held at the University of Michigan, entitled, ”Is Consumerism Sustainable?” the panelists concurred that “innovation” is the answer to sustainable development … “either gradually or by crisis.” It is up to innovation to advance yield on natural resources to at least maintain the standard of living among developed populations while also improving the standard of living among developing populations.[4]

These advances can represent opposing imperatives, and Jeffrey Sachs adds that “political will” will need to complement innovation.[5]

In more recent years, a range of new ideas have been advanced regarding innovation and sustainable development. Topics include design (e.g., Roberto Verganti’s ideas about the unsustainability of "user-centered" innovation), the organizing principles of capitalism (e.g., Michael Porter’s views regarding “shared value”), and more.[6] The changing context may place increasing weight on aspects of leadership and stewardship within the engagement of innovation's methodology.

In keeping with Kahneman's expression of "responsible creativity," Csikszentmihalyi's view below is consistent with a chorus of thought leaders' voices:

"The changes technological inventions have brought about have increased the range of our options, but each has presented a bill that must be paid. The most important challenge that confronts us now is learning how to assess the pros and cons of the fruits of our imagination."[6-1]

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See more for innovation's fit with:

b. science and invention
c. entrepreneurship
d. intellectual capital
e. design thinking

 

Principle #2

How do innovation practitioners generate the change of resource leverage?

To generate innovation's version of change, practitioners develop and deploy two fundamental types of effective hypotheses:
-- An hypothesis of "what could be" in terms of new value to customers.
-- Associated hypotheses addressing "how the value proposition could become an offering accessible to customers and a catalyst of change."


 

Whether implicit or explicit, and whether stable or dynamic, innovation methodology's basic structural unit is a diagnostic hypothesis about change by way of value. The hypotheses suffuse innovation's day-to-day practice.

The paths to innovation's gateway of effective "what" and "how" innovation hypotheses vary (e.g., from observation of a gap in the marketplace to technical invention that allows for offerings of new value), but all paths converge at the single what-and-how gateway to the commercial and social production systems, where change happens.

Comments:

a. Both the "what" and "how" hypotheses are necessary --

In Steve Jobs' words: "(T)here's the technical part of the equation and the business part, meaning the distribution, manufacturing, and so on. And then there's the human part. You just have to put the whole equation together." [21] Jobs emphasized integration of the equation throughout the full span of an offering's development, using terms such as "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." [22]

Pioneering social innovator and entrepreneur, Bill Drayton, refers to an interrelated set of "how to's":

"What combination of ingredients makes the ... approach more practical, scalable, or cost effective, or better-rooted politically, than prior attempts? It turns out that the idea is … a product of 'how-to's.' A new idea might include these considerations: How to better use local resources to solve a problem? How to overcome cultural obstacles? How to get legislation passed? How to finance an organization? How to train others to do the work? How to motivate clients and staff?"[23]

Likewise, within development of what became Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg purportedly hypothesized that an algorithm associated with a chess tournament would enable a complete working product in support of his hypothesized customer value proposition and overall lever-based vision.

A grand "equation" or "gateway" to innovation's change by way of value -- the interrelated hypotheses of "what could be" as new value and "how it could become" an offering and catalyst of change -- can be viewed within the context of a business model "canvas" as presented within Business Model Generation and shown just below.[24] (This same canvas probably could host the alternative label of: "model for producing new value.")

  • The element of the canvas called the "customer value proposition" would represent the essential hypothesis for "what could be."
  • All other elements of the canvas could be viewed as categories of directly associated hypotheses for "how it could become."[25]
  • Although the practice of building and/or adjusting the set of interrelated hypotheses may be dynamic, the equation, at any given point in time, adds up to the "whole equation."

 

(In the source, the "customer value proposition" element is not visually highlighted above the other elements of the canvas. Also, as described below, a particular model, from Steve Blank, includes using this particular canvas to develop a set of hypotheses that allows for effectively translating technical invention into marketplace value by way of a startup venture that brings the value to scale. However, the path that begins with invention is only one path to the gateway of innovation hypotheses depicted by the tool of this canvas.)

 

b. Innovation's varying contexts, sizes, and shapes all share the hypothesis-based combination of "what could be" and "how it could become." This includes:

i. Varying starting points, such as:

-- initial focus on opportunities presented by customers, the marketplace or production process (e.g., perceiving a suboptimal equilibrium);

-- initial focus on invention or new knowledge;

-- desire to start a scalable business;

-- initial focus on an agenda (e.g., a design brief, enterprise strategy, or problem statement);

-- initial focus on an organization's strengths.

ii. Varying type and size of organization, including a new versus established organization.

iii. Classifications of leverage (e.g., transformational versus incremental).

iv. Varying ambitions of scale.

v. Focus on commercial versus social goals (or a combination).

 

c. Similarly, a sub-set of innovation models incorporates the same hypothesis-based combination of "what could be" and "how it could become," either explicitly or implicitly.

Two groupings of sample models below are organized according to the fit of hypotheses within the model. In the first group, effective hypotheses are assumed as an input to the model. In the second group, models provide a framework for development of effective hypotheses.

