Posted by Kees de Vos on January 24, 2000 at 04:14:29:

In Reply to: Innovation and KM posted by Yalvora on January 21, 2000 at 10:34:56:

Hi Yalvora,

I believe you are referring to a message I posted a while back, http://www.brint.com/wwwboard/messages/5790.html.

On the subject of innovation my view is that the best metaphor I came across was that of reconfiguring Lego (tm) pieces and making sense of what is created. The Lego pieces in question can be viewed as the blocks which makes up ones perception of reality.

So there are two important steps; the reconfiguration bit. The willingness and ability to rethink your view of reality.
The second bit is the interpretation bit, the ability and willingness to make sense of the new constellation. This bit is very important and often underestimated. As good sense making involves getting the new view accepted it is quite often that the best innovations strike us as being rather obvious (The "Now Why Didn't I Think of That" element).

I believe it's what Einstein meant with "I am standing on the shoulders of Giants", others had come up with the building blocks, Einstein merely saw himself as the one that made sense of it in a new constellation.

Now to come back to your message, the way in which these two processes are facilitated are hard to define or optimize. Discussion might be one (for example to sow the seeds of doubt of the correctness of ones view of reality) but sitting in a bath going over a problem might be a good way to create a Eureka moment as well :). It might even come from a bit of missing data, which makes all the lines between data, information knowledge and innovation fuzzy again. Interesting question might be why can't we just accept the fuzziness and work on that basis...

Hope this helps, kind regards,

Kees de Vos.

• What drives the added value of KM?

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Innovation and KM (why can't we accept fuzziness?) Reilly Atkinson 13:53:57 01/24/00 (3)
  • Re: Innovation and KM (why can't we accept fuzziness?) Christina 12:07:42 04/05/00 (0)
  • Re: Innovation and KM (why can't we accept fuzziness?) Kees de Vos 03:12:44 01/25/00 (1)
    • Re: Innovation and KM (why can't we accept fuzziness?) Reilly Atkinson 21:15:26 01/25/00 (0)

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