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.

complexity, libraries, and web design

At Computers in Libraries a couple of weeks ago, Ellyssa Kroski gave a talk about Information Design for the New Web. What I found particularly interesting, in addition to the design tips, was how this presentation demonstrated so vividly the point that libraries exist within a complex system. While complexity in the sense of a complex system was never mentioned in her presentation, the clear dependency of our library environment on the external world was demonstrated in the fact that all of the examples on how libraries need to be designing their services were drawn from outside of libraryland.

The message from this isn't particularly new, but it is clear: we must take our clues and directions from our environment. Libraries do not exist in an isolated or rarified world and our environment is being determined within a larger context that is not under our direct control. Even in the most traditional environments, the world expects differ things for us today. If we do not meet the expectations of the environment, the other systems with which we interact, such as our patron populations, will adapt and meet their needs in ways that are better suited to their needs. If that doesn't include us, it's not going to be a big concern for them, so it better be for us.