I have been thinking a little further on the previous discussion on the role of the innovation community and it's ecosystem of other communities. I believe that there are four basic ingredients to innovation - inside or outside a community - that can be seen as pillars:
- Context
- Sharing
- Diversity
- Debate
You need context to understand what an idea is about, how it relates to demand and feasibility etc. You need to work in a sharing environment where there is an opportunity for people to speak freely, capture ideas, experiment and take risks. This sharing environment needs to be more or less uncontrolled (that is what the freely refers to). Then, there is a need for diversity of the participants: put people together from different backgrounds, jobs, departments or even geographical locations - and even junior and senior staff - to maximinze the potential in the community. The fact that all these people, due to their different features and backgrounds are most likely member of their own core communities as well, is the strong relationship that an innovation community must have to other sources (communities). All of these lead to debate, which is the process of innovation. It can be immediate, it can happen after months only.
Now put these four elements into perspective and you will get something that I depicted in the diagram above. The matching of the lower elements 'context' and 'sharing' to existing communities are just for illustrative purposes; the real ties are in the 'diversity' element which bounds the communities to the innovation one.
This happened at 6:32:43 PM or
|
Weblog
