Brain Rules Summary

In a Nutshell

Your brain evolved to need exploration and exercise. You are capable of remaining able to learn forever, but physical activity is crucial.

Two Minutes

Your brain may look like a big, soft walnut, but it’s really a beehive of activity.

[caption id="attachment_3086" align="alignright" width="300"] Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School[/caption]

Your brain believes you are still fighting for survival against a saber-toothed tiger. Knowing 12 rules about brain function can help you learn better and stay smarter. Your brain evolved to need exploration and exercise. You are capable of remaining able to learn forever, but physical activity is crucial.

No two brains are alike. Male and female brains are distinctly different.

People cannot give full attention to dull information.

To recall data short-term, “repeat to remember”; to recall it long-term, “remember to repeat.”

To be your smartest, sleep well and regularly.

Your brain needs information from all your senses, but vision is king.

A child’s brain cannot function best in a conventional classroom trapped in rote learning. Children learn at home, and they learn better overall when that home is emotionally stable.

 

10 Minutes Brain Rules Summary

Your Brain Is Complex and Amazing

Researchers are using brain scans and other techniques to learn more and more about how the human brain works. Although more is left to discover, 12 basic “rules” capture much of what science knows about the amazing computing device in your head.

1. “Exercise” – Your Brain Slows Down When You Sit Still

Physical activity is vital to keep your body and mind working in tip-top shape. Retired television exercise guru Jack La Lanne is a perfect example. At age 70, he celebrated his birthday by swimming across California's Long Beach Harbor pulling 70 boats with passengers onboard. His history of exercising and eating well contributed to his perennially quick wit and agile humor.

Anthropologists note that the first humans roamed in search of food, covering dozens of miles a day, so their brains evolved to handle regular physical activity. Because human brains “were forged in the furnace of physical activity,” if you want to use your entire IQ you must exercise. Inactive couch potatoes lose mental facilities along with physical capabilities. To regain your mental abilities, get aerobic exercise, even if you have neglected yourself. Just walking half an hour a few times a week will boost your cognitive output and reduce your risk of dementia.

Children who find concentrating difficult will benefit from physical activity. Exercise makes oxygen flow more efficiently through the blood and into the cells, cleaning up toxic wastes left behind by food metabolism. When you move you're keeping your brain cells healthy. More than food or water, your brain, which consumes 20% of your body’s energy, requires oxygen to function. Exercise also makes your mental engine run cleanly. Unfortunately, modern civilization requires people to sit for long periods without moving. If schools and offices incorporated physical activity, students and staffers would get smarter, healthier and more productive.

2. “Survival” – Your Brain Is an Evolutionary Triumph

The human species is weak, but brainpower helped people survive and thrive. Your brain has three parts where many survival and learning tools are hardwired: a “lizard brain” or amygdala, a “mammalian brain” and the cortex for higher reasoning. Humans have a great capacity to adapt. Over thousands of years, thanks to their powerful brains, people adjusted to changes in climate and food supply, and came to dominate the planet. Their advanced brains also allow them to “read” each other and negotiate. Your brain’s memory is an informational “database,” and you use mental “software” to improvise and solve problems. You may perform best with encouragement and be unable to perform as well near someone who threatens you. Your primitive lizard brain is always watching out for your safety.

3. “Wiring” – Brains Are “Wired” Individually

Nerve cells, known as neurons, look a bit like fried eggs that have been stepped on. The yolk holds important genetic coding. The long tentacle-shaped edges transmit and receive electrochemical messages at blinding speed. This is the cellular basis of learning. The brain’s neural connections are in constant flux. Your specific brain structure depends on your culture and other external inputs. A musician' brain has different cellular “wiring” than a scuba diver’s. As children grow, so do their brains. Key brain growth occurs up until the early 20s and changes can continue for decades. Many researchers have worked to understand intelligence and to map how the brain functions. Some believe there are multiple types of IQ. One person might be great at math while another excels at physical movement. Different parts of the brain are activated for different memories and skills, so your brain scan looks different than anyone else’s, even your twin’s. Since each brain is individual, educational programs should be customizable.

