Innovation Portal
March 15, 2010 | Filed Under Read Today! | Leave a Comment
I have been thinking a lot about innovation as we participate in the Department of Education Innovation Portal
We submitted two ideas:
- LiteracyCenter.Net –completing our FREE Prk-1 curriculum and making it available in more than ten home languages; and
- The Adolescent Nation Project –a middle school curriculum that supports reading through music, cooking, and project-based experiences and exercises.
For the past ten years, I have been in the business of innovating. I have a lot experience as a designer and an early adopter of education technology. I am a great team player. I have very strong ideas. For some reason, I seem to draw fire from the lowest common denominator even while I inspire the participation and best performance out of the brightest minds. It is a curse and a blessing.
This recent experience has forced me to think about what really works and doesn’t work in innovation. I am thinking about large commercial efforts like Google, Apple as well as medical device companies we have worked with. Successful innovators have certain things in common: they create small teams of the best people. They work together for a common good. They don’t squabble even though there might be tension if someone tries to take credit for the innovation. The success of the innovation is the only goal. Innovative people focus all their efforts on achieving the goal. The process goes something like this:
- Idea;
- Prototype;
- Test with target audience;
- Collect data;
- Revise prototype;
- Allow larger audience access to Beta V.1.
Projects often fail when the group gets hung up on ideation. This is the fun part because people can sit around and talk endlessly about ideas. Some call it brainstorming others call it mind mapping. We call it a waste of time. For real innovation to take place, ideas need to be thoroughly fleshed out before the team assembles so each strong player can add something powerful to the mix. Innovation is about constructing something with extreme forces–the best and the brightest. The child psychiatrist does not question the expertise of the programmer any more than the programmer questions the expertise of the interface designer. Each person on the small team has a role and each role is essential to the development of the innovation. Including members of the target audience on the innovation team saves time and helps focus the goal.
After developing these guidelines for innovation, I began to question if it would be possible to do this in a group or online setting. I think group chats can help bring designers, innovators, and end users together. An astute innovator can draw a lot of information from these kinds of interactions but what happens when you try to codify the process the way the Department of Education and other agencies are currently doing?
The Innovation Portal has helped me in several ways. It has helped me articulate our ideas and run them by a larger audience. It has helped me identify potential innovation partners. Unfortunately, it has also exposed our ideas to unqualified criticism and ugly bashing—flames so strong they could destroy any idea before the prototype stage. These negative experiences waste time, confuse the entire community, and threaten to stop innovation in its tracks.
But what about innovating online? Can we create communities that drive innovation? Can the dream or vision of the Innovation Portal come to fruition? We like the idea of helping small non-profits tell their stories in an open and equal environment. We like the idea of the best ideas winning. We do not like the idea of larger corporate efforts stealing ideas and using them for their own profit.
I guess I have to say the jury is still out of this one. We hope parents and teachers and other great thinkers will join us in this grand experiment. We need the best and the brightest in our network and on our team.
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