A Prototype Learning Tool
Part of a Larger Idea —
This site’s humble version of a “gallery of innovation examples” fits into an overall vision regarding the potential for learning power from the public good of a high-quality version of innovation’s fundamentals. That overall vision, elaborated at the separate web site of IngenuityEpoch.org, includes sketches of sample learning applications that would be made possible by a framework of innovation’s fundamentals:
- The learning-application sketch for a searchable online gallery of innovation examples (or “profiles”) is the basis for this site’s prototype gallery.
- The sketch is much more ambitious than this prototype. In particular, the sketch assumes an innovation profile template that reflects innovation’s constant forces, with tags that highlight its many types of variation. This site’s prototype examples do not yet include that level of sophistication, but they may eventually!
As pasted from IngenuityEpoch.org, here’s the sketch of what a searchable online gallery of innovation examples might look like:
An Ongoing World’s Fair of Innovation —
The ideal experience of visiting an eventual searchable, online gallery of innovation profiles might be like visiting a hands-on world’s fair or museum or trade-show … online:
For every single 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:
- world changing
- based on new technology, including AI technology
- based on bio-mimicry
- 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 startup organizations versus other types of organizations
- contributing to sustainable development
- within ventures seeking a triple bottom line
- based on seizing opportunity versus addressing a problem
- based on “jobs” that customers “hire” a product or service to do for them
- illustrating increasing complexity, from an effective new connection of simple knowledge to a connection of a complex web of knowledge
- 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 (retirees, teens, women, children, etc.)
- originally conceived of as new value with subsequent need to figure out a source of revenue
- enacted within public service agencies
- featuring disruptive innovation for any sector
- enacted by youth
- catalyzing change in customers’ behavior or capability, arranged by difficulty of change and learning
- led by a woman
- featuring a like-business-model (e.g., matchmaking of any type)
- filling a gap in the marketplace
- and so on.
The online gallery also could offer innovation learning tools beyond its collection of innovation profiles. It could include resources for educators (e.g., practice topics for youth), links to related resources such as Open IDEO and much more.
Subscribe to “Offering of the Day” —
The gallery could deliver an “offering of the day (or week)” delivered via email or social media (and perhaps featured independently in news media as “good” news). Subscribers could opt for particular industries for their offering of the day, with everyone receiving one universal selection. The latter is to support intelligibility of innovation’s constants across industries and more, including supporting cross-pollination.
Essentially, an offering of the day is to put innovation’s concrete purpose and practice into public drinking water, to stimulate conversations and questions. The offerings should be clear enough for middle school students.
Why an Online Gallery? —
From cognitive science: “The surest way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose them to many different versions of the abstraction.”
And from the Kauffman Foundation:
“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.”
The sketch continues at IngenuityEpoch.org, including speaking to “how” it might come about.
I welcome all comments on the overall hypothesis, this site, etc.
Thank you for visiting.
Karen Gates
kgates@umich.edu