4. “Attention” – If It's Not Intriguing, Your Brain Isn't Interested

When you find something boring, you don't pay close attention and you can’t retain the content – so when you're giving a presentation, capture the audience’s interest as soon as you can. You want your audience to focus. Multitasking is a recipe for inefficiency and danger. In fact, multitaskers are prone to 50% more errors and take 50% longer to finish a task than people who do one thing at a time. Studies say that chatting on your cell phone while you're behind the wheel of an automobile is as dangerous as driving under the influence of alcohol.

People remember emotional situations longer than calm ones for neurochemical reasons. During emotional events, your brain releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is associated with attention and rewards; it helps you cement the memories. At stressful moments, the brain doesn't pick up details. It focuses on the big picture. If you're trying to teach someone, present “the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.” Provide information in 10-minute chunks and use entertaining hooks between those chunks.

Researchers who study stroke victims have found that the left side of the brain can only pay attention to visual stimuli on the right, but the right side takes in the entire visual field. So a stroke patient will recover better if the stroke occurs in the left hemisphere of the brain.

5. “Short-term Memory” – The Case for Connection

When you can recall a piece of information immediately, it is stored in your short-term or “working” memory. To make a memory last longer, repeat it and link it to something familiar. For instance, students forget 90% of a classroom lesson in less than a month, but going over the material at regular intervals and associating one piece of data with another will improve their retention rates. Information in a list of unrelated items is harder to recall than material with meaningful connections to something familiar. Thus, people learn better when they can refer to familiar examples. To be more memorable, engage your listeners’ elaborately and substantively.

6. “Long-term Memory” – The Case for Repetition

Sound and images enhance short-term memory, but you won’t retain information in your long-term memory without a stabilizing process called “consolidation,” and subsequent recall and repetition, or “reconsolidation.” Stored memories are more malleable than you might expect. Today’s fresh memories can fade after a few years, forcing your brain to struggle to recall the specifics of events that once were clear. Studies show that “the brain might cheerily insert false information to make a coherent story.” This has disturbing implications for the value of witnesses in a court of law, among other things. If you want to retain something, be deliberate. For example, ignoring your homework and then studying all night before a test is counterproductive. You will do better by spacing out multiple

study sessions. To retain specific information, you need to:

Think about the information within the first hour or so after you learn it. Immediately speak to other people about it in great detail.

Have a good night’s sleep and “rehearse” the information again afterward.

7. “Sleep” – Snooze or Lose

The human body increasingly malfunctions when deprived of sleep. If you are sleepless for a few days, in addition to severe fatigue, you will experience stomach upsets, crankiness, poor memory recall, disorientation, and eventually paranoia and hallucinations. For about 80% of the time you spend asleep, your brain doesn’t really rest. Brain scans show enormous electrical activity among the neurons, even more than when you are awake. The body has a delicate control process, called the circadian cycle, which keeps you alternating between wakefulness and sleep periods. An individual’s preferred sleep timeframe varies genetically. Early birds (called “larks” and “early chronotypes” by scientists) make up about 10% of the population; another 20% of people are late nighters (called “owls” and “late chronotypes”). Everyone else falls midrange on the continuum.

Your brain slows in the afternoon, but a nap can work wonders. Napping for 45 minutes will turbo-charge your brain for six hours. Conversely, students who skip even an hour of sleep each night face a dramatic drop in academic performance. Sleep deprivation impairs “attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge.” Wouldn’t it be great to match job schedules with people’s inherent sleep patterns? Plus, a later school day would address teenagers’ normal tendency to sleep late.

8. “Stress” – Chronic Tension Makes It Harder to Learn

A little bit of stress heightens your ability to learn, but ongoing, chronic stress damages brain function. Chronic stress can cause a phenomenon called “learned helplessness,” in which people simply give up hope and no longer engage their brains or try to solve problems.

