Journal 3-The Innovation Journey

So, here we are on the final week of our Innovation class. It has been an eye-opening 5 weeks with me becoming more in-tuned with innovation going around me every day. When I began this class I thought I was pretty creative and I'm sticking with that analogy. A strong 8 on the innovation scale. But one thing that I do have to say is that I have become more aware of things going on and I use some of the innovation techniques to come up with new ideas.

The techniques that stands out most to me is that there isn't just one good answer to everything. In fact, I now take my time to see if there are 2 or 3 good answers to a problem. It forces me to look at things from a different perspective. It also makes me aware of other peoples innovation process. Just the other day when we were talking about our project I found it funny that whenever one of the guys had a new idea, they would point at each other and say "that's a great idea. We should write that down!" just like they were kids keeping score in a board game.


The largest barrier I had to overcome was actually taking the time to look for another answer. Not just settling for the idea of the moment. I am learning to slow down and not only rethink what I'm doing, but when someone has an idea, I have been challenging them to think of another idea, just in case that idea doesn't pan out.

My problem solving-innovation approach used to be this; I would make a split minute decision and go with it. If something would change I would quickly come up with what I would call "Plan B". In fact I use this phrase all the time. I often make a split minute decision after "Plan B" didn't work and quickly go to "Plan C", and so on. It wasn't a bad way to make decisions, but it was sort of like always putting out fires instead of thinking it through and preventing the fires to start with.

Now- for my innovative idea of the week! Every year I buy one new Halloween decoration. I could really take it or leave it, but I guess I do it for the grand kids. Anyway, I was looking at a cute little metal stand that looks like the body of a witch. The top of it has a large round tray that has a large spike sticking out of it so you can impale a carved pumpkin on it to look like a head. It was on sale for 70% off, so being a woman who can't turn away from a good sale, I had to buy it. Now, I have no intention of buying a pumpkin and carving it. I could picture in my mind a little foam formed light up pumpkin I had at home that could use a little "somethin' somethin". When I got home I took the stand and explained my great idea to my husband. Sometimes my great ideas involve power tools and I would prefer to have my husband use them than me. After some evaluation and figuring where the electrical cord went in to the light bulb, he grabbed his drill and put a hole in the bottom of my little foam pumpkin and "wha la"! I have a cute little stand with a modified pumpkin on top.

Article i3 Bring Innovation to Education

So now for innovation in the workplace. I would like to address Innovation in Education. My sister and brother-in-law are building a new house and they, along with their 2 children are temporally living with my parents. Since my sister leaves for work at 5am, I have volunteered to drive the kids to school, since it's just across the street from where I work. Anyway, it dawned on me one day when I was talking to my niece that our K-12 system really needs to get out of the old way of teaching that there is only one right answer and they need to stop squashing the imagination of these brilliant and innovative kids! The K-12 institution is so insistent that the students all have the same answer to the same question that they are inhibiting that once innovative mind that the child was born with.

When I was growing up, we didn't have all of the wii's and the gameboys to play with as today's kids have. There were 6 kids in my family and we always had at least another dozen cousins hanging around on the farm for the summer. From the time the sun came up and our farm chores were done, we had the entire day to be creative and find things to do to entertain us. We would build forts out of sticks and twine, build tree houses out of scrap lumber and even put on parades for the neighbors. The only cartoons that we had were on Saturday mornings and that was it. No cartoon network with cartoons 24/7. When my daughter was little, I wanted her to develop a god imagination and limited her TV watching. She loved reading books which I believe does help develop a students imagination.

So, I was reading this blog about the i3 fund, which is grant money for innovation in education. As I was reading the article, I was thinking of how much greater our school system would be if we taught kids to be innovative all the way through their school careers. The US is falling behind in the education race and its time to get some innovation into our schools. The biggest challenge is to get the "old mindset" of the way we have always taught children out of the way for the new mindset of innovation. I am anxious to see if any of our schools, who are in need of operational funds, apply for this grant and create a new world for these kids. I get goose bumps just thinking about it. What a great way to spend taxpayers dollars! We would get a wonderful return on investment.

