Digital to REAL

Open innovation and absorptive capacity

Schools build classroom communities. Most of a teacher's time is spent with a group, not one on one with a student. Entrepreneurship curriculum (and all curriculum areas) need to carefully study the social and management environment that builds the creative individual so needed for 21st century economic growth. The Managing for Creativity article (July-August, 2005) from the Harvard Business Review highlights two key concepts that need weaving into the curriculum and our use of computer technology.

"While most students of the creative process have focused on what makes individuals creative, a growing number of thinkers such as Andrew Hargadon at the University of California, Davis, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox, are unlocking the social and management contexts in which creativity is most effectively nurtured, harnessed, and mobilized. Eric von Hippel of MIT and Henry Chesbrough of the University of California, Berkeley, have called attention to the critical role played by users and customers in the creative process and to a new model of “open innovation.” Duke University’s Wesley Cohen has shown that corporate creativity depends upon a firm’s “absorptive capacity”—the ability of its research and development units not just to create innovations but to absorb them from outside sources."

The SAS Institute puts these concepts in practice by also valuing the work over the tools, rewarding excellence with challenges, and minimizing hassles.

In turn, the tools with which we teach, including distance education tools, need to foster open innovation and absorptive capacity. Creating a cascade of voices that bridges traditional composition with new tools that do precisely that would include blog sites, wikis and other newly emerging tools of the Internet.

posted by Bob Houghton @ 8:43 PM