See more.

i. Models for which effective innovation hypotheses are assumed as an input:

  • Clayton Christensen explicates principles of "disruptive" (versus "sustaining") innovation within the context of competitive business strategy and also for societal goals, or social innovation. Specialized practices in support of this variety of innovation, including organizational structures, follow from the model's "disruption" principles. However, disruption depends fundamentally on -- it assumes the inclusion of -- an effective hypothesis for new customer value and effective hypotheses for "how the value can become" throughout the specialized business model framework. [28]

  • In The New Age of Innovation, Prahalad and co-author M.S. Krishnan not only reinforce the enduring principle of customer determination of utility within the commercial production system, they extend it to the degree of “N=1.” Within this overall model, the variable “N” represents the customer, and “N=1” means that generating maximal new value (and leverage) involves aiming to customize offerings to the level of every individual customer, along with the full set of global resources as the relevant set of resources. (Prahalad and Krishnan noted that this seeming extreme standard for customization represents change that is underway.) The model relies on a particular approach to analytics to "amplify market signals." Like disruption, the model's principles for commercial competitiveness assume translating the market signals into effective hypotheses for new customer value and its delivery. [33]

  • David Cohen and Susan Moffitt provide a framework associated with social system goals, including the multiple types of change that can be required among an offering's users for progress. The policy-oriented framework, in which both policies and their instruments serve as offerings, speaks to dynamics of the social system context (or marketplace) in which hypotheses for change are situated. [28-1]

  • A framework developed by Jeff DeGraff and Shawn Quinn, customized for large organizations, begins with the point of reference of a classification of innovation by the type of leverage desired (e.g., incremental change versus breakthrough change) and addresses activities conducive to innovation hypotheses for different qualities of leverage and scale. [31]

  • From the Startup Genome, metrics drawn from thousands of internet startups provide a tool of intelligence and proposed framework. A startup is viewed as "a product centric organism that interacts with its environment, the market," where: "the core dimensions that define this organism are customer, product, team, business model and financials" and "the key challenge for a startup is to keep those five dimensions in sync with the actual customer response."[30] The metrics offer guidelines and insights for "assessing startups more effectively by measuring the thresholds and milestones of development that Internet startups move through." Effective hypotheses are assumed.

 

ii. Models that establish frameworks for the development of effective innovation hypotheses, with varying starting points:

  • Models such as IDEO’s “design thinking” and Roger Martin’s “integrated thinking” begin with initial reference to customers and/or the market or system and proceed to development of an offering that embodies a hypothesis for compelling new customer value.[30-1] (Design thinking begins more specifically from a "brief" that describes a problem or category of opportunity, situated within a set of constraints.) The models provide a framework and process for generating effective hypotheses.

  • From entrepreneurship educator, Steve Blank, a model for scalable startup businesses begins with the point of reference of technical capability (newly existent or newly applied). The model guides practitioners from the technical domain to “customer development,” including product-market fit, and the active search for a scalable business model. The model draws upon other tools and frameworks such as Geoffrey Moore's model for customer adoption of new technology and the "business model canvas" noted above. Throughout, Blank emphasizes the structural unit of hypotheses for leverage, guiding practitioners to establish and test a hypothesis for each element of the canvas toward a scalable business model.[29]

  • The framework within Stephen Goldsmith’s Power of Social Innovation focuses on a civic context and includes a set of primary pathways to discovery (hypothesis) of a “catalytic ingredient” that can spark social progress when “translated into a new product, intervention, or means of delivery.”[32]

  • Eric Ries introduced the "lean startup" model, which links Blank's customer development with principles of lean manufacturing and which explicitly broadens the notion of a "startup" to "an organization creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty." The model's core feedback loop of "build-measure-learn" emphasizes efficient iterations of the loop toward a tested value proposition and business model: beginning with a "minimum viable product"; testing the product and associated hypotheses for strategic viability "using the scientific method"; and if appropriate "pivoting" to a new strategic direction, which may include a new value proposition.[33-1]

  • In A New Culture of Learning, Cultivating Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown provide a framework in which passion is an explicit starting point for the process of generating innovation. Hypotheses are characterized as "leaps" within a non-linear process that fits within the tension between a massive information network and "a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment" within those boundaries. (This overall framework is broader than innovation and involves much more than this abbreviated description, but innovation is fundamental, as is passion.)[33-2]

 

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Principle #3

How are effective innovation hypotheses developed?
Fundamentally, an idea, or hypothesis, is a new connection of existing knowledge. Effective innovation hypotheses stem from creativity's "evaluative-generative" processing, drawing upon an understanding of innovation's resource-leverage purpose along with pertinent knowledge.



For discerning innovation hypotheses, practitioners integrate an anchoring understanding of the direct resource-leverage purpose with knowledge and cognitive processing that are pertinent to that purpose:


A. Particular of purpose -- intuitive familiarity with innovation's direct purpose of resource leverage and its catalytic medium of customer-determined value.

Familiarity includes sensitivity to, and sensibility about, creating new customer value, or utility.

For example, a McKinsey & Company manager said of social innovation thought and action leader, Bill Drayton: "He taught me to look for the non-obvious ways to gain leverage times ten on an issue." [34-3]

Thematic comments speak to sensitivity regarding:

-- a "suboptimal equilibrium" and "embedded within it an opportunity to provide a new solution, product, service, or process"; [34-1]

-- "many things as broken and want(ing) to fix them"; [34-2]

-- opportunities to change the world.

(Presumably this type of list would include perceptual sensitivity to opportunities for profit, but I didn't find it as a visible theme.)