During times of stress, people experience a “fight or flight response.” The resulting blood pressure rise and racing pulse are detrimental over the long term, raising the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Chronic stress worsens your ability to work with numbers and language. When you are seriously stressed, you don’t learn as well and have difficulty concentrating, remembering and solving problems. Chronic stress can lead to acute depression. One kind of stress has serious implications for children: Kids who live in homes where parents fight constantly “have more difficulty regulating their emotions, soothing themselves, focusing their attention on others,” and are more often absent from school. Their ability to learn, study and remember is so diminished that their test scores drop. A program called “Bringing Baby Home,” by researcher John Gottman, Ph.D., teaches fresh marital communication skills to expectant couples. As a result, their newborns have healthier brain chemistry than infants who live with fighting parents.

9. “Sensory Integration” – For Best Results, Use All Your Senses

Your brain gets crucial sensory input from your eyes, ears, nose and skin. For enhanced learning, bring all your senses into play. For example, you will retain more of what you read when pictures accompany the text. The more inputs your brain has to work with, the better you will learn and recall information. You also remember things better if you first encounter them in the presence of distinctive sensory clues, like smells or sounds. That’s why Starbucks doesn’t want its employees to wear perfume, because it could conflict with the aroma of coffee in the stores.

10. “Vision” – The Eyes Have It

Expert wine testers can be fooled, and made to ignore their sense of taste and smell, if you change the color of wine they are testing. This illustrates how the brain prioritizes the sense of sight. The human vision-processing system is highly complex, and when the brain encounters blind spots it actually interpolates the visual field. Reading is a complex mental activity, because the brain processes each letter as an individual visual symbol.

11. “Gender” – Your Sex Affects Your Brain

Scientists find subtle anatomical and functional differences between male and female brains. For example, women synthesize the feel-good neurotransmitter, serotonin, more slowly than men. The genders respond somewhat differently to acute stress: Women often assume a caring role, while men isolate themselves. However, no given individual necessarily conforms to group statistics.

12. “Exploration” – A Sense of Wonder Promotes Learning

As infants become toddlers, they act like little scientists, constantly examining their environment, and testing cause and effect. Their brains are busy gaining data and concepts to help them navigate their circumstances. The adult brain remains flexible and plastic. People are able to learn throughout their life spans.

Image Courtesy of Jurvrenston

10 Faces of Innovation Summary

In a Tweet

Combining ideas with different world views can be great for your business.

10 Faces of Innovation In 2 Minutes

You've probably attended more than one meeting in which a participant proposes a new idea only to have someone ask permission to "play devil's advocate for a minute." Just like that, he or she stomps on the new idea and stifles creativity. However, using role-playing to experiment with ideas is not a bad tactic. Although the devil's advocate role is negative, its effectiveness demonstrates that taking on a pretend persona can completely change what you see in a given situation. Role playing is a good way to encourage innovation.

The term "innovation" needs some explanation. The 3M Company defines it as "new ideas – plus action or implementation – that result in an improvement, a gain or a profit." In fact, many ideas don't go anywhere, so 3M's inclusion of "action or implementation" in the definition is important. So far, so good. However, a complete definition of "innovation" should also emphasize the role of people – plural – in the process. Innovation doesn't just "happen." It requires determination and teamwork.

"Learning," "Organizing" and "Building"

Role-playing can add energy and excitement to your meetings, and help your company stay on top of market changes. Ten roles you can use to nurture innovation fit into three categories:

1. "Learning roles" – The "anthropologist," the "experimenter" and the "crosspollinator" see, create prototypes and explore what other disciplines have to say.

2. "Organizing roles" – The "hurdler," the "collaborator" and the "director" connect and guide people, and overcome obstacles.

3. "Building roles" – The "experience architect," the "set designer," the "caregiver" and the "storyteller" build physical, psychological, emotional and linguistic structures that nurture innovation.

10 Faces of Innovation In 10 Minutes

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240"] The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization[/caption]

People can switch roles; no one needs to be stuck playing a particular one all the time. You don't need one person for each role in every situation: Three people might play seven of the roles, such as. The experience of swapping roles itself opens people to new ideas. Make a commitment to innovation organization-wide and over time, not just for one project. Try acting these roles:

1. "The Anthropologist"

Anthropological researchers immerse themselves in alien cultures and see carefully. This sort of intense observation is the single greatest source of innovation you can bring to your organization. View the world with what Zen Buddhism calls a "beginner's mind." Try to see everything as though you've never seen it before and watch what people do without judging them. Seek ideas everywhere: in your own intuition, in daily action and in the clutter around you.

