Getting to Know Innovation Catalyst Kirsten Richert
Have you ever wished you were more innovative? Do you wonder how those around you consistently come up with interesting ideas?
Our friend Joe Kwon, host of the unique “Why it Works” podcast, turns the table 180 degrees and interviews my “Getting Unstuck” co-host Kirsten Richert on innovation and her role as an innovation catalyst. Kirsten reveals some of the hidden mechanisms behind why Innovation works.
Listen for:
• Why Kirsten became interested in innovation to begin with, and what challenged her to move to innovation consulting on a full-time basis.
• What common misconceptions people have about innovation and being innovative.
For a primer on the five tools that Kirsten spoke about in the Systematic Inventive Thinking tool kit, turn to the March 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review.
• What stops individuals and organizations from doing more innovation.
• How innovating positively impacts the people doing the innovating.
• Why innovators need to take into account who they are trying to serve with the innovation.
• How the mentality of “functional fixedness” – the context of how products, services, and processes typically operate – serves to limit our ability to innovate, and how you can disrupt that mentality.
• How organizations that espouse innovation often work against themselves by injecting danger into the innovation process.
• How “task unification” allows you to find a new purpose for an existing product or service.
• How breaking an existing product into its component parts breaks functional fixedness and actually spurs innovation.
After listening to the episode:
If you have an interest in pursuing another career, what challenges do you see standing in your way?
Pick any object in your office or on your desk and assign it a task different from, or in addition to, its commonly accepted one. (Like the plastic soda bottle now used to conduct light.) For example, if you have a framed picture on your desk, how else might you use the frame?
The Systematic Inventing Thinking process of innovation doesn’t create “new” out of thin air. Rather it starts with an existing product, service, or process. What existing products, services or processes in your organization cry out for innovation?