Innovation's Organizing Principles

 

Learning Leverage

 

Summary

This page presents the type of expert knowledge drawn upon in arriving at the hypothesis for learning leverage by way of innovation's organizing principles:

• Lever of Intelligibility --


• Lever of Pedagogy --
  


• Lever of Embedded Personalized Guidance --

Interrelated levers, together supporting trajectories of learning over time. Addressed separately to speak to:

Nature of cognitive support & key sources

Complementary pedagogical structures & tools (existing and opportunities for new)

 

A developed, high-quality version of principles is envisioned as facilitating (or even enabling) an innovation learning system of the type that Peter Drucker associated in the 1980s with "an entrepreneurial society" and that John W. Gardner associated in 1964 with social renewal: a system "that would continuously reform itself in response to changing (social) 'ills' and would support the learner's continuous change and growth."[1]

 

 

Background:

An Innovation Learning System --

The voices of thought leaders Peter Drucker and John W. Gardner were particularly strong, as of at least the 25 years ago, for systematic cultivation of capable practice of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Drucker argued throughout the late decades of the 20th century and into the 21st 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." Drucker noted separately that it's organizing principles that allow for converting any skilled craft to a methodology or discipline by making the craft broadly teachable.[2]

In the 1960s John W. Gardner framed the instructional challenge for social innovation in a way that remains pertinent 50 years later and for innovation overall, not social innovation alone. Gardner envisioned an innovation learning system that would continuously reform itself, including in response to changing "ills," and would support the learner's continuous change and growth:

The classic question of social reform 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, but …[2-1]

The alternative (to indoctrination) is to develop skills, attitudes, habits of mind and the kinds of knowledge and understanding that will be the instruments of continuous change and growth on the part of the young person. Then we will have fashioned a system.[2-2]

Intensifying Need --

In 2013, a ramped-up version of these same types of criteria for a system that cultivates innovation capability are consistent with calls for "a new culture of learning," as advanced by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown -- a culture that cultivates the imagination for a world of constant change and where continuous learning is lifelong. Gardner's criteria are in keeping with the type of culture that Thomas and Seely Brown depict.[3]

Overall, present societal conditions amplify the need for advancing innovation capability. In fact, the conditions actually may signal that a new "social ill" is the need for such an advance and thus for facilitating levers vis-a-vis significant learning demands.

 

Lever of Intelligibility

Inform & Inspire --

Intelligibility is to inform and inspire. As Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues have noted:

"Humans can observe and/or be shown how activities of humans have changed the environment, fostering realization that other people may be able to also bring about change ... A sense of what has been done helps lead to a sense of what might be done as well as an appreciation for the kinds of established constraints that might affect imagined changes."[5-1]

Within an innovation learning system, intelligibility fits onto a developmental trajectory, with an initial access point for apprehending innovation and its practice that is supported by skillful unpacking and followed by experience-based opportunities for deepening understanding.

[BULLETS]Bruner referred to a "style of thought" that distinguishes any discipline and that requires time and participation for absorption. DEEP - WILLINGHAM

Intelligibility includes relating innovation's direct purpose and methods to the same for science and invention, as directly related complements. It also includes elaborating the varying modes of engaging innovation's methodology. This variation in engagement includes fundamentals such as:

• contributing overarching hypotheses of "what could be" as new value versus contributing to "how it could become" hypotheses within many different types of specialized roles (from engineering to marketing)


• differing pathways to innovation's direct purpose -- for example, one might begin with science and/or invention and proceed to innovation's translation of these advances, or one might begin with direct reference to the marketplace, etc.


• different innovation "personas," such as those elaborated by IDEO's Tom Kelley, which overlaps somewhat with the preceding types of variation, but delineates a generally different dimension of variation and overall perspective. [10-1]

The lens of organizing principles is intended to help launch and support a trajectory of intelligibility by providing continued grounding and connection. For example, first principles can serve as a home base for the many dimensions of variation on the same thematic fundamentals:

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Based on the prototype principles, constants would feature:

• the hypotheses for "what could be" as new value and "how it could become an offering accessible to customers and a catalyst of change";
• the existing knowledge that was connected to form each hypothesis (i.e., the evaluative-generative processing of the knowledge); and
• the offering's targets of change (adoption, behavior, capability).

