Developed by David Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the cultural sector with National Arts Strategies, this course is designed to help arts and culture leaders create an environment where new ideas are constantly created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work. One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas flourish. Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach you how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to: - Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision - Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives - Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice - Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage you in a series of class discussions and exercises.
L7-Part 7 Environment Constraints
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來自 Vanderbilt University 的課程
Leading Innovation in Arts and Culture
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從本節課中
Technological Constraints
This week takes the perspective on innovation of the scientist and engineer. This view holds that innovation is constrained by the laws of nature and our ability to manipulate them. It focuses on the physical limits we hit when we try to do things like improve acoustics, present light-sensitive artifacts in an engaging and immediate way, or bring together thousands of people in one place for a festival. We will develop a model of these "technological constraints" by understanding the roles of 1) our knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology, 2) the nature of time and sequencing, and 3) the natural environment and ecology that form the context for our innovation. The perspective is that innovation will fail when the proposed change does not function or functions in unanticipated ways.
與講師見面
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
Jim RosenbergIndependent Consultant and Senior Advisor at NAS
[MUSIC].
The third kind of technological constraint we're going to talk about has
to do with ecology. And this has to do with you know, through
basically the distribution of natural resources.
And also our ability to sustain life you know, human life and otherwise inside the
system that we place our innovation in. And so again, we're going to put our
innovation in some context. And so, what is the effect of that
context on our innovation from the ecological perspective, and the effect of
our innovation on that ecosystem as well. We'll talk about three kinds of
constraints or subcontraints within here. first being the availability of necessary
inputs. Where do we get the inputs that we allow
to and help us to think of the transformations we need to?
Where do we make those transformations? So, I am talking about a site, the
suitable site for transformation. And also, when a system has outputs, when
our innovation creates outputs, where do those outputs go?
And some of the outputs are the ones that we want as outputs.
The, you know, the, the the outputs we would call them.
But then, there are some other things called the by-products, and what happens
with those. So, let's start with necessary resources.
If you're going to do certain activities that you would do require a great deal of
power, for example. And so, in the case of the A12 aircraft,
what they needed was they needed lots of power to be able to test these engines.
And so, they needed to put the testing facility, the innovation, you know,
basically the place where they're doing the innovation, in some place where
electricity was available. And in fact, they had to do the testing
at night because the city use too much power during the day, and so if they did
these tests at night, they could actually get enough power out of the power grid.
Interestingly you might say, well, we can put the system where it's best for the
system. Think of solar power.
So, in solar power actually, you know, just off the top of your head, you might
think that solar power, best place for solar power might actually be in the
desert, right? because there's lots of sun, no clouds
rain. This should be a great place for it.
Well, it turns out, all the ways that we know to use, or how to produce power
through solar energy require a great deal of cooling, so the paradox is you have
this place where there's lots of sun, but there's not a lot of water available.
And so, how do you mitigate that, how do you make that work?
You know, there might be other materials that we need as well.
And other things, we're talking about power nuclear power plants, for example.
And nuclear power plants, they have to be sited in places where there's you know,
the, the, I mean, the weather we may have humidity issues.
You have ground stability, you know, are there earthquakes in the area, what's the
temperature there. Nuclear power plants also require a great
deal of cooling. And so, when you put one next to a river
and you pull the water out and you, you basically cool down your reactor, you put
it back into the river, the water is at a much higher temperature.
And this also creates a problem in terms of siding effort for transformation.
So if it's a very small river, you may raise the temperature of that thing too
high in order to sustain life within it. And life become, becomes a kind of
problem that you have to face. We may also have the sighting that is, we
need to put our transformation and put our innovation inside of a biological
host. And so, if we're putting something inside
of a person, you know, if we are putting something inside of a cow, that those
kind of things, those constraints of biology also may constrain us as well.
It's like how do I get them inside, how do I keep that thing alive while I
actually have these things in there? So again, doing the, you know, it's like,
to use an example a long while ago. Keeping the body alive during brain
surgery is a very difficult thing that we have to be able to sustain life, and do
it within the limitations of our understanding.
And so, again, this is about, not about conscious competence, but it's really
within the limits of our understanding. Then, we have this problem of raw input
availability. And the raw inputs that I need to bring
into my innovation in order to do the transformation, they might not be
available in the place I need. And so again, like power and all these
things, how do I get the access to the, the material, the inputs that I need to
make my innovation possible. Then, we have the problem of outputs.
Outputs, you know, basically we're transforming inputs into outputs and
that's, that's happening at some site and there are constraints there.
