| Smarts
: Books
A Work of Art
Creating a business masterpiece takes a palette of
different ideas.
Frans Johansson has authored a sparklingly good book on innovation
in the ‘gray’ space. The book takes its name from
a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.
The Medicis were a banking family in Florence, who funded
creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this
family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets
and philosophers, financiers, painters and architects converged
upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned
from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines.
Together they forged a new world based on new ideas –
what became known as the Renaissance. So how can organizations
of this century achieve this dream?
In The Medici Effect, the author explores how to
create an Intersection of disciplines within and outside organizations.
Drawing on discoveries that have arisen across fields as diverse
as business, biology, politics, engineering, music and technology,
Johansson shares stories of innovators past and present to
illustrate how Intersections were created and exploited. For
organizations, techniques such as brainstorming may not always
give the desired results. Instead, Johansson suggests that
specialization and expertise must give way to functionally
and culturally diverse teams. The walls between departments,
divisions, companies and industries must come down to enable
the free cross-pollination of ideas. Inside companies, incentive
programs need to be extended to embrace failure where learning
has occurred, as well as to reward success. As Tom Peters
says, “reward successful failures, punish mediocre success.”
But
for organizations, the issue in creating Intersections will
come in trying to systematize the process. For example, at
ManyWorlds, we have researched and developed a leading edge
process methodology for managing portfolios of ideas, discretizing
them into their component parts, and recombining them effectively
to form stages of investments and option valuation. This,
accompanied by tools such as Epiture® to generate combinations
of idea components and to deliver those combinations to suitable
employees, can create a basis for the Medici Effect to occur,
systematically. However, as with every process, the most important
element is the change in the hearts and minds of people, and
that is where the Medici Effect Intersection is most valuable.
A
highly enjoyable and well written book, many a would-be innovator
will enjoy.
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