6351 Class-01 Slides [Compatibility Mode]

8/14/2019 6351 Class-01 Slides [Compatibility Mode]

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/6351-class-01-slides-compatibility-mode 1/33

I’m Chip Wood, your instructor and this class is about discovery and new ways of thinking aboutspecific area of interest. It is a course to teach you process methods that get you out of the mental

‘box’ you don’t even know you’re in, and help you generate new ideas that set you on a path to

innovation...



In summary, here’s a graphic of the course with each of the 12 lesson steps that we will be goingthrough together. Although they are laid out in a linear fashion, you will find out quickly that many

of these steps run concurrently and many-times there is a need to loop back to a previous step.

The whole series can be divided into two large groupings; Creative Discovery and Creative

Envisioning. But you should think about this whole process in holistic terms, always be thinking

about the end-game, even while working at the beginning; one practical reason for this is to enable

you to discern useful and valuable elements to capture and save and use for your final presentation.

We will talk more about this as we go along.



I haven’t found one book to use for this class, so I draw from a lot of sources for the lectures.However, here is a nice starter list of books that I recommend.

You can add to our total rade an extra 5 oints if ou identif a ood book to add to this list—all

that’s required is that you write up a one page overview describing the book and why you

recommend it.



A few more thoughts about this chart: Take note that half of the steps listed are under the label‘Creative Discovery’, i.e., research. There is a direct correlation between the amount of research one

does and the significance of the innovation. Most people are not innovators, but are what I would

call ‘hitchhikers’, i.e., they grab other’s ideas, package them up and push them into the market place,

gambling with other people’s (investors) money in the hope that the ideas will stick, so they can take

credit and get the fame.

Then the other half of the steps shown here have to do with the back-end of research, i.e., Creative

Envisioning’ or exploring the possibilities based on what was learned in ‘Discovery’.

What isn’t being shown here are all the steps involved in ‘Realization’ or what business

entrepreneurs would call the ‘Value Chain’, i.e., all the steps involved in securing investment capital,

engineering, manufacturing, advertising, and distribution to customers. That is the realm of theMBA. The activities shown here are the realm of the ATEC graduate students.



As for the name of this course, I chose it carefully and selected these three words…and here are theirdefinitions…(see slide)

I’ve used the ad ectives Generative and Desi n to modif the noun Research i.e. to ualif what

kind of research we’re going to study in this course.



Richard Florida has written a nice book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and as a social scientist hasnoted that:

The creative im ulse—the attribute that distin uishes us as humans from other s ecies—is now

being let loose on an unprecedented scale.

He further notes that about 40 percent of us are now engaged in creative enterprises; the measure of

our value is tied to creative accomplishment, whereas a hundred years ago, 90 percent of us were tied

down to task oriented jobs that had little tolerance for individual initiative and creative action.

Can you name some of the forces at play that have contributed to this evolutionary change in the

social s stem?

•Democracy

•Free Enterprise

•Education

•Communication

•Ubi uitous Information Internet



OK, the first thing I want to do is lay a foundation for a new way of thinking about the subject of research and innovation.

I ho e it isn’t too tedious…if ou are ettin lost or don’t understand what the heck it has to do with

this class, stop me and we’ll work through it until you do. It is vital that we start this course with this

common philosophical understanding before we launch into the methods and tactics.

So, after talking about some fundamental forces that are changing our lives for the better, I’m going

to chat a bit about the subject of linear and non-linear systems, and then talk about complexity, chaos

and something called the Fuzzy Front End.

We will also see what thou ht leaders have to sa about how these new realities are effectin this new

age we are living in right now.



About ten years ago, I was attending the Aspen Design Conference and this interesting looking, tall,red-headed fellow by the name of Bran Ferren was one of the featured speakers, he was the new

Exec. VP for Creative Technology, Research and Development at Disney’s Imagineering Lab. He's

one of those guys that the movie industry gives awards to for technical achievements that we never

see at the Oscars. He’s also a science advisor for many government agencies including Homeland

Security and in 2000 he was awarded the Kilby (as in Jack Kilby*) Award for his contributions to

society. In short, he’s a modern technology ‘Thought Leader’…

I’ll never forget his opening rhetorical question at the conference…(see slide)

Now you realize that in 1995, the WWW was an experience that few had; in fact, you could

practically count the number of web sites there were on your fingers and toes, so few at that

conference knew where he was coming from.

* Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics for being one of two scientists to invent the modern

silicon chip while a youn en ineer at Texas Instruments



Here’s another quote from one of my favorite books about the WWW...(read quote on slide)...That in general terms is what we have been experiencing the better part of the last decade.



Also that year, I attended the exclusive TED Conference in Monterey California (you have to applyto attend; they only accept 900 at a cost of $4000). It is one of the most eclectic and interesting

conferences in the country; TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design; started by Richard

Saul Wurman, an Information Architect who wrote the books Information Anxiety 1&2.

