sift everything

At least two things are true of me. One, I love coffee. Two, I’m a fiddler. Not the musical kind, the annoying kind. Always jigging around, tapping, rattling, bouncing, swaying – annoying.

Being a big fan of experiments, I started one on myself. I hypothesized that my fiddling is positively related to my coffee consumption. If I stopped drinking coffee, would the fiddling stop?

Nearly one month later – no. Foot is impatiently tapping a staccato rhythm on the floor as I type. What did stop is blogging.

Each morning around 5:30 I wake up, just for a few minutes. In those minutes there is an opportunity – get up or keep sleeping. When I was drinking coffee, the idea of a tall cup of French-pressed, Starbucks bold-roast Vienna coffee was enough to lug myself out of bed.

When I get up at 5:30, there’s not a lot to do, so I read. When I read, I learn. When I learn, I innovate. When I innovate, I blog. Us economists call these positive externalities. By doing one thing, there is other unintended results that effect more than the owner of the action. Included in this group is second-hand smoke, loud music, and nuclear bombs.

So, no coffee leads to a negative externality: no blogging. I just keep sleeping.

Noting this relationship, I started thinking of the disciplines of innovation. To get started I search for this phrase on Google. Did you know the phrase “disciplines of innovation” has only 37 hits? But “discipline of innovation” has 1,900. One “s” and a difference of 1,873 results. Why?

What’s the difference? Well, maybe its purely semantics (or semantic), but I think it depends on whether you see innovation as a destination or a journey. If innovation is a destination, then you want to know where it is. If innovation is journey, you want to know how to get started. If a discipline helps you get to a destination, disciplines help you undertake a journey.

Peter Drucker thinks innovation is a destination. He says three ingredients that make up the discipline of innovation. First, focusing on the mission, he believes that one must have a definitive goal or purpose. Second, defining significant results, or otherwise expressing what is believed to be the anticipated end result. Third, performing rigorous assessments based on the tasks that are being performed while trying to adhere to the mission.

I don’t think Drucker’s wrong. I do think there is value to looking at innovation as a journey though.

Earlier this year I met David Ulrich. He was talking about his new work on capitalizing on capabilities. To do that, he prescribed some disciplines. By committing to a set of disciplines organisations can capture some of the intangible aspects of knowledge, experience, and social networks to help capitalize on their capabilities.

Ulrich believes capitalizing on capabilities is a journey. Why not look at innovation the same way?

So, what might be the disciplines of innovation? Here, I’ll get the list started:

1. Drink coffee

A billion-dollar IPO for Johns Hopkins!?! William R. Brody, President of the Johns Hopkins University, is looking for money – or at least for some value. I think he’s found it.

Mr. Brody makes an interesting comparison: Google’s $1.67 billion initial public offering and librarians. Librarians?

Citing Moore’s Law which states computing power increases exponentially over time and relating that growth to the challenge of managing petabytes of information, Mr. Brody captures a point he says is missing from Google mania:

“Massive information overload is placing librarians in an ever more important role as human search engines. They are trained and gifted at ferreting out and vetting the key resource material when you need it. Today’s technology is spectacular — but it can’t always trump a skilled human.”

This is sort of a hum-drum, old-hat sort of rave except for the interesting comparison he started with: $1.67 billion vs. librarians.

$1.67 billion in unused information. $1.67 billion in ill-directed proposals. $1.67 billion in gap finding exercises without $1.67 billion in information using exercises. Information is valuable, precious, and the best, priceless - but only when well used, applied, and supplemented with understanding.

How well are you using your information and intellectual property? Better yet, how well are you leveraging the knowledge around you?

I was just playing around at BlogPulse. They’ve got a nifty tool for querying the frequency of blogging topics. Now I’m not sure how many sites they scan, but still, the idea is cool even if it’s not statistically valid.

I’ve been reading/blogging a lot lately on the relationship between major societal challenges (education, terrorism, global warming, etc.) and the potential for innovation, insight, and creativity to address them.

I thought it would be interesting to query BlogPulse for key societal issues, some of the potential solutions we’ve already identified (biotechnology, alternative fuels, recycling, etc.), and then my favorite three words - innovation, insight, and creativity. The results were unexpected.

Again, I’m not sure how many sites are searched by BlogPulse, but it looks like bloggers aren’t too worried about these issues, at least not the representative ones I chose. About one percent wrote on education recently. One percent! Around half a percent discussed terrorism. And basically no one is talking global warming.

The big surprise for me was the dearth of thinking on innovation, insight and creativity. I expected high numbers here, what with all the raves about the promise of blogs.

Given the absence of discussion of mechanisms to solve these issues, it wasn’t too surprising to see close to zero conversation on the previously identified solutions.

Want to know what the top phrase was? “Today is December 1st.” Good grief. Even a day late! The first big issue, health care, slouches in at 27th place.

Well I might talk more about this later. For now though I’m sort of excited; there’s no one on the field I want to play in. Maybe I’ll get to make up the rules.