At the same time, the nature of consciousness of innovation's purpose of resource leverage may itself involve a somewhat large genus:

Tom Kelley, co-founder of the design firm IDEO, emphasizes in his book,The Ten Faces of Innovation that there is more than one productive personal style of attunement to, and engagement with, innovation's purpose. Kelley presents ten different personal orientations (e.g., the anthropologist, the experimenter, the convener, the cross-pollinator) that can lead to the same fundamental sensing of "sharp edges" of offerings "crying out for improvement."[42]

Within the work of creativity researchers (with regard to all domains), there are similar themes about a purpose-oriented disposition or stance [42-1]:

"(T)here must be a special kind of awareness that is constructed (or is built) in the individual's mind ... It is a consciousness that includes the realization that the world as it is need not be the world forever."[7-4]

"The creative process starts with a sense that there is a puzzle somewhere, or a task to be accomplished."[33-3]


 


B. Particular of knowledge -- pertinence to innovation's direct purpose of resource leverage and medium of change-catalyzing new value.

Even as knowledge may seem obvious as an element of effective innovation hypotheses (it could be viewed as innovation's raw material), the call for pertinent knowledge is strong. For example:

"The good intuiter may have been born with something special, but his effectiveness rests upon a solid knowledge of the subject, a familiarity that gives intuition something to work with." [38-1]

"The 'entrepreneurial move' is from intelligibility to innovation." [39]

"Innovate only where you understand."


Themes suggest that knowledge pertinent to innovation hypotheses features depth and multiple thematic strands, but it is not necessarily elite. Thematic, fundamental strands of knowledge include:

-- domain/category knowledge (technical and operations) 

-- knowledge of customers

-- general human and social dynamics 

-- “anything and everything” -- in connection with other fundamental strands.


Speaking to each thematic strand in short (the Sources section goes into much more detail):

    • Domain/category knowledge is fundamental. Prominent designer and author about design, Donald Norman, notes that the value of “fresh eyes” can go only so far:

      "Today … designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable."[39-1]


    • "Knowledge of customers" is intended in a broad sense, inclusive of perspective such as "jobs" that customers need to get done, plus customer values, beliefs, behaviors and capabilities. Knowledge may overlap with empathy (as a way of knowing), and increasingly, innovation frameworks, models, and tools incorporate customer knowledge by way of co-creating offerings, often as a means of addressing "usability."


    • Knowledge of general human and social dynamics encompasses more general perspective regarding the human and social dynamics of "customers" as the arbiters of change -- "how the world is put together from a social and emotional point of view."

      This strand incorporates the combination of enduring dynamics slow to change (human "hardwiring") with evolving cultural dynamics.

      It may be the least developed in terms of its direct relation to innovation. Psychology scholar and creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has commented:

      "Our ancestors -- through religion and science -- created increasingly sophisticated representations of the way things work in the world. But strides have been small in the matter of knowledge regarding individual and social needs and laws governing human affairs."[39-2]

      At the same time, neuroscience and other fields have been advancing knowledge about both enduring and evolving laws and norms, nearly all of which is likely to be pertinent to innovation's purpose. As one example that seems particularly pertinent, see this site's mention of Martin Seligman's theory of well-being (a theory of "uncoerced choice") at the "social differential" link above.


    • The knowledge strand of "anything and everything" reflects a theme of innovation's hypotheses incorporating associations across disciplines, sectors, etc.:

    IDEO co-founder and Stanford University professor and d.school leader, David Kelley, created the expression of "T-shaped" people to refer to deep specialized knowledge combined with general knowledge.

    Kelley's modern term echoes a similar idea expressed by Drucker some 50 years earlier: "The only meaningful definition of a 'generalist' is a specialist who can relate his own small area to the universe of knowledge."[39-3]

    Similarly, Csikszentmihalyi notes about creativity in general: "Sooner or later ... it becomes essential to master the specialized knowledge of a particular domain. ... Yet it is important to keep in mind that most breakthroughs are based on linking information that usually is not thought of as related. Integration, synthesis both across and within domains, is the norm rather than the exception."[39-4]


If new knowledge is involved (including new technical capability), it typically needs to be connected to other strands of knowledge, especially knowledge of customers.

Drucker referred to innovation that incorporates new knowledge or new technical capability as the "cutting edge of the knife," with all other innovation representing the "blade" (of much readier opportunity) that makes the edge possible.

For Drucker, the blade features initial reference to the production system(s), with existing knowledge connected in such a way as to diagnose new opportunities signaled by change (e.g., associated with seven discrete categories marked by change, including gaps, incongruities, unexpected successes, and demographic trends).

Drucker argued that the blade -- not the cutting edge -- represents the most ready source of resource leverage opportunity. Similarly, C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan called for analytics that would "amplify weak signals" of marketplace opportunities and support an ever-improving match between resources and customer utility. [8]


Finally, "technology" overall may represent another strand of knowledge that should be on this list of strands that are fundamentally pertinent to innovation's direct purpose:

As a rapidly changing strand, technology also could help bring into relief exactly what knowledge is changing versus not.

 

 


C. Particular of cognitive processing -- evaluative-generative coupling within the context of fertile conditions, both internal and external.[38]

Evaluative-generative coupling is not unique to innovation's direct purpose and hypotheses. What is unique is the hypotheses' generative medium of expression -- the what and how of change-catalyzing value in the form of offerings.

