Ken Robinson on Creativity

This is a fantastic presentation by Ken Robinson at a TED conference. About 20 minutes long, but really fun and engaging. Watch if you can!

The gist of it - Ken contends that creativity is as important as literacy and should be treated with the same status. He defines creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value and highlights that it comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

Here's the thing. Children will take a chance. If they don't know the answer they'll have a go anyway. They're not frightened of being wrong. If you're not prepared to be wrong you're not going to come up with anything original. As you grow up you become frightened to be wrong because we stigmatise mistakes, and we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. Effectively we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

We need to radically change our view of intelligence. It is diverse, dynamic, and distinct; and it's expressed through distinct and different avenues - some creative, some physical, some academic. Consequently he believes only hope for the future is to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.

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What is SROI? - A couple of useful papers for download

I've turned my previous post into a very short paper you can download for reference.

And in case you want something more in-depth here's the REDF paper on exploring value creation in non-profit sector

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Social Return on Investment (SROI)

For many of us who are looking to start up a social enterprise, the framework of Social Return on Investment (SROI) could prove to be crucial in both understanding and presenting our social impacts in economic terms. Anything that helps us raise funding and support has to be worth taking seriously, so here's a short overview of SROI.
According to the SROI-UK Network , SROI is an approach to understanding and managing the impacts of a project, organisation or policy. It is based on important impacts that stakeholders identify and puts financial value on outcomes that do not have market values. SROI therefore is a framework. It’s a story, not just a number.
The story should show how you:

1. Understand the value created
2. Manage it
3. Can prove it

It was developed in the early 1990s, by a non-profit social enterprise called The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund [REDF] who began to analyse its SROI to help illustrate in monetary terms the value generated through an investment in its social programmes.
For social entrepreneurs there are 3 avenues of value creation:

1. Economic: creating services or products that have greater market value than their inputs e.g. any commercial business
2. Social: creating services or products that have a provably beneficial impact on society e.g. anti-racism initiatives
3. Socio-Economic: creating services or products that increase the market value of inputs but also generate cost savings for the public system or environment e.g. employment programs

Why should you care?
The key point to note is that the SROI analysis is essentially a robust argument for your non-profit or social enterprise to be at least partially compensated or credited for the value it creates in the marketplace. This could be either through public funding or CSR investment.
To create your SROI analysis you need to do the following:

1. Examine your social service activity over a given time frame (usually five to 10 years);
2. Calculate the amount of "investment" required to support that social activity and analyze the capital structure in place to support it
3. Identify the various cost savings, reductions in spending and related benefits that accrue to your public system as a result of what you're doing
4. Calculate the economic value of those cost savings and related benefits
5. Discount those savings back to the beginning of the investment time frame using a net present value (NPV) and/or discounted cash flow analysis
6. Finally present the Socio-Economic Value created during the investment time frame, by expressing that value in terms of NPV and SROI rates and ratios.

And yes, it clearly points towards needing a decent accountant!
Still, the benefits of having an SROI framework are clear. It will help you

• Understand the real value of what your enterprise/organisation does
• Raise finance more easily
• Get public sector support more easily
• Improve reporting on positive changes caused by your organisation
• Develop a better organisational structure, with improved strategies, systems and accountability
• Improve your ability to manage risks and identify opportunities required to achieve your mission

References

• Harvard Business School SROI Overview
• London Business School SROI Primer
• SROI-UK Network

Download
Download this post on SROI as a pdf

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3 Reasons Why Your Great Idea Doesn't Yet Exist

I've recently had a number of people with ideas for startups come to me for advice on how to get these ideas going. In each case the idea has appeared to plug a perceived need in the market, suggesting a no-brainer that the 'inventor' is therefore about to take risks to pursue.

After a little investigation however, I'm usually able to find equivalents that already exist, or good reasons for why it's not already being done. So I always urge caution, as there are some obvious reasons why an idea you've had does not already appear to exist

1. You haven't done your research properly.
   This is by far and away the primary reason people think their idea is unique. Don't just search for the most obvious term that reflects your idea. Look for words and phrases that mean something similar. Also look for news or releases that suggest that something similar is already under development.
2. Someone has thought of it, looked at all the angles and decided the ROI isn't worth it.
   This is also very likely. Stay wary of your idea until you've covered these bases yourself. If the idea requires set up and development well outside your personal areas of expertise, you should know that many ideas that seem entirely obvious to the naive, often involve prohibitive execution, set up and development, or simply don't have the scale of market first imagined.
3. Someone thought of it, built it, and it failed.
   Lots of companies, services and products come and go. Don't just focus on things that are out there. Make sure you've checked if anyone has tried it before and failed. Investigate why they weren't successful and be honest about whether or not you are really likely to do better.

Finally, if you get past all of the above you are in the fantastic position of being confident that no one has thought of it. Yes it's rare, but it happens. Protect your IP and get busy!