You can't find out how customers use your products by asking them directly, because they will filter and clean up their responses for public presentation. Or, they simply may not know. So, watch what they do. Observe them in person or use technological aids,such as videotaping. If you talk to them, ask open-ended, behavioral questions from several different angles. Don't ask an adolescent, "What's hot?" Instead, ask what he or she would buy with a certain amount of money. Visit a newsstand and buy a magazine you don't usually read. You'll see your culture and your customers differently.

2. "The Experimenter"

You can recognize an experimenter immediately. Like Thomas Edison or, today, like James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuüm cleaner, experimenters are persistent about solving problems. They try lots of prototypes, make drawings, and build and test models. Then, they take what they learn and start all over again.

Many people are reluctant to create prototypes because they think a prototype should impress those who see it – but that is not its purpose. If necessary, you can make a quick-and-dirty prototype out of things you've pulled from the trash. Your aim is to give your ideas a literal shape, so you and others can grasp them and then improve them. Compare two prototypes to discern what works and what doesn't.

3. "The Cross-Pollinator"

Cross-pollinators bring together disparate things. They take designs, practices and concepts from one discipline and they plunk them down in another, creating something new through "unexpected juxtaposition." These juxtapositions can travel startling distances. The concept of punch cards came from the silk-weaving industry and IBM applied it to its early computers.

To innovate, let your mind wander. No matter how counterintuitive it may seem, let go of your focus on your job. Read new things. Travel to new places. To encourage innovation, act as a cross-pollinator by underwriting educational experiences in any subject area for your employees, with the goal of broadening their minds. Organize regular "show-and-tell" sessions among departments. Provide space for people from different disciplines to mix. Set up a speaker series. Hire people with diverse backgrounds. Encourage lateral thinking and simple curiosity. Try "reverse mentoring" by pairing an older professional with a younger one so they both learn another generation's perspective.

4. "The Hurdler"

Hurdlers specialize in overcoming obstacles. You can't defeat them by blocking the direct path to their goal – they'll jump over it or work around it. Hurdlers treat every obstacle as an opportunity.

If, acting as a hurdler, you can solve a problem others can't cure, you'll reap huge rewards. However, prepare to face blockages. Inside the company, you may have to slip past rules that present hurdles. Resist the temptation to just "do your job." Getting a successful project approved after the fact might be easier than getting it funded when it is still hypothetical. Outside forces will also erect hurdles. Experts may even dismiss your ideas, but keep going. Cargill, the food company, wanted to buy from cotton farmers in Zimbabwe, but it faced a hurdle: it discovered that "not enough currency existed in the local economy for the company to pay" the farmers, so Cargill printed its own "money."

5. "The Collaborator"

Collaborators not only work well with others, they also generate connections among other people. They encourage teams from different disciplines to work together, mediate among parties and keep everyone on the same page. Collaborators may also broker deals among organizations, helping companies move from simple buyer-seller relationships into multifaceted, more profitable arrangements. For instance, when Kraft Foods and its vendor, Safeway, worked together, they were able to make better plans, improve their supply chain, and reduce handling and inventory costs. Consider these two unusual collaborative techniques:

1. "Unfocus Groups" – Rather than bringing together representative consumers, as you do in a focus group, gather the most extreme, creative consumers for an unfocus group. Then, learn from watching participants respond to one another's ideas.

2. "Cross-training" – Provide training in one discipline to employees in another.

Of course, forming work teams is a kind of collaboration. You can formally train employees in teamwork skills or, informally, you can have work teams play a sport together. Whether you use formal or informal collaborative techniques, harness the energy of "opponents" and bring them into the fold. Celebrate collective and not individual successes.

6. "The Director"

Directors are planners and organizers. While collaborators may work on relatively routine projects, directors are visionary and ambitious. They start new ventures and enlist people to work on them. Being a director requires taking risks and exercising leadership. Hire the best people and lead them in brainstorming sessions. Record the good ideas that result. Let others take the spotlight. Give your projects striking names to draw employees to them.