As with science and invention, innovation's hypotheses are based on a new connection of knowledge. They're rooted in “paradigmatic imagination” -- “the ability to see possible … connections (of existing knowledge) before one is able to prove them in any way, for which discernment is fundamental”[35]:

"Imagination, not reason, creates the novel. It is to social inheritance what mutation is to biological inheritance; it accounts for the arrival of the fittest. Reason or logic, applied when judgment indicates that the new is promising, acts like natural selection to pan the gold grains from the sand and insure the survival of the fittest."[7-2]

"Many creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the abiility to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don't waste much time exploring bad alleys." ... "To do that, of course, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' ideas according to the field."[7-3]

[Note, in the case of innovation's production system domains, "good" and "bad" ideas are in the eyes of customers, who serve as the jurors of value and provide the "field's" gatekeeping function.]


Thematic descriptors of innovation's evaluative-generative processing often overlap with descriptors of the same for science and invention:

-- "associational thinking," with emphasis on connecting knowledge from fundamentally unrelated domains or contexts (also known by "cross-pollinating" and other terms)

-- integrated thinking

-- concrete observations to abstract insights to concrete ideas

-- "envisaging as a system what to others are unrelated, separate elements."

-- diagnostic attunement to standard signals of innovation opportunity (e.g., gaps, incongruities, unexpected success, demographic changes)

-- reference to analogies, metaphors, images, symbols, plus non-thinking ways of "knowing."

 

Conditions too are stressed as fundamental within cognitive processing's effective new connections of knowledge. Descriptors of conditions are particularly thematic, including across different specialized fields such as neuroscience and psychology. Moreover, the same fundamental descriptors apply to a practitioner's internal and external conditions:

  • openness
  • flexibility
  • comfort with complexity

(See this site's Sources section for elaboration of these themes and sources.)

Thought leaders note that external conditions can foster reciprocity with internal conditions, including organizational and cultural systems that are structured to reward knowledge sharing and that establish explicit goals of resource leverage.

 

 

Comments:

a. Developmental trajectories --

Thought and action leaders, for creativity in general and for innovation in particular, describe developmental trajectories for effective evaluative-generative coupling, based on positive reinforcement. For example:

Stanford University faculty member and IDEO founder, David Kelley, has referred to "creative confidence" gained from a trajectory of experience.[40]

Lafley and Charan referred to gaining "a sixth sense of what is possible" based on firsthand participation in generating and implementing a breakthrough idea.[41-1]

Social innovation thought and action leader, John W. Gardner, noted that making complexity productive requires a "tolerance" that is borne of "profound confidence" in one’s capacity to "bring some kind of new order" from "a wild profusion of ideas and experience.”[41-2] Such profound confidence is likely a product of experience and development.

Bruner referred to a "style of thought" related to any given discipline, such that increasing experience with a subject may be necessary to bring the meaning of its style of thought "increasingly to light."[38-2]

With his conception of "flow" (experiences of engaged strengths in which challenges fit with one's abilities), Csikszentmihalyi holds that every experience of flow produces growth in abilities, for a potential channel of ever-developing growth and personal evolution. [41-3]


With this, it seems fortuitous that innovation's expression of creativity does not require sophisticated knowledge. Innovation's fundamentals allow for early practice, including applications where the amount of leverage realized for any given hypothesis (or set of hypotheses) may not be of the size or scale to be labeled "innovation," but where generating and acting upon a hypothesis for leverage would rightly be labeled innovation methodology. Such practice might launch a developmental trajectory toward larger effects. Indeed, such beginnings may be essential to development.

 

c. Models and tools that support innovation's hypotheses vary significantly --

As just two examples of the ways that models and tools vary with respect to innovation hypotheses:

  • Some models relate to creativity overall, including but not limited to innovation's direct purpose and medium.
  • Others models relate directly to innovation's purpose, but often address it partially, with emphasis on a particular element of hypotheses (e.g., purpose, a thematic strand of knowledge) or on conditions related to productive processing (external and/or internal conditions).


For example:

1. The WICS model (Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized), which integrates Robert Sternberg's decades of prolific education psychology scholarship, is not innovation-specific. However, its elaboration of cognitive capabilities and evaluative-generative bearings seems tightly coupled with the processsing that innovation's purpose calls upon:

  • "Creativity": "(W)ork that is novel (that is, original, unexpected), high in quality, and appropriate (that is, useful, meets task constraints)."
  • Intelligence: Creative work calls for balancing three fundamental categories of intelligence, or abilities: "analytical, creative, and practical."
  • Wisdom: "People can be intelligent and even creative but also foolish." [6-1]

Note that Sternberg differentiates between "creativity" as a product and "creative intelligence, or ability." This model seems especially pertinent as a framework for innovation's cognitive processing. Its use could be tailored to innovation's particular creative product, including incorporating pertinent strands of knowledge. For more detail overall on the WICS model see this site's sketch of an innovation learning system at the Learning Applications page.


2. The model of Design Thinking also emphasizes the element of cognitive processing, but does so with focus on innovation's particular generative medium of change-catalyzing new value for customers. Proposed as "a thought process" that provides "an approach to innovation -- to generat(ing) breakthrough ideas that have an impact," the model provides direct guidance more akin to a recipe. This model too allows for incorporating innovation's pertinent strands of knowledge.


Other examples of models and tools, organized by relative emphasis with respect to innovation hypotheses include:

See more.