Journal 2- The World Around Us

My current creativity project is the Woodland Kitchen. I started it with a blank slate-which is my favorite way to start a project. I will admit it takes a lot more time and research- but it really gets your mind working on ideas and innovations to make this project work.

I have learned to surround myself with a variety of personalities and talents. I have one of my employees who thinks a lot like I do, but loves to follow the rules. She keeps me from getting into too much trouble. Another worker is very task oriented, which is someone who I can assign tasks to that need to be completed in a timely and orderly manner. She also sees the glass half full- so I need that perspective also.

I used to have an employee that was a person who was in touch with other people's feelings. She never wanted to hurt any ones feelings and she was the exact opposite of me. So, she would be the one that would give me clues about avoiding hurting someones feeling instead of rolling over them. My team of coordinators also come with great innovation and we become a very strong team when we work together on projects.

Back to the kitchen...We were trying to model our kitchen from the famous Farm Market Kitchen of Algoma. As you may know, it is a huge success but also took many years to get to its current state. I had to take a road trip to see what was so special about this kitchen. Well, it's obvious that the director is a genius and is a wealth of knowledge. She would feed me a little information at a time, but I had to remind myself that not only do we need to make this kitchen be self-sustaining, we had to get our educational piece entangled in the process.

The kitchen we are renting had sat idle for years. It was from a school district that closed over 7 years ago and they took any equipment that was still salvageable. I knew that I needed to hire an assistant that knew about commercial kitchens and could feed me information so I could make some educated decisions. Thank God I found one!

One project that I had to complete was to make a "processors manual" with all of the forms and information they would need to get started.I had a variety of information that I found on the web, or someone handed to me and I filed it away. It was like a giant puzzle! So I had to sit down and actually go through the process of becoming a kitchen processor. I had to also be the person watching out for any legalities that could get us(NWTC) in hot water, such as lease agreements. If that isn't innovation , I don't know what is!

What did we ever do before we had the Internet? I can hardly remember. To think that most of the information that we received was outdated by the time it hit newspaper print and imagine how little information could be printed in a newspaper or shown on the nightly news. It still amazes me!
(Sorry for getting side tracked)

So the question is "how am I becoming more innovative?" I will have to admit that there have been many times in the past few weeks that little lessons of innovation have popped into my head. One that really stands out to me is the "wait for it" part. I choose the fastest decision and I don't get a chance to look at it in a different light. So if anything, I guess I have taken more time to just sit back and take a second look before jumping to a conclusion.

You know the saying...
If you need something done right away, do it yourself
If you have time, delegate it
If you have forever, form a committee

I'm afraid these are words that I've lived by most of my life.

I had a supervisor in a past life that taught me the value of that saying. We had to rely on decisions being made by a county board. Now, in their defense, this group of people that get together once a month, for very little pay, and they have to make decisions on only the information that is given to them. That pretty much stifles innovation of any kind. When we (my supervisor and I) would prepare presentations to the board we would give them as much information as we could possibly give them so they could make an educated decision and not table the decision until next month.

Just when you thought they had all come to a decision based on good facts there came what my supervisor called "the clown factor". This was the board member who showed up late, slept through most of the meeting and would say something so "out there" that the decision would get tabled again. After reading the Whack book this week I can look at the clown in a different light. Maybe it was a good thing for the jester to come in and make the members rethink a decision. That was an ah-ha moment for me!

So, what is on the horizon for the kitchen? I do believe there is a grass roots movement to bring the small entrepreneur back into the picture and move away from the large commercial chain stores. But what is so exciting about this venture is that some of these little entrepreneurs can actually become a supplier to one of these large chain stores! They just need to find their little niche. Go for the natural, healthy, and good for you movement. Put your product in recyclable packaging before the larger companies figure it out! They could be the next success story if they play their cards right. And we are going to be there to help them through the entire process.
Now for our project...
Today one of my team members stopped in my office with an update on the project. He said that when he was working on the project this weekend it dawned on him to add a drawer so that we could accommodate different shaped containers. That was very cool because he was pretty sure his original design was perfect and didn't need anything else. I was giving them a hard time when we were working on Friday by being the devils advocate- which I could tell really annoyed one of them, but I am not a conformist, so it's my job to ask the questions and really fun to annoy people at times.

My final words- Patients is a virtue