The Preschool Question: Who Gets to Go?
Va. Expansion Efforts Highlight Debate
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 22, 2007; A01
The children in Carrie Hamilton's preschool class yesterday drew wobbly hearts with wobbly letters underneath. They tapped the buttons on a toy cash register and raced cars over roads built of wooden tracks. Hidden in the games and giggles were lessons on the building blocks of reading and math.
These Fairfax County 4- and 5-year-olds are part of a national push to devote more public resources to the youngest learners. They are also at the center of a debate, underscored last week in a Virginia policy shift, over whether the government should offer preschool to all children or concentrate on those from poor families.
Nationwide, about 950,000 children are enrolled in state-funded preschool, a 36 percent increase from five years ago, said experts who track the programs. As advocates promote quality pre-kindergarten as a way to prepare children for school, strengthen the workforce and reduce crime, states have increased funding since 2005 for such programs by 75 percent, to $4.2 billion, according to the District-based organization Pre-K Now. Some in Congress have also proposed more federal money to help build state preschool initiatives.
The questions about which children will benefit most from government-funded preschool and how great the investment should be are at the core of Virginia's effort to expand pre-kindergarten but have also arisen in Maryland. Next week, in its first foray into all-day preschool, Montgomery County plans to introduce full-day, federally funded Head Start classes for 260 students at 10 elementary schools that serve low-income neighborhoods. This week, Prince George's County expanded its full-day state-funded preschool program by half, to 261 classes, also targeting students from poor families.
After campaigning in 2005 to offer free preschool to every 4-year-old in Virginia regardless of family income, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) scaled back his plan last week and said he would focus resources on the neediest children.
In an interview yesterday, Kaine said his pledge to launch universal preschool was prompted by research showing that a tremendous amount of learning takes place before the first day of kindergarten. But education experts persuaded Kaine to build on the work of existing public and private preschools.
"Instead of just creating a system from scratch, why not take the existing network and focus on the goals of increasing access and increasing quality?" Kaine said. "We can change the financial criteria to help kids who can't afford it and have an impact on the quality of all parts of the system."
Virginia 4-year-olds who qualify for free school lunches -- those in households with incomes of less than $27,000 for a family of four -- are eligible for free preschool, and about 12,500 children take part at an annual state cost of about $50 million. Kaine's plan would extend benefits to children in families with incomes up to $38,000. The new proposal, which envisions enrolling about 17,000 more underprivileged children by 2012, would cost an additional $75 million a year.
Kaine also is calling for a state-led rating system to help parents gauge how providers measure up. Preschools, much like restaurants or hotels, would be rated on a five-star scale based on such factors as the educational level and training of teachers, class sizes and an expert's classroom observation.
Kaine's plan to offer universal preschool for all 100,000 4-year-olds in the state would have cost about $300 million annually.
Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is a leading proponent of income-targeted funding, said research has shown that children from poor families get the biggest boost from high-quality preschool. He said universal preschool provides unneeded benefits to wealthy families and said the emphasis should be on helping children in lower-income homes, who tend to start school knowing fewer letters and numbers than their peers.
"We need to focus scarce dollars where the benefit is the greatest, and that's to children from low-income and blue-collar households," Fuller said. "If dollars are sprinkled across all families rich and poor, it's illogical to think early learning gaps will be narrowed."
But other education experts said the country should shift to preschool for all children. They say every dollar spent on public preschool will improve school performance, lessen the need for remedial education and have other long-term benefits.
A recent study of New Mexico's preschoolers showed that students in the state program learned many more words and scored higher on a test of early math skills than peers who didn't attend.
"Even though it costs more, the public is better off if they make sure it gets to all kids," said W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. "Even middle-income kids, the middle 60 percent, have a 1 in 10 chance of failing a grade, a 1 in 10 chance of dropping out of high school. A lot of that can be traced to how far behind they were when they started kindergarten."
Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, which backs universal access, applauded Kaine's proposal. "Given the political realities of the state, he's starting where he should," Doggett said, alluding to Virginia's budget constraints.
The federal Head Start program provides preschool for about 900,000 children from low-income homes across the country, and many states fund classes targeted largely to disadvantaged children. Georgia and Oklahoma offer universal preschool that reaches large percentages of children. Other states, including West Virginia and New York, are working toward such programs.
In Florida, voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2002 that mandates pre-kindergarten for all children, but critics contend the quality of the program has suffered because of a lack of funding. Last year, California voters rejected a ballot measure that would have taxed the wealthy to pay for universal preschool.