Purpose Emphasis:

  • Tom Kelley's framework of The Ten Faces of Innovation features the classification of personas that represent different personal orientations that lead to (or can lead to) sensing the "sharp edges" of offerings "crying out for improvement"; [42]
  • Peter Drucker outlined seven “symptoms,” to which all innovation corresponds and which can and should be actively observed and monitored for opportunities. [43]
  • John Seely Brown noted: "To see differently, we need new intellectual constructs."[34-5]
  • John W. Gardner spoke to the individual's connection to social innovation's collective purpose in Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society.
  • The potential databank tool sketched under this site's Learning Applications is intended as support for cultivating intuitive familiarity with innovation's purpose.


Knowledge Emphasis:

  • Intellectual capital speaks both to knowledge that is pertinent to innovation's direct purpose and also to where it is located: in humans, structures, and customers. "Human capital" possesses knowledge that is pertinent (and knows how to apply it to innovation's purpose). "Customer capital” refers to mutual learning between customers and practitioners. "Structural capital" provides for organizing and distributing knowledge for the purpose of innnovation.[44]
  • Clayton Christensen's conceptualization of "jobs" that customers need to get done.
  • Many platforms and models for business intelligence and analytics. (Innovation's thematic strands of pertinent knowledge could serve as framing for "innovation intelligence," as a special version of business intelligence.)
  • "T-shaped people" as a depiction of individual practitioners possessing deep subject-specific knowledge plus general knowledge.


Cognitive Processing Emphasis:

  • Ken Robinson's "evaluative-generative" coupling with varying media of expression.
  • Roger Martin's model of "integrative thinking"; [45]
  • From design firm, IDEO, an approach that features moving from concrete observations, to abstract insights, to concrete opportunities; [46]
  • Tim Brown builds upon the above IDEO approach within the explication of "design thinking"; [47]
  • Former Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley and co-author Ram Charan speak of "actionable" insights.
  • Behaviors linked to specified "discovery skills" and "associational thinking" within The Innovator's DNA. [48]
  • Processing features of "knowledge management" (e.g., explicating what is tacit; finding simplicity on the far side of complexity; drawing on metaphors and symbols).
  • Many insights related to emerging findings of neuroscience (e.g, Now You See It, The Other 90%, Thinking Fast & Slow).

External conditions:

  • the system presented in Disciplined Dreaming "to nurture, manage, and grow creative capacity" for any size organization; [49]
  • the system that supported Procter & Gamble's corporate-wide paradigm shift (and ten-year doubling of share price), including strategic use of teams, as led by A. G. Lafley; [50]
  • cultural models such as the Netflix culture of "freedom and responsibility," aimed at continuing "to attract and nourish innovative people" who embody a specified set of behaviors and skills. [51]
  • A New Culture of Learning for a World of Constant Change (Thomas & Seely Brown)
  • Innovation "ecosystem" features (e.g, from Judy Estrin, Steven Johnson).
  • Access to structural capital and other forms of intelligence.
  • Crutchfield and Grant's Forces for Good.
  • Cultural features (e.g, from Stanford University's d.school, Netflix, Small Giants, Disciplined Dreaming, Power of Social Innovation)

Internal conditions:

  • Passion (e.g., from Steve Case, Thomas & Seely Brown, David Kelley, and neuroscientist Rober Cooper).
  • Bruner's On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
  • Creative Confidence (e.g., from David Kelley)
  • "Mindfulness" (associated with skilled meditation or other means for focusing consciousness).
  • From neuroscience, a variety of internal conditions are associated with generative thinking, from effects of caffeine to the primacy of goals.
  • See discussion of thought leaders' thematic internal and external conditions here.

 

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Principle #4:

Why do practitioners pursue innovation's creation of value for others?
Practitioner passion and vision are fundamental to the personal-level "why" of pursuing innovation's methods of generating change-catalyzing offerings of value to others. The practice is fundamentally "inner-directed and other-focused."


Even as resource leverage requires that value is determined by customers, a practitioner's values and/or passion are fundamental to the imagination and perseverance that bringing a new offering to fruition demands. Outward-focus (toward customers) is combined with inner-direction.[51-1]

The description of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's drive to connect with value to customers may represent a particularly good example of the formula of outward-focus combined with inner-direction:

"He's spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments … He didn't build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his. … It grew because it gave people something they wanted. … " [53]


If knowledge is innovation's raw material, passion and conviction may represent its vital sources of energy. Psychic reward, inspiration, engagement, and/or meaning supports work that is uncertain and typically demanding: [54]

C. K. Prahalad advised a cohort of fellows pursuing social innovation: “Don’t do it ... for morality only. Do it because intellectually it is the most exciting thing that a young person can aspire to.” [55]

And Drucker noted: "Innovators … need to be temperamentally attuned to the innovative opportunity. It must be important to them and make sense to them. Otherwise they will not be willing to put in the persistent, hard, frustrating work that successful innovation always requires."[56]

Social innovation thought and action leader, John W. Gardner, held that innovators reserve their independence for what matters to them. [57]


“People, passion, and perseverance” …

For practitioner teams of any size, shared conviction in the vision of "what could be" is fundamental to day-to-day inclusive, collaborative participation in the production of innovation's hypotheses, including its steady stream of "how" hypotheses.

Faith that a personal vision for "changing the world" will connect with customers can generate a model of what AOL co-founder, Steve Case, has called “people, passion, and perseverance.”[58] A startup team’s shared belief in, and passion for, a vision of "what could be" provides the hook for the perseverance associated with an “overnight success” that can be “ten years in the making.”