Put someone who can act as a director in charge of an innovation initiative. In this job, the director would develop goals, find resources, show the criteria for success, protect the initiative, reward people for supporting it and create an atmosphere of trust, where everyone could speak with honesty and without fear.

7. "The Experience Architect"

Experience architects present ideas by appealing to the senses. They're interested in aesthetic pleasure as well as understanding. Expert experience architects use technology to give their audiences new experiences, but even untrained people can act as experience architects if they focus on the five senses. For example, someone in the role of an experience architect would use his or her personal reactions to check the experiences of consumers by tracking "the customer journey," including waiting time, background music, physical comfort and ease of purchase. This involves following every step a customer takes when interacting with your organization. The consumer probably takes more steps than you thought – giving you more areas to improve.

8. "The Set Designer"

Set designers focus on making physical space both functional and pleasing. For example, to take on the role of a set designer, consider whether your organization's space

enhances and encourages innovative thought. Create this effect by arranging desks and hallways so people can gather easily in impromptu groups. Encourage informal talk. Repeal restrictions on how people use and decorate their individual spaces. Reorganize offices to encourage people of different departments to spend time together. Move workers around on a project-by-project basis. Provide materials for recording and showing ideas, and designate wall space for displaying the results.

9. "The Caregiver"

Think of the bedside manner of the best doctor or nurse you ever had, or the calm nurturing that an ideal parent provides. Caregivers, who work well with experience architects, have the ability to put people at ease, but their main concern is providing good service. Caregivers seek ongoing relationships with customers as individuals, as well as with the larger community. They build a sense of shared identity that can help build brand loyalty. In a world increasingly dominated by automated services, caregivers wish to revive the personal touch – and the smile.

10. "The Storyteller"

Unlike facts, stories forge "emotional connections" between the teller and the audience. Storytellers can take the ordinary and reshape it into something special, creating inspirational myths and allegories. The storyteller's goal is to create meaning, not entertainment. He or she seeks the truth and speaks with an authentic voice, both as an individual and as a representative of your organization.

Adopting the persona of the storyteller brings you full circle, back to the anthropologist, because a major part of the storyteller's role is to listen. To act as a storyteller, ask open- ended questions, then take what you hear and weave it into a structured narrative. Such stories bring teams together. They express ideas and experiences that people may not have been able to discuss. Innovation can be chaotic and scary. A good storyteller "helps make order out of chaos" and makes the "vocabulary of change" familiar. Good stories make work enjoyable and meaningful.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

Image Courtesy of Pilar Azaña

Making Innovation Work summary

Read the Amazon Reviews

You don't have to wait for innovation to happen. Plan for it, and make it happen methodically in your company.

2 Minutes Summary

Select a "Play-to-Win" innovation strategy or a "Play-Not-to-Lose" strategy. Guide innovation through measurement and incentives.

You can create innovation through several aspects of either the business or the technological side of your company.

Innovation is the greatest source of organizational security in a changing economy.

Innovation is the creation of new value through some intersection of business and technology. Radical innovation changes both the technology model and the business model. Innovating methodically matters because the way that you manage innovation will dictate the kinds of innovations your company creates.

Not every business needs to innovate intensely, or in the same way; the kind and level of innovation your company needs depends on your specific business.

Because innovation challenges the status quo, parts of your organization will fight it. Most people misunderstand innovation. It is not mysterious or magical.

Making Innovation Work Summary

Making Innovation Work is not revolutionary or magical, and not every company has to innovate a lot. Depending upon your industry, polishing existing processes might be enough. Three broad rules govern innovation. First, like other aspects of business, it requires specific conceptual tools, used with discipline. Second, to innovate profitably, you must measure and reward innovation. Third, to change your industry fundamentally, combine a business model change with a technological change. Company leaders - who play the most vital role in innovation - must choose between a "Play-to-Win" (PTW) strategy and a "Play- Not-to-Lose" (PNTL) strategy. Once you determine your approach, guide innovation by using metrics and rewards, and by helping your organization learn.