That year, the featured speakers included Nicholas Negroponte (Director of the MIT Media Lab),

Danny Hillis (Artificial Intelligence research professor – MIT), John Perry Barlow (one of the

founders of the WELL & the Electronic Frontier Foundation & Lyricist for The Grateful Dead), and

many other thought leaders of the emerging information age. There was a lot of excitement about the

potential of the WWW. As of yet there was no-one making money on the ‘Net, but all were making

pre ct on t at t wou t ey un erest mate t e revenue t e o ow ng year y ; t was t e

beginning of the Internet Bubble)



Then this guy—Stuart Kaufman, PhD Biologist—appeared on the stage with a blackboard; he’s acomplexity theorist from the Santa Fe Institute; he’s written several books, the most famous one

being ‘At Home in the Universe’. He drew a simple graphic like this…and proceeded to explain that

the rise of ubiquitous forms of information and projected influence of the Internet was very similar to

the Cambrian Explosion about 500 million years ago, when DNA emerged. When living cells had

developed this organic system to allow cellular information to hold their blue-prints in memory,

biology exploded on the earth in all it’s diverse variations of life. He said, this is what is happening

right now except that this time it is an electronic information system that holds ideas in memory and

easily shares them on a peer-to-peer basis over the Internet and the effect will be to change

.

He went on to postulate that as the social-economic effects of the ‘information age’ explodes, the old

‘industrial age’ would wane, represented by the falling curve. His advice was to pay close attention

to the changes and begin to move over to the rising curve of change. He also warned that many will

hang on to the old systems and fall into anachronistic irrelevance.

Another way to put it would be, all of society was in the process of rapid change, giving rise to the

— .



Now let’s move on to a discussion of one of the fundamental paradigm shifts that is supporting the riseof that accelerating new age curve, especially as it pertains to how we will learn and discover. We just

met Stuart Kaufman, and you can see him in the company of these other scientists at the Santa Fe

Institute in New Mexico. They represent the vanguard of the new science of complexity. The Institute

was started by George Cowan and Murray Gell-Mann (1984); two noble laureates who were working

at the Los Alamos National Laboratory a short way up the valley, where the American Atomic Bomb

was developed during WWII.

They, along with many other scientist around the world are working hard at developing a new science

that will supplant the old ‘Cartesian’ science from the days of Newton and Descartes in the 1600’s…



Mitchell Waldrop, a science writer wrote a nice historical book about the Santa Fe Institute and madethis observation…(see slide)

Linear s stems are based on the scientific rinci als of Sir Isaac Newton & his cohorts and are the

dominant and pervasive school of thought for describing and controlling (so they hope) our

environment all around us. It is the basis for most scientific investigation and evaluation, and is at the

heart of most systems set up to manage our civic-socio-economic lives.

The underlying tenant of linear systems is the belief that all things can be measured and then reduced

to a simple formula, from which decisions can be expanded or scaled up and contracted or scaled down

with some confidence of the outcome. This works fine if all parts of the system are identified and

there are no errant elements present to disrupt the equilibrium. The truth however, is for centuries,

science has set aside that which it couldn’t measure as so much noise in the background so they couldmove on with their work, which includes fuzzy-squishy things like art and social behavior.



Kaufman, likes to illustrate the difference by referring to how easily Newtonian Science can measure arock and how it will behave when you throw it into the air, but when you toss a simple bird into the air,

it is utterly unpredictable what this complex little creature with a brain will do.



Here’s another fellow, Albert Barabasi, who wrote a very insightful book a couple years ago called Linked . He’s a physicist who is interested in the science of emerging networks and the focus of his

research is the Internet and what we can learn from the biggest self-organizing network on the planet.

He starts out his book with this observation about linear vs. non-linear science…(see slide)…



He continues…(see slide)…so here we have this new breed of scientist, coming to the realization thatthe old Cartesian science of Newton & Descartes can’t deal with the dynamic realities of life.

Reductionism is another label for Cartesian scientific methodolo i.e. takin ever thin a art to

examine the parts, get a fix on the parts and then play with the parts to make things. We can see this

old view at work today, even with the advanced work going on with gene splicing and their hoped for

therapies. You could substitute the genes for steel and rivets and it would be the same old process.

Problem is, they are finding out that genes are not rivets, but complex micro worlds unto themselves

that are more like that humming bird with mysterious parts involved in an elegant dance based on

mysterious self-organizing principals.

So, as we watch our Cartesian scientific friends in the big pharmaceutical industry push chemical rivets

around and produce a blizzard of designer drugs, like Vioxx, suddenly everyone is surprised that thereare unintended consequences attached to these so-called wonder drugs that are actually killing some

people (reference the recent $250million award to a Texas widow against Merck, with several thousand

plaintiffs waiting in the wings).

Our whole social-economic system is still, for the most part, operating in the grips of this self-serving

eterm n st c v ew o t e wor … ut not or ong…



…to put the nail in the Cartesian coffin, Kaufman makes this observation…(see slide)…That’s a mouth full and we probably could spend an entire class discussing this…what’s the bottom

line here? I think it is summed u in the o enin statement which is that life is an unendin

procession of change, change which is imposed on us by other forces that surprise us…I put that out as

kind of ground rule or mental framework in which we must understand and accept as we endeavor to

understand the future and how we can participate in it in a creative way.



OK, there are lots of ways to examine complexity. Mathematicians like to calculate and graph theirfindings and here’s just one way to look at it.

Think of this chart in terms of it re resentin life’s la in field—with two end-zones at each end.

On the left is the Equilibrium end-zone, where things are linear, simple and all the parts are easily

identified.

On the right is the Chaos end-zone. Where complexity is extreme and defies measurement.

In between is the zone of Emergent Complexity, a.k.a. where we live!































Date post:	30-May-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	vera
View:	223 times
Download:	0 times

6351 Class-01 Slides [Compatibility Mode]

Documents