As but a few examples of variables:

• The practitioner's original point(s) of reference. For example:
  
  • starting with new technical capability or new knowledge;
  • starting with observation of the production system (including "discovery" linked to customers or the marketplace);
  • starting with a goal (e.g., strategy or brief).


• The type of technology and its centrality to the offering (e.g., new technology versus "appropriate" technology versus new application of existing technology versus no central technology role).


• The level and types of knowledge connected.


• How a lever-based vision (overarching hypothesis) came about (its story), including the practitioner/s' version of creative processing and relevant internal and external conditions.


• Organizational context (size and type, including established organization versus start-up, etc.).


• Classification of leverage and scale (e.g., "disruptive," transformational, other), which could begin with an established classification system (e.g., by Jeff DeGraff and Shawn Quinn).

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Intelligibility also can help distinguish examples of excellence, including the examples' exemplication of driving fundamentals. The Kauffman Foundation's Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education described an analogy with music:

Departments of music composition cannot make students creative. But studying how great music is made can ignite whatever creativity students possess and help bring it to expression. The aim of studying composition is to unpack works of genius and excellence and thereby lead students beyond imitation to originality. … Making innovation intelligible may help students to imagine and engage in entrepreneurial activities they otherwise might not have considered.[5-2]

At this web site, the cases of social innovation viewed through the lens of the prototype first principles are intended to help convey the type of unpacking that first principles can support.

Additional focused support for intelligibility comes from this site's sketches for online video lecture(s) and an interactive online gallery of innovation profiles.

Consider the developmental demands indicated by Robert Sternberg's WICS model (Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized), which unpacks creativity's fundamentals[4]:

WICS Framework
This model elaborates creativity's ambitiousness in both breadth and level of abilities, and also speaks to its motivational element. It speaks to what Gardner called the "skills, attitudes, habits of mind ..." that can serve as "instruments of continous change and growth" on the part of individual practitioners.

Based on decades of scholarship, Sternberg's elaboration, which the model presents in reverse order of the WICS acronym, clarifies the high demand on abilities for producing any type of creativity:

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• "Creativity": "(W)ork that is novel (original, unexpected), high in quality, and appropriate (useful, meets task constraints)."
  

  "Creavity is the potential to produce and implement ideas that are novel and high in quality. (Creativity) goes beyond the creative intelligence ... in that it contains attitudinal, motivational, personality, and environmental components as well as the cognitive one of creative intelligence."

• Intelligence: "Creative work and the broad-based creativity underlying it, requires applying and balancing the three intellectual abilities -- creative, analytical, and practical -- all of which can be developed."
  
  "Creative ability is used to generate ideas. ... Without well-developed analytical ability, the creative thinker is as likely to pursue bad ideas as to pursue good ones ... Practical ability is used to translate theory into practice and abstract ideas into practical accomplishments. It is also used to convince other people that an idea is valuable ... (and) to recognize ideas that have a potential audience."
  
  
  • "Analytical ability involves analyzing, evaluating, judging, inferring, critiquing, and comparing and contrasting."
  • "Creative ability involves creating, designing, inventing, imagining, supposing, and exploring."
  • "Practical ability involves applying, using, implementing, contextualizing, and putting into practice."


• Wisdom: "People can be intelligent and even creative but also foolish."
  

  "(W)isdom is the application of intelligence, creativity, and knowledge as mediated by positive ethical values toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among (a) intrapersonal, (b) interpersonal, and (c) extrapersonal interests over the short and long term."

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2. Feasibility --
Fortunately, a self-reforming innovation learning system in keeping with the criteria that Drucker and Gardner put forth and in keeping with evolving conditions seems more feasible than ever at a time that it also seems more important than ever.

Feasibility does not mean easy, in terms of establishing a system or in terms of using it. However, feasibility is noteworthy given the seeming need and challenge of the objective and given the potential leverage from a system's grounding and connection.

