streaming innovation

Boy, did time get away from me. On a positive note, I attended a presentation by John Adams of The Martin Agency this week. He spoke on the ‘Language of Business,’ and blasted the anesthetizing effect of the words that flow during the business day. One point he demonstrated was the dearth of poetry about business that exists in the literary world today. He pointed to one bright spot, Love and Profit by James Autry. Mr. Adams’s presentation inspired me to take a stab at this, too. So, I wrote the poem that follows during an inspired Friday night moment.

 

Success

 

Success. 

 

He walked in and surveyed.

The room was bright, 

brighter than it had been 

when electricians and drywall hangers,

foremen and painters

convened their meetings

to produce this multi-dimensional canvas. 

Workspace to make work 

passion.

 

Was this success?

It sat deep in his journal

of personal goals and personages. 

A brighter time for him

there was not before

and had not been since.

This build-out was his

monument to the work that came before.

Building from an idea.

 

Success is the product of experiment.

An experiment his idea –

that care and compassion

through growth and contraction

could walk hand-in-hand

with profits and satisfaction. 

He stepped out to grow and daring

to take a risk.

In that there was no question.

 

Success.

Along the way in this blog, you will have the opportunity to participate in exercises and experiences involving innovation energy, beginning with this one. This photo and the one will find further down come from one of the more recent architectural by-products of innovation energy. As the month of November moves along, the structure will be further revealed. Learn its identity on U.S. Thanksgiving Day, 27 November. See if you can identify it before then. Email or post a response here, providing your guess. Anyone guessing correctly will receive a copy of a recent article on innovation measurement, and will be in line for an early copy of a paper to be released this winter on innovation as energy. Guess early, guess often!

All too often, when we read or hear about it, innovation is referred to as a mindset, a process, or an outcome. The consequence of these perspectives is discrete, finished product. We talk about producing an innovation, or “innovating” as its own, self-referencing action. In one of its current advertising themes, IBM tackles the problem of innovation, suggesting that companies stop thinking - or “ideating” - about it begin doing it. All of these examples presume that innovation is somehow independent of the other activities companies and people are engaged in.

An alternative to this deterministic approach is to think of innovation as energy. What do I mean by that? Like the sunlight, wind, heat, and other forms, energy flows constantly. As humans - and other animals like the beaver, nature’s engineer - we strive to constrain, control, create, and benefit from energy. However, all we can say is the degree to which we make productive use of energy. The unused portion is lost to us as the energy flows somewhere else or ultimately dissipates. Innovation can be viewed, like these natural forms, as energy, flowing from person to person, organization to organization, region to region - and everywhere else.

Eastern philosophers have long regarded energy as an elemental force of the human condition. These forces course through and between people, fueling the basic ingredients of life. Innovation is a basic ingredient of organizational life — energy  engaging a plasmatic substrate within companies and organizations that enables them to learn, develop, and grow. What does this mean for innovation as an activity of people in organizations?

Two consequences most immediately: 1) in its truest and most productive state, innovation is not a directed process, and 2) all organizations are capable of amazing levels of innovative by-products once they learn to harness its energy more effectively. This blog will address these two concepts in many different ways, with the aim of creating openness in the ways in which companies adopt innovation practices and program — letting the energy in, so to speak.

I have hestitated for a few months with the beginnings of this ‘blogsite.’ This represents both a relaunch of the Provance Asymmetric and new beginnings for a business that helps companies achieve gains in market and financial performance by applying innovation intelligence to competitive strategies. The field of innovation is enormous, so enormous that little agreement exists as to what the term actually means. Even limiting our mental search of this definition to business - or perhaps more appropriately organizational - innovation yields little concurrence among experts, practitioners, and the newly indoctrinated alike. The confluence of several events and insights brought me to this point, relaunching the website for my company - Provance Asymmetric - as a blog. In doing so, I have settled on the title Streaming Innovation, which reflects the influences of Eastern philosophy, systems dynamics, technological advancement, and the human condition on my perspective and Provance Asymmetric’s methods regarding development and adoption of organizational innovation strategies.