Blog

It's January of a new year! It's the time for new year's resolutions and fresh resolve to achieve those goals that remained elusive at the end of last year. Achieving a challenging objective often requires taking a new perspective. Since my new year's resolution is to blog more, I wanted to start out the year with a blog about 12 key areas where we've seen first-hand, working with organizations around the globe, the impact that taking a new perspective can have.

A well-known saying, probably misattributed to Einstein, says that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." If there's an objective you had trouble achieving last year, maybe this year you need to come at it from a new perspective.

Innovation relies on new perspective. We’ve found there are two ways to get that: collaboration and data. Either one can free our attention from the daily productivity push and spur an innovation.

Innovation requires collaboration, but due to the current state of our filter bubbles, collaboration is stuck in a rut. Data science utilizing knowledge graphs and team and portfolio optimization software can help us climb out. It can increase the scale, the intentionality, and the nuance of how we collaborate. With the right data and algorithms, we can use software to optimize our teams and facilitate innovation.

I recently moved from Boston to Oklahoma City. My wife got offered a tenure-track position at the University of Oklahoma, which was too good an opportunity for her career for us to pass up. Prior to the move, I had done a lot of traveling in the US, but almost exclusively on the coasts, so I didn't know what living in the southern Midwest would bring, and I was a bit trepidatious. It has turned out to be a fantastic move. There is a thriving high-tech startup culture here. I've been able to hire some great talent out of the University, and we're now planning to build up a big Exaptive home office here. Even more important, I was delighted to find a state that was extremely focused on fostering creativity and innovation. In fact, the World Creativity Forum is being hosted here this week, and I was asked to give a talk about innovation. As I thought about what I wanted to say, I found myself thinking about . . . cowboys.

The Einstellung effect is a psychological phenomenon that changes the way we all come to solutions and impedes innovation.

Most innovation management software (a.k.a. innovation software) is focused on generating and curating ideas. Ideas are explicit. They’ve been articulated, inside your head at the very least. Implicit knowledge, the context of an idea, is where many big opportunities reside.

It’s hard to create effective interdisciplinary teams or facilitate useful interdisciplinary exchanges. Research grants are increasingly calling for interdisciplinary collaboration as a requirement for funding. Interdisciplinary endeavors are popping up in academic settings and research foundations. Interdisciplinarity is a necessity for solving complex problems. But executing interdisciplinary collaboration is easier said than done.

Some problems are complicated. Finding a solution requires expertise and analysis, but the solution exists. Sky scrapers are complicated. Some problems are complex or even wicked. These problems have no solution. They’re too big, too slippery, too thorny.

I am constantly amazed by the energy and momentum around data science. Only a few years ago, I would be met with a blank stare when I told someone I planned on going to grad school for machine learning. Today, there is no need for my “it's like computer science, linear algebra, and statistics had a combined love child” analogy as most people instantly respond with “Oh, like AI!”

If your job is to get your company, team, or community to innovate, you know how organizational forces can make it hard to even try something new. Visualizing the resources available is an effective first step in overcoming some of those organizational forces. Simply being able to see, and show, what you have allows you to make a compelling case for marshaling resources and even spark some initial interactions in that direction.