Similarly, within large operational teams, shared understanding of, and commitment to, a lever-based vision and business model can support highly ambitious change. For the operation that eradicated smallpox, Larry Brilliant, conveyed the power of a shared operation-wide vision (among a team of 150,000) for applying a set of process levers. [59]

Wendy Kopp's drive to connect future U.S. leaders with the cause of schooling opportunity for poor children by way of Teach for America provides another seeming example of the formula of people, passion, and perseverance. Kopp's driving and passionate insight-based vision resonated with a veritable movement of "like-valued" new-college-graduate practitioners.

For Teach for America, as with many, many other examples of new offerings, practitioners' shared conviction in the value proposition is integral to producing change-catalyzing new value.


“Responsible Creativity" …

It's important to note that a connection between practitioner and customer values is morally neutral, as is innovation's overall power.

From a standpoint of innovation's fundamentals, practitioners' driving values can vary widely -- e.g., personal wealth, adventure, ethics, “creating,” etc. As long as that value is driving and associated with an offering that connects with value to customers, it can lead to innovation hypotheses that catalyze change. From a methodological standpoint, the hypotheses are effective if they offer value that catalyzes change, even if that change is not in customers' best interests or society's collective interest.

Increasingly, thought and action leaders call attention to the connection between innovation's personal-level why and its societal effects, as with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's coinage of "responsible creativity." Also, from Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi:

"(F)or better or worse, our (collective) future is now closely tied to our human creativity." ... "It would help if we realized the awesome responsibility of this new role."[57-2]

 

Comments:

a. The Combination of Mastery and Passion --     

When passion is combined with mastery of innovation's methods, it seems more likely to lead to levels of resource leverage that have made innovation and entrepreneurship noteworthy.

Indeed, one of the benefits of mastery is the fundamental understanding that the offering must provide customer utility. The absence of co-existent value -- for innovator and customers -- can distinguish invention's technical advance from innovation's productivity advance.


From virtual world to actual world ...
Game designer Jane McGonigal has argued that accumulated hours playing on-line games within a virtual world can develop the practitioner "super powers" capable of changing the actual world. Such practitioner super powers seem to relate, at least partially, to practitioner passion and value: "urgent optimism; weaving a tight social fabric; blissful productivity; and a desire for epic meaning." [60] Thus, if games do not already support innovation's channeling of passion toward the creation of value for others, designing them to do so may represent a ready opportunity for more complete super powers.

 

b. Passion as the means to discerning imagination ... within a new culture of learning for a world of constant change

Within the framework for a new culture of learning (for the 21st century's world of constant change), set forth by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, passion is the starting point for learning and for the cultivation of discerning imagination:

"The passion of the learner is the greatest source of inspiration but also the largest reservoir of tacit knowledge," and tacit understanding "relates most deeply to the associations and connections among various pieces of knowledge." [60-1]

See more.

Thomas and Seely Brown describe the new culture of learning as the effective fusion of two core elements:

i. The massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything (and is constantly changing).

ii. A bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.

The authors note that the first element's extensive new tools and resources "make play, questioning, and imagination the bedrock of the new culture of learning." Further, when this information network element is fused with a bounded environment element, the fusion can create a "powerful" medium for learning and action. But that power is dependent most fundamentally on passion (especially when it is engaged with others who share the passion).

Indeed, the authors argue that "students [of all ages] learn best when they follow a passionate interest within the constraints of bounded environments, where there is complete freedom to act within those constraints."[60-3] Innovation's first principles could provide such constraints for learning and especially for the cultivation of fertile imagination and its applications. The first principle alone -- creating value for others -- might provide a worthwhile constraint.

Thomas and Seely Brown hold that their overall framework is based on a type of learning that exists informally today (especially within "massively multiplayer online games") but is "essentially invisible" because it is so different from the learning "of education theorists." The authors argue that this type of learning is needed broadly to "keep up with our rapidly changing world."

The authors also note, however, that "discovering one's passion can be complicated."[60-4] Indeed, one author described a university-level course designed to prepare honors students for a capstone thesis, in which the students' greatest challenge was identifying a passion. And with this, a learner's early practice with innovation's methods could support exploration toward the discovery of passions.

In general, there may be particularly rich opportunity to set up innovation's teaching and learning in such a way that it is aligned with Thomas and Seely Brown's broader framework, especially among youth and within post-secondary settings. (See more about this within the introduction to this site's Learning Applications.)

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c. A methodogical dimension of "responsibility" ... again within a world of constant change

Some thought leaders hold that a moral perspective is as functional within individual engagement as it is important collectively.

For example, given the hypothesis that digital technological evolution and development in 2025 will happen at least one-thousand times as fast as in 2010, it will be "harder to imagine an attractive future in concrete terms," and character strengths will represent a precondition for engagement.[60-5]

 

 

Concluding Principle:

"(I)t is not exhortation they need but instruction.” [61]

The societal siren call for innovation amounts to a call for realizing greater yield from human resources, given that humans are innovation's prime movers. In other words, it calls for social innovation -- offerings that catalyze a shift in human behavior and capability with respect to innovation's methods.

A "knowledge" economy may be more precisely a "creativity"/"innovation" economy, linked directly to resource leverage. Knowledge of many levels and types is needed, but is not enough. The seeming imperative is to channel knowledge toward innovation's purpose, both directly and indirectly.

