Joseph Doiron
A blog with its fingers on the pulse of social, cultural and technological innovation.
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7 posts tagged Innovation
The Right Tools for the Job: We Need Educational Product Innovations in Addition to Process Innovations
Of course, put the right tool in the hands of a person with the right knowledge, skills and aptitudes and behold the wondrous results. Many of our museums, libraries, universities, cities, towns and homes are filled with products that attest to this. However, when it comes to education, we largely exclude discussions of the tools or products that we need to put in the hands of educators in order to make their jobs easier, more efficient and deliver better learning outcomes.
For the most part, education sector innovation has focused on process innovations. The government, schools of education and private sector organizations have made the reform or improvement of existing administrative arrangements, processes and procedures, or the proposal of new ones their priorities. These process innovations primarily focus on the areas of teacher recruitment, training and support, the provision of more and different schooling options (e.g. Charter Schools), data-tracking and accountability systems, and the refinement of other administrative processes. Few efforts have focused on product innovations.
Let me be clear, process innovations are important. However, existing processes have a finite potential for innovation; that is, they can only be reformed or streamlined up to a point. It sometimes takes the introduction of the right tool or product innovation to unleash significant changes within a domain or across several.
Let’s consider the impact of email for a moment. Since the late 1770s the US Postal Service has picked up and delivered letters door to door in the United States. This is a monumental undertaking; millions of people send millions of letters to millions of different addresses within an area of 3.79 million squares miles. If you want to send a letter look no further than the USPS. They have the people, equipment, procedures and other infrastructure necessary to get your letter delivered to the intended destination within a few days. However, as we all know, the USPS is in trouble. It currently faces a loss of $7 billion for this fiscal year. We just aren’t sending as many letters as we used to. With other faster and more convenient ways to stay in touch with our loved ones, pay our bills, apply for jobs and send invitations, “snail mail” has been reserved for special occasions and is no longer the communication tool it once was for our daily transactions.
While many of us might feel nostalgic for the post office and handwritten letters, our nostalgia apparently isn’t great enough to change our behavior. What we seem to care about more than written letters, is fast, convenient communication. No matter how efficient and convenient the USPS can streamline its processes and procedures for picking up, sorting, transporting and delivering our letters, it can’t compete with email in regard to the key metrics we seem to care about most in our daily written communication. In other words, email is currently the right tool for the daily communication job.
So, my question for all of us in the education sector is this: Are we going to continue to work to deliver a faster letter, or are we going to use email?
Let’s start the discussion now.
“It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space. These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.”
“Only operations that are well-established, high-turnover, standardized or highly subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and table can absorb uneconomic discussions - these go into old buildings …
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings.”
Jane Jacobs as quoted by Stewart Brand in “Nobody Cares What You Do in There: The Low Road
“Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution, or a new venture started by a lone individual in the family kitchen. It is the means by which entrepreneurs either create new wealth-producing resources or endow existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth.”
(Drucker, 2002)
Recommended Reading: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
Johnson, in beautiful and engaging prose, provides a framework for understanding where the great innovations throughout human history have come from. Rejecting the more common conception that great innovations come from isolated geniuses struck by single moments of inspiration, Johnson demonstrates that innovations have primarily come from:
- Liquid Networks
- Slow Hunches
- Serendipity
- Error
- Exaptation
- Platforms
Of the many reasons you should read Johnson’s work, the best reason is that Where Good Ideas Come From is a page-turning feat of inter-disciplinary scholarship that presents complex ideas simply with beautiful clarity.