What Kind of Innovation Fits Your Organization

Companies that innovate can prosper, and change society and their industries. Innovation isn't just for business; nonprofits can apply it as well. Develop the right portfolio of innovation by determining what's appropriate for your company, based on its nature and market position. Innovation can be "incremental, semi-radical or radical." Incremental innovation improves current processes with repeated small changes. Semiradical innovation creates a fundamental change in your business model or technology. Radical innovation changes your business and your technology models at the same time. Sometimes combining two semi-radical innovations creates an "ersatz radical innovation," which has as big an effect as a radical innovation, but happens in stages, and may have a shifting cast of participants.

What is Innovation and How Do You Leverage It?

Innovation is a change in business and/or technology that creates greater value. Six aspects of your organization can drive change, divided between the business side and the technology side:

Business:

1. Value proposition - Change what you sell; offer a new item or a variation.


2. Supply chain - Change how you create products and/or get them to market.


3. Target customer - Change to whom you sell your product.


4. Technology


5. Product and service offerings - Create and sell an item using new technologies.


6. Process technologies - Deliver things differently.


7. Enabling technologies - Create something that lets you execute strategies faster.

How to Design a Winning Innovation Strategy

What sort of innovation does your company need? First, determine if "Playing-to-Win" (PTW) or "Playing-Not-to-Lose" (PNTL) is a more appropriate strategy. PTW works for companies like new tech start-ups that want to transform their industries. But, with PTW, you bet everything on delivering a successful semi-radical innovation in technology, if not a radical innovation. PNTL fits better in a volatile, highly regulated or deeply competitive market. PNTL uses mainly incremental innovation. You can lead an industry this way, but you risk that someone else will make innovations that are more radical.

Once you make this choice, design a strategy that considers crucial internal and external factors. For instance, honestly appraise what your internal organization can do technically, what its structure allows, how successful your current model is, and what resources you can invest in innovation. Blend these factors to shape a clear vision. Externally, consider your industry's nature and what your competitors are doing. How is technology changing in your industry? Can outside parties offer productive supplemental partnerships?

How to Structure a Company for Innovation

To innovate successfully, you must balance creating something new with capturing value. Organizationally, let individuals voice new ideas and provide a mechanism that identifies good concepts. Design interdisciplinary, inter-unit business and technology platforms. Each platform should develop an array of innovative projects, from incremental to radical. Individuals, teams and the company should seek internal and external partnerships. Use "transparent" creative processes, so people know what innovation is underway. Clearly explain the value of the innovation so everyone understands how innovation creates profits. Block the nay-sayers who mobilize to destroy challenging new ideas.

Designing the Process of Innovation

The structure of your innovation system should address five functions: efficiency, communication, coordination, learning and alignment. Efficiency moves innovations quickly from ideas to the market. Those involved in innovation should be able to communicate readily with their internal and external partners. Coordination helps people in different areas work together and share results. With learning, each process tells your organization more about how it innovates. Finally, align the company's objectives: bring all the goals in line.

A range of models let you accomplish these functions, including "Structured Idea Management" (SIM), "Experimentation" and "Prototyping." In SIM, you control the environment and develop project criteria. Participants brainstorm, develop hundreds of ideas and narrow them to a dozen or so. Then they document, outline, briefly investigate and develop these ideas. Consciously assess if these ideas are radical or incremental, and salvage stray "idea fragments." Radical innovation requires experimentation, the process of moving projects through repeated versions. "Prototyping," a related model, works in a modular fashion. Instead of trying to solve all of a project's problems at once, design prototypes that answer one question at a time. Make lots of cheap versions and learn from each one.

How to Measure Innovation

Metrics are essential for guiding innovation. Use a few sharply focused metrics that enable information to flow from innovation teams to upper management and back. Your metrics should blend objective and subjective (to account for intangibles) measurements. Metrics should touch on each stage of the innovation process, from creating ideas to capturing value. Your goal is to make the process visible at each stage and to evaluate it. Your measurement system should take specific factors into account: talent, resources, knowledge development, managements' influence, communication flow and more. The most challenging aspect is measuring how a radical innovation creates value. This kind of innovation usually takes time, creates new capacities for entirely new markets, and - naturally - carries a high rate of failure. While you might evaluate it subjectively, you could also explain its success in terms of intellectual property and project stages completed, rather than in terms of numerical or financial rewards.

