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During the week of February 22, 2010, we will launch our new SmartStorming newsletter, “Innovation Insights,” where approximately every two months we’ll be sharing concepts and observations designed to inspire new thinking and fresh ideas for you and your organization.

If you’reinterested in receiving “Innovation Insights,” we invite you to register, either using the form in the right hand column of this page, or here http://tinyurl.com/yal35a7 . Of course, your email address will never be shared with anyone for any reason.

This thought-provoking excerpt written by Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, invites us to explore a fresh viewpoint about our relentless pursuit of innovation… and why it’s time to innovate innovation itself.

Innovation: it’s the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong.

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.

Let’s face it. “Innovation” feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation. A better concept, one built for a radically interdependent 21st century, is awesomeness. Here are the four pillars of awesomeness:

Ethical production. Innovation turns a blind eye to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That’s a natural result of putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy low, sell high, create value. That’s so 20th century. Awesome stuff is produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn’t possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why? Starbucks isn’t just trying to innovate yet another flavor of sugar-water: it’s trying to gain awesomeness.

Insanely great stuff. What is innovative often fails to delight, inspire, and enlighten — because, as we’ve discussed, innovation is less concerned with raw creativity. Awesomeness puts creativity front and center. Awesome stuff evokes an emotive reaction because it’s fundamentally new, unexpected, and 1000x better. Just ask Steve Jobs. The iPhone and iPod were pooh-poohed by analysts, who questioned how innovative they really were — but the Steve has turned multiple industries upside down through the power of awesomeness.

Love. You know what’s funny about walking into an Apple Store? The people working there care. They don’t just “work at the Apple store” — they love Apple. Contrast that with the alienating, soul-crushing experience of trying to buy something at Best Buy — where salespeople attack you out of greed. (Or, as editor extraordinaire Sarah Green put it, “where you wander around for a full half-hour unable to find anyone to help you before you finally get the attention of some blue-shirted 12-year old who turns out to know nothing about the products she sells and ultimately end up committing hara-kiri with a Wii controller”). Their goal is to sell; the goal of Apple Store employees is simply to show off their awesomeness, and let you share it. Love for what we do is the basis of all real value creation.

Thick value. It’s the most hackneyed phrase in the corporate lexicon: adding value. Let’s face it: most value is an illusion. Nokia, Motorola, and Sony tried for a decade to “add value” to their phones — yet not a single feature did. Food producers and pharmaceutical companies claim they’re “adding value,” but mostly they’re just mega-marketing.

The vast majority of companies — in my research, greater than 95% — can only create what I have termed thin value. Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.

Let’s summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

To read Umair Haque ‘s complete text, please visit the Harvard Business Review at: blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/09/is_your_business_innovative_or.html

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation.

Follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/umairh

I wanted to share this recent blog posting by John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design. John is an inspired thought leader on the subjects of innovation, design and technology.

A few months ago, I sat with John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple, who described Steve Jobs’ primary design principle: “Not what you can add, but what you can remove.” It reminded me of the first law I outlined in my book The Laws of Simplicity, that, “The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.” This philosophy runs counter to a typical tech company’s approach, where the goal is always to upgrade and add as opposed to subtract. It’s true, for the consumer to pay more and get less defies conventional wisdom and seems to contradict economic principles. But simplified technology doesn’t necessarily mean less functionality.

Apple products aren’t simple technologies by any stretch, but there is a beautiful simplicity to them. How does Apple do it? In terms of the design evolution of the controls, the iPod started out simple, with one large button. It got more complex in middle-generation devices, and in the newest versions, it has oscillated back towards extreme simplicity in design , with all of the buttons now integrated into a single seamless control. With the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can’t even see that control anymore.

So what’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords. Apple’s done it. Others want to follow suit.

Right now, our nation sees left-brain thinking, focused on logic and reasoning, as critical to future economic development. You can see it in the emphasis on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects. What’s missing from STEM is right brain thinking — embodied by what I call the key “IDEA” (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). We need both both halves of the brain to work together and channel that brilliance through our hands and propagate ideas throughout our world. We all wonder why Apple’s products have that je ne sais quoi that draw us in. I’m beginning to think that it’s not just that they understand the power of simplicity, or the power of software. It’s that you can see they were born from a person, from two dirty hands, from just a little bit of technology, and from a massively powerful IDEA.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-maeda/technology-design-apple_b_291748.html

Also visit John Maeda’s website on business, simplicity and design: http://lawsofsimplicity.com/

Please take our online BRAINSTORM SURVEY here http://bit.ly/5BgiY
We are trying to establish some baseline data on brainstorming. Please take a few moments to complete the survey. Thanks for your help.

We are thrilled that this question has elicited so much response.

First, to date, of those who answered the poll, almost 1/2 (47%) believe creativity can be taught, 29% think this is “somewhat” the case (that people can improve their creative ability), 24% feel you’ve either got it or you don’t.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the number and variety of responses we received when we posted the question on LinkedIn. In just one day the question received 23 answers from business professionals of all kinds, from different industries. Many were extremely thoughtful and provocative. We hope to use highlights from several in our article.

In the meantime, I’ll share an original poem offered up by Michael Lyubomirskiy, project manager, consultant and inventor at Lyubomirskiy Consulting.

Can creativity be taught?
Debate is endless. All for nought.
“Self improvement” so much fun
Run around, but nothing done.
Geniuses meanwhile left to rot…

More soon on this topic!

We’re really excited about launching our blog.

Innovative thinking is what this blog is all about. And in particular, how to do it more effectively, more efficiently and more enjoyably. We’re going to be sharing regular insights, experience and tips and techniques to help you and your organization generate more, better ideas then ever before.

In today’s challenging environment, businesses need a constant supply of fresh, innovative ideas. We call this the “Innovation Imperative,” and we’ll refer to it often on these pages.

Workforces are overtaxed and frustrated due to constant pressure to think “outside the box,” to work more efficiently, to raise performance levels and to maximize productivity-often under the stress of tight deadlines and limited resources.

One of the most widely-used tools for generating new ideas is traditional brainstorming. However, brainstorming is a severely inadequate and fundamentally flawed process.

SmartStorming is a totally new approach to brainstorming. You can learn all about it at www.SmartStorming.com.

But for now, we’d like to start with a poll, to find out just what you think about brainstorming as it’s currently practiced in your organization. We’ll report back on the results when they’re in.

Thanks again and we’ll be back to you soon.

Mitchell & Keith

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