Innovation in Practice Blog
Innovation and Design Thinking: The Challenges Ahead
Innovators have a rough road ahead. Despite the mandate for growth and the pleas for a more innovative culture, innovators face a lot of challenges from both inside and outside the organization. That was the major theme we explored this week in “Innovation and Design Thinking.”
Innovation and Design Thinking: The Best Practices of Teams
October brings the start of the U.S. baseball championship called the World Series. Baseball, like innovation, is a team sport, and success demands best practices out of the players and team managers. We thought it might be useful compare innovation and baseball given this week’s focus on teams.
Baseball is a diverse sport played in many countries The U.S professional league (called Major League Baseball) has 1200 players from 19 countries. Innovation also requires diversity. A best practice is to make innovation teams diverse in several ways: cross-functional, gender, experience, and cultural. Diverse teams harness the unique perspectives of the team members when applying the innovation and design thinking tools taught in this course.
By the way, how does this MOOC compare to Major League Baseball? We have over 2100 participants from 55 countries! Evidently, diversity is also a driver of learning.
Innovation and Design Thinking: Week One Final Thoughts
The terms innovation and design thinking are used so often in so many different contexts, often interchanged, and sometimes misused. What do they really mean? More importantly, how do they relate to each other?
These questions set the stage for “Innovation and Design Thinking,” the first Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) offered by the University of Cincinnati and the largest course ever taught since it was founded in 1819. Nearly two thousand students from around the world are participating.
Inside the Box: How to Use the Innovate! App
The new Innovate Inside the Box app facilitates the use of the creativity method, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It explains each of the five techniques (Subtraction, Division, Task Unification, Multiplication, and Attribute Dependency) and allows users to generate creative ideas and innovations. This app is ideal for readers of “Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.”
The app is available for iPad 2 or 3. Learn more about it at the Apple iTunes Preview.
Here’s how to Use the App:
Discover Where Creativity and Innovation Live.
Get the book today.
