innovation

This 45 minute podcast features a keynote address by Scott Kirsner, Columnist for the Boston Globe, recorded at the NERCOMP 2008 Annual Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. The speech is entitled, "What Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood".

Technology innovators sometimes expect that users will embrace new ideas and new tools with open arms. In reality, most innovations are met with hostility and indifference, and it can take a lengthy campaign to persuade organizations to change the way they work. In an illustrated spin through Hollywood history, journalist and author Scott Kirsner will demonstrate how innovators like Pixar, George Lucas, and Bing Crosby (yes, "Mr. White Christmas") have changed the movie industry while facing enormous resistance. He'll also describe the three kinds of people that exist in every organization and some of the key reasons people tend to rebel (or go into a shell) when confronted with a new piece of technology.

 

Notes from: “What NERCOMP Innovators Can Learn from Hollywood”

A podcast of this general session is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcastwhatinnovatorscanl/46455.

Scott Kirsner, Columnist for the Boston Globe, The Future of Video, Tech and Innovation spoke on the topic of innovation. 

Abstract:  Technology innovators sometimes expect that users will embrace new ideas and new tools with open arms. In reality, most innovations are met with hostility and indifference, and it can take a lengthy campaign to persuade organizations to change the way they work. In an illustrated spin through Hollywood history, journalist and author Scott Kirsner will demonstrate how innovators like Pixar, George Lucas, and Bing Crosby (yes, "Mr. White Christmas") have changed the movie industry while facing enormous resistance. He'll also describe the three kinds of people that exist in every organization and some of the key reasons people tend to rebel (or go into a shell) when confronted with a new piece of technology.

In this 16 minute podcast we feature a conversation from the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. The topic is digital fluency and innovation at the academy from an administrative perspective. Our conversation participants are Louise Thorpe, Head of Academic Innovation at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK; and Holly Morris-Kuentz, Director of Instructional and Research Technology for Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Both of the them also co-presented sessions at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. Holly Morris-Kuentz co-presented a session entitled, "Prioritizing Technology-Rich Classroom Space: Strategies for Success". Louise Thorpe co-presented a session entitled, "The Digitally Fluent University: A Recipe for Success?".

 

In this 17 minute podcast we feature a conversation with Gardner Campbell, Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. He is joined later in the conversation by one of his students, Serena Epstein. They co-presented a session at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting entitled, "Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education". Our conversation addresses questions about institutional change in the new media environment and how instructors and administrators might innovate within the traditional university system.

Educause and the New Media Consortium released The Horizon Report 2007 Edition back in Spring. The 2007 report included six “key trends”, seven “critical challenges” and six “technologies to watch” and their projected adoption periods.

As I looked back through this report what jumps at me are these items and how they potentially impact us at Des Moines University.

Two of the reports “Key Trends” include:

Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.

Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says "I need your group to be more innovative." Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go "be innovative"? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?

Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it "Spark".

This is a 6 minute interview with Jenn Stringer, Director of Educational Technology at Stanford School of Medicine. It was recorded at the 2007 Educause Western Regional Conference in San Francisco, California. Jenn Stringer was part of a panel for a session entitled, Campus Learning Spaces: Two Innovation Design Approaches.

As educators emphasize learning over teaching, campus facilities are redesigned and repurposed. The decentralized Stanford University academic culture informs a "test kitchen" approach for piloting and disseminating instructional technology innovations.

Many times we tell ourselves that the key to US competitiveness is innovation. Visiting China makes one realize that we aren’t the only society focused on innovation.

For example, at a session held at Tsinghua Science Park we learned that China has 42.8 million people involved in science and technology with R&D expenditures approaching $200 billion RMB; 2.5% of GNP is invested in science and technology. As they explained their science and technology approach we learned that their goal is to create an innovative nation and increase proprietary innovations, leapfrogging developments in key fields. To do that they are investing in both basic and applied research and facilitating business-university partnerships.

In China there massive programs for high technology research and basic research. In addition to research and development they are creating the capacity for science and technology commercialization, including the promotion of small and medium sized businesses. In addition, multinational corporations had over 750 R&D units in China in 2005, 90% of which are in either Beijing or Shanghai.

These podcasts are my favorite sources of audio content related directly or semi-directly to what I do every day in the office -- innovation, ideas, management, perspective, etc.

The HBR IdeaCast
This is from the Harvard Business Review -- each episode is generally composed of an interview with an author or researcher about a particular set of ideas or advice about management and business, as well as a short "tips" segment toward the end.

Escape From Cubicle Nation
Pamela Slim focuses on creating a work life that you're passionate about -- for many, this may mean starting your own business or otherwise leaving corporate culture. For me, however, the focus is on creating a work environment that is appealing to people and gives them space to grow inside a larger organization. In addition, I find her reflections on marketing, discovering your own strengths, and developing services to be extremely relevant in an academic IT environment. She has a great blog, too.

Startup Nation

I just finished up a week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.

Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.