Feasibility of Explicit Fundamentals --
Feasibility of a system seems connected fundamentally to feasibility of elaborating a set of innovation's enduring organizing principles. If the latter can be articulated, the result indeed would seem to lay the foundation for broad teachability and for an innovation learning system to "continuously reform itself":

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• The prototype of first principles aims to demonstrate this aspect of feasibility, based on themes that have spanned the past two centuries.


• Moreover, advances in knowledge from separate disciplines shines additional light on innovation's fundamentals:
  
  
  • One key example is research on creativity, including a focused body of scholarly work as of the second half of the 20th century, which now includes perspective from neuroscience. This strand of expert work, which includes the WICS framework, features insight regarding the nature of what Gardner referenced as the "skills, attitudes, habits of mind ..." associated with innovation's methodology.
  
  
  • Another example is the field of positive psychology. To begin, the "well-being" theory introduced by a co-founder of this field speaks to what humans "value" most fundamentally. That knowledge seems quite relevant to innovation's rooting in change by way of value. Indeed, at least two of the theory's five elements of value -- "engagement" and "meaning" -- are relevant to drivers of innovation methodology's practice.
  
  
  • The examples continue. What seems to be missing is a basic, shared framework of innovation's fundamentals that provides for situating and leveraging this pertinent and increasingly available specialized knowledge.
  
  


• Finally, with differentiated innovation models and tools situated within the framework of the prototype principles, there is potential to draw considerably greater value from these resources. (See this site's mapping of a sampling of such resources to the prototype first principles, at Principles Elaborated and/or Quick Reference.)

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Moreover, from multiple standpoints of feasibility, the overall U.S. schooling status quo seems poised for the added dimension of an innovation learning system. To explain:

Feasibility of Incorporating a System --
Since innovation as skilled craft has existed as a modifier to many disciplines, it makes sense to view innovation as methodology in the same way -- similar to the fit of research methods as a modifier of wide-ranging disciplines.

What remains is to convert innovation's craft to a methodology that is taught intentionally and systematically, such that learners and practitioners can be intentional, connected, and nimble across both time and place.

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To use higher education and social innovation as an example:

• Social innovation's purpose and methods are pertinent as a facet of perhaps a large majority of the existing range of disciplines within a comprehensive research university:
  
  
  • To begin, disciplines include those associated with social and public sector "industries" (e.g., Education, Public Health, Natural Resources, Economic Development, Government)
  
  
  • Other disciplines provide the complement of technology (e.g., Engineering, Information Science, Natural Science) and/or strategic management (e.g., Business, Law, Public Policy)
  
  
  • Still other disciplines provide crucial advances in understanding the human and social dynamics that are fundamental to innovation's function of resource leverage (e.g., Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Learning)
  
  


• If a shared framework of fundamentals of innovation's methods can, like research methods, both modify and integrate the differentiated knowledge resources, there is seeming additional opportunity for leveraging the knowledge. As but one example, given the posited "social differential" within this site's prototype organizing principles, which includes "behavior" and "capability" as focal types of change, the established field of Health Behavior & Education offers a model that might be readily translatable to other social industries, such as:
  
  
  • "Schooling Behavior & Education"
  • "Sustainability Behavior & Education"
  • "Civic Behavior & Education"
  • "Economic Mobility Behavior & Education"
  • "Innovation Behavior & Education"

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Feasibility of Learning --
The explicit framework of innovation's organizing principles shines light on the way that early and continuing exposure to innovation's fundamentals would seem to support personalized connections to a methodology that calls for developing high-level abilities and pertinent knowledge. (In fact, it's likely that a personalized connection is exactly the catalyst that has characterized skilled-craft practitioners' trajectories of development.)

See more.

For example, considering the prototype first principles:

Principles #1 & #2 --
The first two prototype principles emphasize the societal stage, or marketplace (including the social and public sector "marketplaces") in which change plays out: What is innovation, why does it matter, and how does it happen?