How to Design Incentives to Support Innovation

Four major factors feed motivation: vision, passion, recognition and economic incentive. Address the first two by articulating a vision, and creating a healthy unified culture that allows passion to flourish. The second two factors, recognition and economic incentives, require specific tools. Designing specific, measurable bonus reward systems is easier with incremental innovations, such as new ways to reduce process time. But, workers involved with radical innovation are often driven less by financial motives than by intrinsic motivation, that is, the desire to discover or create something new. A radical innovation project's end goal is also less obvious, so set points of recognition, marked with acknowledgements, new titles and awards that underscore your employees' dedication.

How Do Organizations Become Better at Learning?

Distinguish between "learning to act," which focuses on how to improve existing processes, and "learning to learn," which addresses the actual innovation process. An organization must do both to innovate well. Everyone makes mistakes, but innovative firms learn from them. That requires linking your learning process directly with your innovation strategy. Actively manage knowledge and ignorance: determine what you know and what you don't know, then correct the areas you know least. Useful tools for this purpose include "project roadmaps," which show you how to use one project as the basis for several others, and "learning histories," which relate how specific innovations worked or failed.

How to Design a Winning Culture

Some organizations see innovation as the new religion that's going to save everything. Don't let your company grab on to this almost mystical worship of innovation; that re- mystifies it. Instead, spread the demystification of innovation through your organizational culture. Perhaps surprisingly, you must be cautious about success as you create an innovation-friendly organizational culture. Success can make employees complacent, and past successes can harden into dogma. People want to keep doing what already works. When they do so, they often shift to PNTL, rather than PTW.

Let your organization grow in cycles - allowing periods of rest and integration after radical innovation. Be organizationally stable, but open to change. Allow people to think and explore freely, but within generally accepted "rules of play" that guide and focus their work. Balance the creativity that creates new ideas with the discipline that recognizes their value and repackages them for the market. Balance control and trust. Since innovation often happens invisibly, or away from upper management, executives must trust that it really is happening - and must protect innovators from outside attention too early in the process. Such attention can kill innovation.

Your company's executives should know how innovation works, and how to establish a culture that nurtures it. Executives must evolve a vision of innovation that they support with physical and intellectual resources. Innovators need to know where they can get straight answers and money. A good environment for innovation includes:

Narrative support - Tell stories of great innovators in your company's past, making individuals who lived their values into the equivalent of mythic heroes.

Physical environment - Use color and light to put people at ease. Workspaces should allow privacy as needed, free lines of sight and an easy flow of information.

Personnel - Hiring the "wrong" person, say someone creative who doesn't readily fit your culture, or someone without certification - may be the right choice. Different kinds of people add diversity; people outside their ruts apply new perspectives.

Applying the Innovation Rules to Your Organization

Emphasizing innovation too much can destroy your company. Adhere to the seven rules of innovation:

1. Strong leaders must define, guide, fund and support your innovation strategy.


2. Integrate innovation into the company's basic business mentality.


3. Align the amount and type of innovation to the company's business.


4. Manage the natural tension between creativity and value capture.


5. Keep "organizational antibodies" from smothering ideas just because they're new.


6. The basic unit (or fundamental building block) of innovation is a network that includes people and knowledge both inside and outside the organization.


7. Create the right metrics and rewards" to measure and manage innovation.

Fulfil the first three rules immediately. Review what employees do to promote innovation in your culture. The relative weight you place on different types of innovation should match the innovation strategy that fits your firm and your industry. Decide if you want to refine your current innovation processes or redirect them. Several general structures will help you actively manage innovation. In a "stage-gate process," you divide an incremental innovation project into stages, and set up "gates" it passes through, stage by stage, toward a known goal. In a "venture capital model," you delay trying to capture value as a team pursues innovations without specific goals. In the "technology innovation model," a tech team drives innovation, perhaps beginning ambiguously but emerging into a measurable process. Finally, the "time-driven system" works with incremental innovation, focusing on deadlines and reduced production times.

The image is from the IBC Innovation Offices courtesy of Karma Trendz