Tag Archives: innovation

Culture of Innovation as Collective Intelligence

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We begin by assuming that cultures are created or emerge for a reason. Culture is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Great leaders begin by clearly defining and communicating why their organizations exist and create a culture that can achieve this purpose.

We propose that the power of organizational culture lies in its ability to create a collective intelligence that can acquire and apply knowledge and skills at a rate far exceeding that of any individual. This power derives from the organization’s shared tacit knowledge, collective explicit knowledge, acceptable behavior patterns, and the structure of the underlying social network that contains the organization’s social capital. A culture of innovation is the means by which great leaders create a collective intelligence capable of attaining the organization’s higher purpose in any environment.
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Identifying Potentially Disruptive Innovators

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Abstract: This paper examines new ways to extract more insights from the invention networks. We have developed a way of graphing the social influence, diversity of thought and creative intensity of inventors that visually identifies people that we believe are more likely to be the source of disruptive innovations and/or influential subject matter experts.

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Using IP to Visualize and Characterize an Organizations Capacity for Innovation

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Innovation is a social phenomenon. New knowledge is generated and propagates at the speed of trust in connected and motivated networks of creative people. Based on work done with the US Navy this talk explains how intellectual property can be used to visualize and characterize an organization’s capacity for innovation, and further, by making the invisible innovation networks visible, how these insights can guide Leadership in designing and implementing actions to increase innovation.
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Is Your Organization In a Rut?

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Organizations often find themselves becoming increasingly trapped by stale forms of thinking and doing business. They get into a rut! By the time they recognize the rut they are in, they may lack the ability to extract themselves from it. We propose a method for performing such an extraction by using concepts from a branch of cell biology called “epigenetics,” which studies the manner in which living cells are differentiated and stabilized by inner network processes and, in effect, also get into ruts. For the cell, stabilized ruts are necessary for development, but for the organization, they can lead to stagnation.
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What’s In Your Innovation Backbone?

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Authors: Dr. Morton Tavel, Mike Jensen, Gary Markovits, Devin Markovits & Blake Markovits

Facebook and Twitter are popular and successful examples of social media. Successes made possible by their underlying network structure. Networks enable connections and interactions that only a generation ago were impossible. Today, network insights are being used to understand complex systems such as disease epidemics, the electric grid and consumer adoption behaviors.

Why use networks to study innovation? No doubt innovation has a high degree of social content. Many innovations are created by the social interaction of groups and similarly, innovations are adopted by consumers in a socially based manner. So, it is reasonable that a network model should provide powerful insights.
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Bridging Small Worlds to Accelerate Innovation

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The President’s Council on Competitiveness defines innovation as the ability of an organization to deliver a continuous stream of relevant products and services to its customers; and according to the National Innovation Initiative, innovation is the “single most important factor in determining America’s success through the 21st century. ”But our nation and the defense industry are facing an innovation gap. Driven by the complexity, uncertainty, and pace of world events, the demand for innovations is outstripping our ability to provide them. To close the gap and meet demand, we must innovate smarter not harder.
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