Given effective articulation of innovation's enduring fundamentals, virtually anyone can apprehend the nature of innovation's change dynamics. This includes understanding the nature of innovation's distinctive purpose and means of creative expression vis-a-vis the related purposes and means of science and invention.

• We all participate in the marketplace of change and resource leverage as customers, or not. For example, we may or may not participate in recycling. The articulation of fundamentals can shine light on how and why an accumulation of positive individual "customer" responses to an offering determines innovation's effect of resource leverage within myriad contexts.


• Plenty of concrete examples associated with the same fundamentals can allow for seeing innovation's driving constants vis-a-vis it many variations:
  
  
  • This includes seeing innovation's methodology as one that is based on particular types of hypotheses, which depend upon integrating and applying knowledge from virtually any field or discipline. This includes seeing the way that innovation's hypotheses relate to, and sometimes draw upon, advances in science and invention.
  
  
  • It also includes seeing that innovation's hypotheses are developed and deployed by those in widely-varying specialized roles throughout the commercial, social, and public sectors of a global economy.

Principles #3 & #4 --
The second two prototype principles emphasize the essential role of innovation practitioners in realizing innovation's function of resource leverage: How are effective innovation hypotheses developed and deployed, and why would practitioners engage the demands of creating change-catalyzing value for others?

• For the innovation hypotheses that connect knowledge that is widely known or knowable (e.g., the hypothesis that dogs can be trained to aid blind persons), examples can support understanding the nature of a practitioner's new connection of knowledge that is geared to innovation's direct purpose of making more fruitful use of existing resources. Structures for plentiful examples can make the nature of the hypotheses familiar.


• Further, the stories behind real-world examples can highlight practitioners' connection of personal value to societal purpose. The fundamental principles shine light on the way that the methodology calls for applying/expressing personal strengths toward interests that are personal but also extend beyond oneself.
  
  For structured opportunities to learn innovation's methodology, the exploration of intrinsic motivators would be built into the fundamentals to be learned.
  For humans in general, this value of "engagement" (of personal strengths) and "meaning" (connecting to purpose outside of oneself) is associated with "uncoerced choice." It's associated with experiences worth doing for the sake of this value alone.[3-3]

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Feasibility of Beginning Early --
Peter Drucker noted that innovation's function and practice "pertains to all activities of human beings other than those one might term 'existential' rather than 'social.'"

A range of resources indicate that the methodology does not require sophisticated knowledge. It only requires deep and "pertinent" knowledge of a transactions-based subject, along with thinking skills, and personal value for advancing the subject's productivity. This allows for a vast practice ground, including causes that are knowable as early as elementary and middle school years (e.g, school bullying, environmental causes of widely varying types, community service).

The stage established by fundamentals -- essentially beginning with "do re mi" -- allows for a gradual-but-intentional scaffolding of concepts, especially if the concepts are linked to plentiful examples and if the scaffolding includes opportunities for hands-on exploration and practice with subjects that are knowable and personally meaningful.

3. Value --
Innovation's fundamentals not only can help demystify its creative purpose and expression, the fundamentals make it clear that part of what is to be learned is a personal connection. By calling for engagement of personal strengths and interests, hands-on exploration could support learners in finding their strengths and interests.

For learner "customers," the value of this combination -- accessible understanding of innovation's fundamentals of purpose and practice, plus direct experiences of personalized value within early and continued hands-on learning -- is likely to be quite fundamental to the prospect for advancing innovation capability for society. It fits with innovation's dynamics of change by way of value.

Using the same WICS core components further as a framework, complementary perspective from additional expert resources speaks to the way that an innovation learning system would seem to provide support for the fundamental challenges of advancing capability:

See more.

Creativity --
For the attitudinal, motivational, and personality aspects of this WICS component, Sir Ken Robinson has described that individuals' strengths-interests intersection can be "buried deep."[4-2] In the U.S. it seems safe to say that intrinsic motivators have been elusive for a large proportion of learners, especially in terms of relating strengths and interests to schooling and work.