Moreover, for the domain of production systems, both commercial and social, the call for capability is inclusive. As but one example:

“(L)eading innovation is something vital for every employee to master – from the CEO to the department manager to the frontline worker.” [62]

In one way or another, it seems that learning must represent the primary catalyst for change in innovation capability. In pursuing such change, there is potential not only to link innovation's first principles with its array of models and tools and other directly-related resources for practice. There is potential also to link innovation's overall teaching and learning with broader frameworks (e.g., cultural models that speak to a constantly changing world).

The prototype of innovation's first principles is to suggest that a high-quality set of principles is feasible. Sketches of learning applications are to suggest that a developed set of principles could provide an important dimension to the quest for the human capability that is fundamental to innovation.

See discussion of an innovation learning system -- grounded and connected by first principles -- within this site's sketches of sample Learning Applications.

**

 

GO TO SOURCES & APPLICATIONS FOR:

  • Sample Learning Applications
  • Social Innovation Examples -- viewed through the lens of the prototype principles
  • Prototype Sources -- bibliography & discussion of themes

GO BACK TO "HOME"

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NOTES:

[1-1] Jean Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, (1821), Book I, Chapter 7

[1-2] Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (HarperBusiness, 1985), p 252

[1-3] Drucker, 1985, p 27

[1-4] C.K. Prahalad, video, Keynote Address at AcumenFund 2009 Fellows Graduation, acumenfund.org

[1-5] Say, Book I, Chapter I

[1-6] A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan, The Game-Changer, (Crown Business: New York, 2008)

[1-7] Michael E. Gerber, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, (HarperCollins Publisher: New York, 2008), p 50

[1-8] Say, Book I, Chapter I

[2] Say, Book I, Chapter VII

[2-1] Roger L. Martin and Sally Osberg expressed this in terms of the social entrepreneur's aims: "(T)he social entrepreneur aims for value in the form of large-scale, transformational benefit that accrues either to a significant segment of society or to society at large." Roger L. Martin & Sally Osberg, "Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition," Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2007

[2-2] Drucker, Managing in the Next Society, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2002), p 109

[3-1] Say, Book I, Chapters I and VII

[4] University of Michigan Erb Institute video archives, “Is Consumerism Sustainable?” (2007)

[5] Jeffrey Sachs, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010

[6] Roberto Verganti, “User-Centered Innovation is Not Sustainable,” The Conversation, Harvard Business Review, blogs.hbr.com, March 19, 2010;

Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, “The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value,” Harvard Business Review, January-February, 2011

[6-1] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium, (HarperCollins: New York, 1993), p 62

[7-1] Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, (Harvard University Press, 1986), p 13. The paradigmatic (logico-scientific) mode of cognitive processing and paradigmatic imagination contrast with the narrative mode of cognitive processing and “narrative imagination” ("gripping drama").

[7-2] Quoting biologist R.W. Gerard (1946) in David Henry Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Howard Gardner, Changing the World, A Framework for the Study of Creativity, ch 1, "A Framework for the Study of Creativity," (Praeger Publishers: Westport, CT, 1994), p 38

[7-3] Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, (HarperCollins: New York, 1996), p 116

[7-4]Quoting David Henry Feldman (1988, 1989) in David Henry Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Howard Gardner, Changing the World, A Framework for the Study of Creativity, ch 1, "A Framework for the Study of Creativity," (Praeger Publishers: Westport, CT, 1994), p 35

[7-5] Lafley and Charan, p 109

[7-6] Claus von Zastrow, "New Designs for Learning: A Conversation with IDEO Founder David Kelley," Report of interview sponsored by Learning First Alliance, January 20, 2010 (http://www.learningfirst.org/visionaries/DavidKelley)

[8] C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan, The New Age of Innovation, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2008), p 11

[9]Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, (New York Riverhead Books, 2010), p 159

[10]Judy Estrin, Closing the Innovation Gap, Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy, (McGraw-Hill, 2009)

[11] Say, Book 1, Chapter 1

[12] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, (Harper & Brothers: New York and London, 1947), p 81

[13] Drucker, 1985

[14] Drucker, 1985,

[15]Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, (Harper Business, 1993), pp 59-60

[15-1] As one example, see Dean Kamen comments within Jason Koebler, "Segway Inventor: Fear of Failure Kills U.S. Innovation," U.S. News, November 2, 2011, http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/stem-education/2011/11/02

[15-2] After the completion of this prototype, I discovered Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen's differentiation between "innovative entrepreneurs" and "entrepreneurs": "Innovative entrepreneurs start companies that offer unique value to the market" as opposed to someone opening "a dry cleaner or a mortgage business ...." See Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's DNA, (Harvard Business Review Press: Boston, 2011), p 5. Although this distinction did not constitute a theme, it's notable. Also, in 1985, Drucker used essentially the same "unique value" basis to distinguish between small business and an entrepreneurial small business. Thus, the same fundamental distinction is labeled differently, since again, for Drucker entrepreneurship coincided with innovation -- opening a new dry cleaner would not constitute entrepreneurship, and "innovative" would be redundant as an adjective for "entrepreneur." Both sources held that large organizations can be "entrepreneurial."

[16-1] Thomas A. Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge (Currency Books, 2001), p 17

[16-2] Stewart, Intellectual Capital (Currency Doubleday: New York, 1997), p ix

[16-3] Stewart, 1997, p 76

[16-4] Stewart, 1997, p 76

[16-5] Stewart, 1997, p 108

[16-6] Stewart, 1997, p 110

[17] Stewart, 2001, pp 192-193

[18] Tim Brown, Change by Design (HarperCollins, New York: 2009), pp 3-7

[19] Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation, (John Wiley & Sons: 2010), p 246

[20] Brown, p 4

[20-1] Brown, p 4

[21] "The Entrepreneur of the Decade," Inc. Magazine, April 1, 1989

[22] Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2011), p 362

[23] David Bornstein, How to Change the World, Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, (Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2004), p 119

[24] Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation, (John Wiley & Sons: 2010)

[25] In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Blank establishes this model of the business model as a set of hypotheses.

