Innovation week

Last week was Innovation week at work. My sister who works at a different company just got an innovation award, so I started to think it might be larger-scale than I thought.

Searches do show other hits for Innovation week, but they are for different time periods. It does not look like there is a national or global agreement on when to focus on innovation. That is interesting, because one of the focuses of the guest speaker was collaboration.

He talked about coming into a company that had been having problems, and one thing that they did was physically rearrange the space to make conversations and sharing easier, and they felt it was successful.

That was interesting, but I know that I have been at other companies that had similar initiatives, and they spent a lot of money and time on changing the space, but I don't think it changed the culture.

There were a couple of things I was thinking about with this. One is my great love for telecommuting. While it is certainly convenient for me, I always remember that one presentation on the environment. He was so hung up on video conferencing instead of travel, because no car is really efficient enough. At the time I thought it was overkill, but the more I read, the more I see his point. I have managed to commute before, and by using public transportation I was not as bad as I could have been, but more people telecommuting is better for the planet.

If telecommuting is bad for a healthy business, that is something to be considered, because we need to balance different needs. However, my other though was comic book creators. Their work is extremely collaborative, and they are almost never in the same room. They share emails, scans, and chats across countries and continents.

Of course, that is a somewhat specific form of collaboration, that is not necessarily going to lead to innovation; there are some things about the output that can be assumed. There will be pages with words and pictures telling a story, usually - it's surprising sometimes what can change. And even with the basic formula, it can frequently happen that the normal and expected story turn is not taken, and yes, there is innovation in that.

I don't really have any answers there. Some of my personal development goals for the year may be focused around exploring that topic further. I want us to be able to adapt and do things better. That is needed. I also want to be friendly to the planet, which is also needed. And as much as I like downtown Portland, there are a lot of benefits to working from home.

So, just some things that I have started thinking about, and I will not stop.

Related posts:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/06/stop-collaborate-and-listen.html