A Searchable Online Gallery of Innovation Examples
As envisioned, a searchable online gallery of Innovation examples would provide students with a large number of concrete Innovation examples:
- Every example would be presented within the same profile template as a way of showing how Innovation’s widely-varying examples all share the same unifying and driving fundamentals.
- Student searches would be supported by tags assigned to examples.
- The gallery is to serve as a supplemental learning tool — where many examples help bring to life an established framework of Innovation’s unifying fundamentals.
The gallery’s offering profiles are to be clear enough for middle school students, and at least one wing is devoted to a variety of profiles designed especially for younger students.
Although such a gallery would be made possible ultimately by having an established (not provisional) framework of Innovation’s fundamentals, work on constructing a gallery might actually support development of a framework, as Innovation examples repeatedly test working versions of the unifying fundamentals.
Why an Online Gallery?
For learning support, as a direct complement to a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals:
- By featuring Innovation’s wide variation, examples also feature “the small set of themes” that are constant across the variation.
- From cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham: “The surest way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose them to many different versions of the abstraction.”
And for personalized inspiration. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues have noted:
“Human beings can observe and/or be shown how the activities of humanity have changed the environment, fostering the realization that other people may be able to also bring about change. … A sense of what has been done helps lead to a sense of what might be done, as well as an appreciation for the kinds of established constraints that might affect imagined changes.”
Like Visiting an Ongoing World’s Fair of Innovation —
The ideal experience of visiting a searchable, online gallery of innovation profiles might be like visiting a hands-on world’s fair or museum or trade-show … online and as frequently as desired.
For every single offering profile, innovation’s fundamentals — the constants — would be visible.
But innovation’s many variations would be equally visible, including as wings and special exhibits that are either curator-determined or devised by visitors, who could customize, archive, tag, and share their own collections. Visitors also could receive notices of (or search for) new profiles.
A wing’s cluster of profiles might reflect any combination of innovation’s many variations. For example, curated wings might feature profiles of offerings that are:
- based on bio-mimicry
- based on new technology, including AI technology
- based on “appropriate technology”
- based on ordinary knowledge
- illuminating of innovation’s “social differential,” including catalysts for change in customers’ behavior and capability
- growing out of scalable startup organizations versus other types of organizations
- contributing to sustainable development (or any other particular type of purpose)
- initiatives seeking a triple bottom line
- based on varying practitioner pathways to an offering — such as observing an unmet customer need versus addressing a problem versus considering “jobs” that customers “hire” a product or service to do for them
- initiatives that failed
- and so on.
Since visitors to this online gallery could go from one wing to another within a second or two, rather than walking long distances, there could be a large number of wings. Also, a visitor could arrange a wing’s profiles according to personal preferences and could create, save, and share their own wings.
The possibilities for clustering are limited only by tags. In addition to variables such as those above, tags might highlight offerings that are:
- co-created with customers
- based on public-private partnerships
- benefiting a certain category of customer (teens, women, children, etc.)
- originally conceived of as new value with subsequent need to figure out a source of revenue
- enacted within a certain industry (health care, agriculture, government, etc.)
- featuring “disruptive” innovation (per Clayton Christensen’s model)
- enacted by youth
- set in a school or other small-scale initiative
- catalyzing change in customers’ behavior or capability, arranged by difficulty of change and learning
- initiated by a woman
- featuring a like-business-model (e.g., matchmaking of any type)
- filling a gap in the marketplace
- and so on.
Instructional Support —
The online gallery also could include resources for educators (e.g., practice topics for youth, links to a range of Innovation models and tools, perhaps instructor forums, and much more).
Subscribe to “Offering of the Week” —
The gallery could deliver an “offering of the week” (a profile) delivered via email or social media. This delivery could support intelligibility of Innovation’s unifying constants plus intelligibility of the breadth and nature of its variation.
Essentially, an offering of the week can help put Innovation’s concrete purpose and practice into a school’s public drinking water, to stimulate student conversations, ideas, questions, etc.
Prototype of the Gallery
This website also provides a simple prototype of a searchable online gallery of Innovation examples:
- The prototype, which features a small set of Innovation examples, doesn’t fulfill the ambitious vision of the sketch above.
- In particular, whereas the sketch assumes many Innovation examples, all sharing a profile template that’s based on a framework of innovation’s unifying concepts, the prototype’s profiles are similar but not yet based on one template.
- Additionally, the prototype does not include search capability.
Please visit the gallery prototype .