[26] "Entrepreneur for Society," Bill Drayton and Ashoka, 2006, DVD

[27] Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm (Collins Business Essentials: New York, 2006);

Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation, (Currency Doubleday: New York, 2005)

[28] See, for example: Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, (Collins Business Essentials: New York, 2005) and Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2008)

[28-1] David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality, Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2009)

[29] Steven G. Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany (cafepress.com: Foster City, CA, 2006)

[30] "Startup Genome Report 01, A new framework for understanding why startups succeed," May28, 2011, http://startupgenome.cc/pages/startup-genome-report-1

[30-1] Tim Brown, Change by Design (Harper Business, New York, 2009);

Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2007);

[30-2] Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital, (Currency Doubleday: New York, 1997)

[31] Jeff DeGraff and Shawn E. Quinn, Leading Innovation (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2007)

[32] Stephen Goldsmith, The Power of Social Innovation (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010), p 105

[33] C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan, The New Age of Innovation, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 2008), p 11

[33-1] Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, (Crown Publishing Group: New York, 2011)

[33-2] Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, A New Culture of Learning, Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, (Create Space: Lexington, KY, 2011)

[33-3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, (HarperCollins: New York, 1996), p 95

[34] “Reflecting on Prahalad Reflecting on Drucker,” by Rick Wartzman, BusinessWeek.com, 4/23/10

[34-1] Roger L. Martin & Sally Osberg, "Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition," Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2007

[34-2] Jeff Dyer, with Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's DNA, (Harvard Business Press: Boston, 2011)

[34-3] Said of Bill Drayton by McKinsey & Company manager in: David Bornstein, How to Change the World, Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, (Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2004), p 53

[34-4] Drucker, 1985

[34-5] Seeing differently: insights on innovation / edited with an introduction by John Seely Brown. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, c1997

[35] Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, (Harvard University Press, 1986), p 13

[36] Bruner, 1986, p 13

[37] Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p 300

[38] Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds, Learning to Be Creative (Capstone Publishing: UK, 2011)

[38-1] Jerome S. Bruner, On Knowing, Essays for the Left Hand, (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1962), p 20

[38-2] Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education, (Harvard University Press, 1960), p 28

[39] “Entrepreneurship in American Higher Education,” A Report from the Kauffman Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education, Kauffman Foundation, p 12

[39-1] Donald A. Norman, JND.org

[39-2] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium, (HarperCollins: New York, 1993), p 270

[39-3] Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, (Harper & Row: New York, 1967)

[39-4] Csikszentmihalyi,

[40] This term is borrowed from David Kelley, founder of design firm IDEO and Stanford University faculty member.

[41-1] Lafley and Charan, 2008, p 230

[41-2] John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society, (Norton, New York, 1963), p 38

[41-3] Csikszentmihalyi, 1993

[42] Tom Kelley, 2005, p 29

[42-1] As just one example, see Howard Gardner, "Creative Lives and Creative Works," in The Nature of Creativity," Robert J. Sternberg, ed., (Cambridge University Press: 1988), ch 12

[43 ] Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (HarperBusiness, 1985)

[44] Thomas A. Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge (Currency Books, 2001), p 192

[45] Roger Martin, 2007

[46] Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, "Bootcamp Bootleg," http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf

[47] Tim Brown, 2009

[48] Dyer, 2011

[49] Josh Linkner, Disciplined Dreaming, (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2011), p x

[50] Lafley and Charan

[51] "Netflix Freedom & Responsibility Culture," http://blackswan7.com/resources/netflix-culture-slideshare-presentation/

[51-1] The notion of inner-directed and other-focused is borrowed by Robert E. Quinn, Change the World

[52] Michael E. Gerber, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, (HarperCollins Publisher: New York, 2008)

[53] Time Magazine, January 2011, "2010 Person of the Year"

[54] The reference to “psychic reward” is borrowed from “Social Enterpreneurship: The Case for Definition,” by Roger L. Martin & Sally Osberg, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2007

[55] C. K. Prahalad to 2009 Acumen Fund Fellows, video, acumenfund.org

[56] Drucker, 1985, p 138

[57] John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society, (Norton, New York, 1963)

[57-2] Csikzsentmihalyi, 1996, pp 5-6

[58] Steve Case, video, Feb. 24, 2010, Stanford University, ecorner.stanford.edu

[59] Larry Brilliant, March 16, 2011, “Sustaining Humanity,” 10th Annual Wege Lecture, University of Michigan

[60] Jane McGonigal, February 2010, "Gaming can make a better world," www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

[60-1] Thomas and Seely Brown, p 85 and p 82

[60-3] Thomas and Seely Brown, p 79

[60-4] Thomas and Seely Brown, p 79

[60-5] Applied positive psychology : improving everyday life, health, schools, work, and society, edited by Stewart I. Donaldson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, (Psychology Press/Routledge: New York, 2011)

[61] 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.” John W. Gardner, Self-renewal; the individual and the innovative society (Harper & Rowe, New York, 1964)

[62] DeGraff and Quinn, 2007, p 6

[63] Thomas A. Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge (Currency, 2001), p 184