The constraints are the in the products that we produce, you know, the good
stuff, but also the unhealthy bad stuff that we produce as well.
There's an example of Xintang that's my bad Chinese pronunciation, Xintang, China
where there is a city known as Jean City or Cowboy City where they produce a lot
of, of denim material for using them in the Western market.
And so, go ahead and watch this video. And you'll see one of the problems where
we actually have taken something that might have made sense in the beginning
where we might have had one factory or two factories or three factories and
amplify it to where we have 1,500 factories in one small area, the kind of
problems that we create from that. This also underlies the problem of our
willingness to put the manufacturing, that there's a transformation of products
in other places and concentrated in places and not account for the cost that
that creates on the ecology in those areas, because we're in a safe and, and
different area ourselves. And so, we want to consume blue jeans,
and this is the kind of problem that we create by doing that.
So, instead of talking about overcoming natural constraints, I'd rather talk
about living within natural constraints. And so here, is really not about that
we're going to have some kind of mindset that, oh, we can, you know, trample
nature. We can, we can control it.
We can do all sorts of things, but really is to say, how do I actually live within
it? Because if I don't have to expend energy,
you know, taming nature, I can use that energy for other parts of my innovation,
other maybe more important parts of the innovation.
So, if I can understand how to live within it, I might have a better chance
of getting my innovation real, getting my innovation produced and adopted in the
world. So, one thing is to use what's available,
are there materials around that we might be able to use.
In some developing countries to, to irrigate fields, what farmers might do is
go buy a, a diesel powered pump and try to come up with the diesel somewhere to
be able to run that pump. And so, a pump is very, very expensive.
It's heinously expensive. They require many months of a family's
wage, and then also where do you get the diesel from?
The diesel has to be brought in from far, far away, especially if you're in a rural
area like this. And so, what Paul Polak came up with, and
Paul Polak wrote a book, Out of Poverty, where he describes this and he describes
his company, IDE International Development Enterprises.
And they developed this $20 pump that was actually human powered.
And so, in these places where they don't have a lot of diesel sitting around, they
certainly have a lot of people sitting around, and so he made this pump.
It's basically a cast iron pump and it has two, he put two bamboo poles in and
you're able like to do the step master motion which uses the big muscles in your
legs instead of the small muscles in your arms to pump this thing.
It's, and it's by, because of leverage, when you put these let me show you a
picture of one. Well, well, by way of leverage, you can
actually have small children, you know, kids can do this and, and, and pump fluid
in just as good way as the diesel engine can.
And you'll do it at a price that is actually affordable and that actually
works within that context. So again, using what you have at hand can
be an important thing. My next piece of advice is to come in
from the wind and the rain. So here, we're really to think about when
I, when I site my area for transformations do I have a innovation
that's going to be produced or going to make something somewhere, how do I think
about where I put it? You know, these things like I said before
tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, floods, avalanches, all of those things are
going to happen and so let me think about them ahead of time and say to what extent
are these going to be problematic for me. In the tsunami in Japan in 2011, there
was a big problem because here's a picture of a cleaning room, the, the, the
one on this side, picture of a cleaning room where they're making computer chips.
And the problem with computer chips is a very time dependent sequence-dependent
process that is cannot be interrupted. And when the power went out and when the
floods came in, that the process were interrupted and they lost millions and
millions and millions of dollars worth of production that was in process because of
this. And so, we're going to think about if I
had a process that's super susceptible or super vulnerable to that kind of thing,
how do I think about where it is that I want to put that process?
And so, this is something important to think about.
If I'm, it goes from anywhere from baking bread, if you will need a certain level
of humidity and things like that, where can you put it, to something as complex
as making computer chips. In a book Biomimicry, Jane Janine Benyus,
in 1997, she wrote a book that described how it is that we might use models in
nature. Well, they might mimic things in nature,
which is called biomimicry, mimic things in nature to create new innovations that
actually work to sustain life and sustain it in a way that's consistent or that's
more easy on the world. So, take this example of a termite mound,
this is a gigantic termite mound. these things are tall and high and one
question has always been how do these things cool themselves.
There's a lot of insects in here and they are in really hot places and this thing
is sticking up in the air. But as often where there's not a lot of
wind, how do they cool themselves? Well, through a careful study, some
people figured it out, and in fact uh,Mick Pearce, an architect in Harare,
Zimbabwe, he created this building. This Eastgate, this Eastgate office
building, the Eastgate Center. And this building because of the way it's
designed, it uses the cooling, the ideas of how a termite mound cools itself is
able to use 90% less energy for ventilation of the other buildings of
comparable size. And so, that's pretty amazing.