3 Reasons Why Finding Equivalents Shouldn't Stop You

On the other hand, just because products or services exist, doesn't mean that you should drop your idea right away for the following reasons

1. The market has already been primed and created (just make sure it isn't saturated).
2. You can easily evaluate what does and doesn't work, and you might thus be able to improve on existing products and services.
3. You could go niche in terms of design or target market, and focus on developing a specific variant of the idea instead.

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Google's 9 Principles of Innovation

If Google's successes can be attributed to these principles, then they have to be worth modelling your own startup or enterprise around

1. Ideas come from everywhere - it's not about frameworks and enforced ideation
2. Share everything you can - don't be territorial and give credit for ideas
3. You're brilliant, we're hiring - when you meet someone exceptional, fit them in even if you don't actually have a role
4. A license to pursue dreams - make space for your people to explore tangential ideas
5. Innovation, not instant perfection - start rough, learn and iterate
6. Data is apolitical - be specific with measurement and data and make decisions based on it
7. Creativity loves constraints - fixing at least a few parameters helps people start thinking out of the box
8. It's users, not money - if you can successfully engage users, you can monetise them
9. Don't kill projects, morph them - figure out how to repackage and rejuvenate struggling projects rather than waste invested ideas, time and money by shutting them down completely

Watch and listen to Google's Marissa Mayer on the 9 Principles. The video is really old and pixelated but it's still good:

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4 Phases of Innovation

Innovation really has turned into the buzzword for 2008. In case, like most people, you still don't know what innovating is really all about here's a quick intro. According to Iris Mootee on the Future Lab blog, apparently going from idea to mass market adoption happens in 4 phases, all of which involve innovation.

1. The Fuzzy Front End (FFE), which involves a lot of insight gathering, ideation and early conceptualization
   
2. New Product Development (NPD) process, which involves design and engineering prototyping
   
3. Early-Stage Commercialization (ESC), where ideas are needed to inform how the product is being brought to market (usually small underserved or unserved market/segments)
   
4. Driving Mass Adoption (DMA), where innovation is applied to mass market the product/service and considerations include how to use this disruptive innovation to upset the market dynamics and economics.

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The Lifecycle of Innovation

This is a great illustration by Tom Fishburne of what can happen to your fantastic idea once realities bite!

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Are you innovating without knowing it? - A look at NESTA's 4 Types of Hidden Innovation

In light of general pessimism about the state of innovation in the UK, NESTA have published a research report called 'Total Innovation'. 100 pages of mostly impenetrable writing with sentences the size of paragraphs. The key bit of the report however is the focus on 'hidden innovation' and NESTA defines 4 types which are worth sharing.

In our current world innovation has, as NESTA put it, become "synonymous with scientific and technological invention born of new research-driven knowledge." However innovation can be social, behavioural, organisational etc. Recognising this should help raise awareness that just because you aren't involved in tech research doesn't mean that you aren't innovating.

Unhelpfully these other types of innovation have been titled Type I, Type II, Type III and Type IV, so I'm going to use a bit of creative license and title them by their descriptions

1. Type I: Practical Research - eg. Engineering solutions developed through 'on-the-job' learning rather than through lab research.
2. Type II: New Organisational and Business Models - eg. Semi-autonomous business units in the pharmaceutical industry reflecting the entrepreneurial nature of small bio-tech firms.
3. Type III: Novel combination of existing technologies and processes - eg. Using existing functions and routines to deliver new services
4. Type IV: Micro-Innovations - eg. Small scale manufacturing problems and challenges dealt with outside R&D programmes

I found this interesting because it helped me understand that by doing something new with existing technologies, we can be recognised as innovating too. iVoluntr.org will fall into the Type III category. I'll explain why in a follow-on post.

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Disruptive Innovation - Some pointers

To start with, here's an excerpt from a post I'd written a short while ago around disruptive social innovation. "Disruptive innovation is about creating something that fundamentally shifts the way things are done. Using analogies from Systems Thinking, the whole world is a complex web of interactions that localise around tightly linked processes that are all loosely linked to other localised processes. Disrupting the norm in one small area then, can have a follow on effect to the way the whole world works."
The guy who's written the most around Disruptive Innovation is Clayton Christensen. Here's a snapshot of his model.
You can also preview some of his books on Google Books. I think the latest one is called Seeing What's Next

• A more detailed overview can be found on the 12manage website: http://www.12manage.com/methods_christensen_disruptive_innovation.html
• One of the more interesting books on innovation is the Medici Effect, which you can download for free off the web.
• I like the Systems Thinking approach, but here's an article around some diagnostic tools for innovation you might want to look at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html
• A good blog around innovation is in the BusinessWeek Online -- NussbaumOnDesign

Other concepts worth looking at in relation to disruptive innovation are Design Thinking and some of the principles behind User Centred Design. I'll cover these a bit more in a future post.

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