This includes the population of high academic achievers. As one example, in A New Culture of Learning, one of the authors described that, for his UCLA students, coming up with a personal passion was the greatest challenge in preparing for capstone thesis projects.

Similarly, Wendy Kopp drew upon her understanding of this valued-but-elusive intersection with regard to her intellectually high-achieving peers. In founding Teach for America, Kopp hypothesized that many of her peers would be interested in serving in a teaching corps, as they were otherwise entering fields of work in which they had little interest because "they couldn't think of anything else to do."[4-3]

For innovation's lead change agents in particular, recent work by Tony Wagner has reinforced the factor of intrinsic motivation within trajectories of developing overall innovation capability. Wagner has hypothesized that finding intrinsic motivators can support broad access to what he has called seven "survival skills" associated with the 21st century, which includes the combination of intellectual and creative abilities.[4-4]

Effective learning tools for scaffolding innovation's practice, almost by definition, would serve simultaneously as a new type of structure for exploring personal interests and motivators. This feature of the methodology -- its call for personalization -- represents an interesting opportunity for individuals that is associated with a pressing need for society.

Intelligence --
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham argues that the very difficulty of learning the intellectual abilities that Sternberg associates with creativity is the reason that students "don't like school": ~"We're naturally curious but not naturally good thinkers." Willingham argues that the difficulty is the reason that schooling calls for skillful instructional conditions, allowing for students' "successful thinking." [4-1]

But Willingham holds too that "meaning" supports successful thinking.[4-5] And it is in this way that innovation methodology's call for connecting personal strengths and interests to societal needs can provide seeming support for cognitive demands. Again, "well being" theory holds that both "engagement" (of strengths and interests) and "meaning" (a purpose beyond oneself) represent "uncoerced choice," or value for its own sake. [4-7]

The methodology provides the inherent benefit of both personalizing and contextualizing academic content, in real time -- not as a remote concept associated with future pay-off of today's real-time school work. With this, earlier exposure seems better (beginning no later than middle school years) as does regular exposure. In particular, early hands-on experiences of catalyzing positive change -- no matter how modest the setting or how modest one's personal role -- could support whole new ways of seeing, including potentially new ways of seeing school work.

Wisdom --
Finally, the challenge associated with developing what Nobel prize recipient Daniel Kahneman has called "responsible creativity" is especially important for an innovation learning system in light of the moral neutrality of innovation's driving fundamentals.

The global "innovation threshold" depicted by Christian calls for channeling creative expression toward what the WICS model describes as "the achievement of a common good through a balance among (a) intrapersonal, (b) interpersonal, and (c) extrapersonal interests over the short and long term."

And this WICS element, too, is not obviously accessed among would-be innovators. It calls for instruction. In the 1960s, Gardner noted:

"(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."[4-6]

For this element, too, it seems that effective curricula and tools for understanding innovation's fundamentals (e.g., why innovation matters) would, or could, serve simultaneously as tools that support individuals in connecting interests and strengths to a larger context of purpose.

Never before has society possessed such rich resources for this task.

 

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Harnessing Both Expert Resources & Personal Intrinsic Motivators --
For many learners, the opportunity to develop capability with innovation's methodology is likely to represent quite a positive opportunity. And it may be precisely because of this that a grounded and connected innovation learning system -- one that leverages the treasure trove of existing-but-dispersed resources -- stands a chance of addressing the societal "ill" of needed advances in capability. Grounding and connection establishes fertile conditions for learning, and the fit of personal engagement and meaning is likely catalytic.

These interwoven change catalysts of learning and value are in keeping with the prototype principles' "social differential," where greater yield can require change in behavior and/or capability, beyond basic adoption.

The greatest promise of a dynamic, self-reforming innovation learning system, made possible by the wealth of existing-but-dispersed expert resources, may boil down to its provision for simultaneously:

• personalizing early and continuing experiences of learning about innovation's purpose and practice;
• contextualizing academic learning overall by way of personal purpose, for higher yielding academic and life experiences.

 

See this site's learning application sketches as concrete possibilities for using an innovation learning system.

 

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