90% less energy just by having modeled it on a termite mound.
And probably is, inside, it's probably like a termite mound.
If you think of any high rise building full of little people scurrying about it
has that, that sense. Another thing we might do is get smart
about supply chain, that is understanding when people, where it is we put the
outputs in a way that is actually is helpful.
Starbucks, you know, Starbucks they make a lot of coffee and a lot of coffee
throws off a lot of coffee grinds. And the coffee grinds really are not that
useful to them and it is something they would probably would have to pay to have
taken away. One thing they do is they put an, often
there's a little basket inside the Starbucks where they put the coffee
grinds, the used coffee grinds. They put them in these big bags, and as a
customer, you're just able to grab a bag, grab five bags, grab whatever and take it
home and use it as compost and spread it out in your gardens.
It's actually a very healthy kind of compost.
And so, what they're doing is they're able to take this thing, it's normally a
waste, a waste product and get the customers to take it with them.
And that is actually very, you know, that's a, that's good thinking.
Because they're able to get the waste product out of their store and get it to
a place where it's actually much more useful than have it trucked off into a
big landfill somewhere, where it wasn't actually be able to be used as a compost,
is there's, there's a real high value thing.
And from the customer's perspective, the customer also gets access to compost, or
this composting material, and doesn't have to go buy some more themselves.
And so, there's a virtual cycle in there through that whole thing.
Another example like that is with Martin Guitar Company and then, then their
participation in the SmartWood program . Martin joined the SmartWood Consortium
and what the SmartWood Consortium does is they certify the use of woods, so
basically hardwoods inside of, of companies.
And what they certify is that the wood will be sustainably harvested fairly
purchased and, and, and bought and, and, and used and, and, and augmented through
its life cycle. The value to Martin is, first of all,
there's some people who play guitars who actually care about the environment and
who'd like to see this. And those are people who are set up in
this way emotionally and they're going to pay more money for one of these guitars.
And these guitars probably start at like $3,000.
The other thing that it does is that it ensures for Martin that they actually
have a sustainable wood supply. Because if they know that the wood
supplies that they were buying are certified trees and they're sustainably
grown that they're going to be around for awhile and they'll be able to get access
to these. And so, with their factory, they're not
going to be likely to idle it. That is, you have these high paid, highly
skilled crafts people who build these guitars, and the worst possible problem
you could have, is have a bunch of people sitting around, but no wood.
And so, by sustainably growing the wood, you ensure that you have a nice supply
chain. And by doing the SmartWood part, it
actually helps the customers, the kind of customers that you want to buy your
products. And so, it becomes a virtual cycle there
as well. So, why are some things are just hard?
Well, it may have to do with the ecology of it because the distribution of the
natural resources and our ability to sustain life within the context of the
innovations occurring. To wrap this week up on technological
constraints, let me just leave you with an example that hearkens back to the one
from last week. Last week, we talked about the segway and
about this sort of an idea about the self-balancing scooter.
When I ran across this interesting article written by Trevor Blackwell, at
least a website where the chronicles is building up one of these self-balancing
scooters. And by the end of his studies, he spent
about 5,000 bucks, he spent about a week, he spent another week tweaking it and
writing it up. But basically, he spent a week making
this thing happen. So clearly, here's a case, unlike the A12
where technological constraints were not the problem.
And often, we want to jump right to technological constraints especially if
we're oriented as an engineer, we think of ourselves as, you know, a sort of a
technical person. often the technology is, is concrete,
it's easy, we can test whether it's working or not.
It's a lot easier to sort of jump into than it is to deal with the human aspects
of the constraints that we're talking about.
So again, so don't be tricked and don't, don't just jump right into thinking that
every problem is a technological problem. But this is not to say that not every
problem, that every problem is not a technological problem as well.
And so, here again we require a little bit of judgement, that we actually have
to use our brains to figure out, is this a constraint that we suffer from given
the innovation we're trying to do or not? So ultimately, these kind of constraints,
why some of these things are hard, they're hard because of physics, because
we don't know how to manage matter, we don't know how to make matter behave.
Because of time, because we may not have time, we may not have windows of
opportunity, we may think of time the wrong way inside of our organization,
and, and, unproductive ways. And then, because of ecology, because
there's not a good place to get the inputs we need, there's not a good place
to do the transformation we need. And there's not good place for the
outputs, both the value outputs and the by-products of what it is we're producing
in terms of our innovation. And it's all Open Source people who given
lots of images that I can use in my class.
Thank you.
