jumpstarting innovation

Recently, Working Knowledge (from the Harvard Business School) had an article on Jumpstarting innovation: Using disruption to your advantage. Not surprisingly, this article is geared toward the commercial sector, but many of the ideas can be adapted for libraries and information agencies. For example, the author advises us to listen to, and perhaps more importantly, learn from the people who use our services. This has been operationalized in research libraries by using this type of thinking to drive the specifics of institutional repository implementation with the repository as a way of (potentially) addressing issues related to the current model of scholarly communication. Further advice in the article to "expand your horizons" can been seen as a potential impetus for the creation of 23 things at the Charlotte & Mechlenburg County Public Library.

One question that remains is how the advice in the article can be applied to libraries and information agencies. Perhaps the best thing to do would be just jump right in. You can do this by using the tools provided to analyze the disruptive trends in your organization, analyze the ideas about these trends for potential value and then prioritizing and implementing the ideas. Even if it's possible to only implement a few of the ideas, going through the exercise helps create an environment that values innovation and fosters an innovative spirit, which may be the most important thing.

making complexity work

While many of the details in a recent article from CIO Insight magazine on creative thinking are rather specific to information technology, one particular point in the article does resonate for anyone in the information professions, "...culturally you want a certain amount of complexity and churn because it creates a chemical reaction that jars creative thinking." Thinking creatively is an important skill when dealing with complexity because it can help us deal in new ways with many of the issues our organizations face.

Think about things in different ways can help us work through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that accompanies complexity. In doing so, it provides us with new ways of addressing critical issues, such as how to standardize and consolidate functions so we can decrease spending in less critical areas while increasing spending in areas that generate greater strategic return for our organization overall. An example of this from a library IT perspective would be investing in new data mining software. One of the potential benefits of doing so is it would allow us to spend less time tinkering with routine library management system reports and shift the responsibility for that type of reporting closer to where it belongs in the organization. It would also allow the systems development staff to focus on "higher-value" projects, such as developing enhanced user-interfaces that bring all our content together which is one of the most important issues we need to address today.

trust and its potential effect on innovation

While catching up on some reading, I came across an interesting interview with one of the authors of an article in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. In the original article about plumbers and their trust relationships, the authors found that while trust makes existing relationships more productive, it also has a negative effect. In this environment, strong trust relationships acted as a barrier to investigation of new possibilities that existed outside the domain of the trusted relationships. This is why it is so important for our social networks to be broad and widely encompassing. When they are limited, both personally and organizationally, they can act as an inherently limiting force in exploring new ideas and possibilities. Ultimately this has a negative effect on our own growth as well as that of our organizations.

refocusing our attention in the world of institutional repositories

Dorothea Salo's recent post in Caveat Lector is just the latest thing to remind us what we've known for some time now - that the successful institutional repositories (IRs) are those where the library has been proactive in soliciting content and has actively taken responsibility for doing all the work to get the content into the IR. Even so, success in IRs must be thought of in terms of modest acquisitions since no IR has truly taken off the way their planners had hoped. Part of this seems to be related to the work libraries have to do to convince faculty that an institutional repository is a worthwhile endeavor. This reluctance to engage with an IR effort seems to be mainly because the incentives to faculty just aren't obvious to most of them. In general, faculty don't see longevity as an issue for their published material, whether that's reflective of reality or not. The biggest gains that have been documented in relationship to gathering faculty contributions have been in grey literature.

What I found somewhat discouraging about Salo's post is the apparent ambivalence toward student contributions. We tend to forget that a lot of the emergent research in our institutions is conducted by students. This is reflected in the reality of most IRs where the majority of contributions are, in fact, from students in one form or another. McDowell's article in the latest issue of D-Lib is just the latest study to document this.

Perhaps, if we focus on what is meaningful to faculty and students, rather than what is of interest to us as librarians, we might be more successful in getting participation in our IRs.

reenvisioning our processes

A recent article in Computerworld documented the unexpected problems a bank experienced after installing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Basically, the problem was that the bank was too focused on fulfilling its own information needs at the expense of its customers. Although the context in most libraries is quite different from that of the bank, much can be learned from this example. For instance, how often do we ask for more information than is truly necessary "just to make sure." A perfect example here is the typical interlibrary loan form where we ask for so much information it makes it appear we are actually trying to discourage people from using the service. By asking too many questions, the bank started losing people in droves. The question we must ask ourselves is, "Are we doing the same thing in our libraries?"