In the District, more than 5,000 children are enrolled in full-day preschool programs in public schools.
The nonprofit preschool of Annandale Christian Community for Action, where Hamilton's students played yesterday, is one of several private centers in a pilot program started by Kaine to help Virginia reach more children from disadvantaged homes. This summer, the center has new state funding for 26 additional children.
Camilla Torejo, 4, showed off her artwork as classmates flipped through books, played computer games and zoomed around with toy cars. "I made this heart and this heart and this heart," Camilla said. Next to them, she wrote her name.
Staff writer Daniel de Vise contributed to this report.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Let there be LIGHT!
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Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages
FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.
The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.
Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.
His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.
Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.
Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.
“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”
Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”
“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”
A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.
Mr. Bent’s efforts have drawn praise from the United Nations, Africare, Rice University and others.
Kevin G. Lowther, Southern Africa director for Africare, the largest American aid group for Africa, said his staff was sending 5,000 of his lights, purchased by Exxon Mobil at $10 each, to rural Angola.
Dave Gardner, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said the company’s $50,000 donation in November grew out of an earlier grant it made to Save the Children to build six public schools in Kibala, Angola, a remote area of Kwanza Sul Province.
“At a dedication ceremony for the first four schools in June 2006,” Mr. Gardner said in an e-mail message, “we noticed that a lot of the children had upper respiratory problems, part of which is likely due to the use of wood, charcoal, candles and kero for lighting in the small homes they have in Kibala.”
The Awty International School, a large prep school in Houston, has sent hundreds of the flashlights to schools it sponsors in Haiti, Cameroon and Ethiopia, said Chantal Duke, executive assistant to the head of school.
“In places where there is absolutely no electricity or running water, having light at night is a luxury many families don’t have and never did and which we take for granted in developed countries,” Ms. Duke said by e-mail. Mr. Bent, a former Marine and Navy pilot, served under diplomatic titles in volatile countries like Angola, Bosnia, Nigeria and Somalia in the early 1990s.
In 2001 he went to work as the general manager of an oil exploration team off the coast of the Red Sea in Eritrea, for a company later acquired by the French oil giant Perenco. But the oil business, he said, “didn’t satisfy my soul.”
The inspiration for the flashlight hit him, he said, while working for Perenco in Asmara, Eritrea. One Sunday he visited a local dump to watch scavenging by baboons and birds of prey, and came upon a group of homeless boys who had adopted the dump as their home.
They took him home to a rural village where he noticed that many people had nothing to light their homes, schools and clinics at night.
With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.
He worked with researchers, engineers and manufacturers, he said, at the Department of Energy, several American universities, and even NASA before finding a factory in China to produce a durable, cost-effective solar-powered flashlight whose shape was inspired by his wife’s shampoo bottle.
The light, or sun torch, has a narrow solar panel on one side that charges the batteries, which can last between 750 and 1,000 nights, and uses the more efficient light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.s, to cast its light. “L.E.D.s used to be very expensive,” Mr. Bent said. “But in the last 18 months they’ve become cheaper, so distributing them on a widespread scale is possible.”
The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com, where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.
Mr. Bent, who is now an oil consultant, lives in Houston with his wife and four young children. When he is not in the air flying his own plane, he is often on the road.
Traveling early this month in Ethiopia’s border area with Sudan, Mr. Bent stopped in each town’s market to methodically check the prices and quality of flashlights and batteries imported from China.
He unscrewed the flashlights one by one, inspecting the batteries, pronouncing them “terrible — they won’t last two nights.”
On his last day along the border, Mr. Bent visited Rapan Sadeeq, 21, a Sudanese refugee who is something of a celebrity in his camp, Bonga, for his rudimentary self-made radios, walkie-talkies and periscopes.
The two men huddled in the hut, discussing what parts would be needed to power the radio with solar panels instead of clunky C batteries. “Oh, I can definitely send you some parts,” Mr. Bent said. “You can be my field engineer in Ethiopia.”
Sunday, April 22, 2007
On Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurialism in Michigan
| Monday, April 16, 2007 Updated Study Says Michigan Still Struggles to Grow Entrepreneurs | |||
| LANSING - The latest Small Business Foundation of Michigan's Entrepreneurship Score Card, released Monday, finds that Michigan last year lost ground in developing new, high growth job-creating entrepreneurial small businesses. The Score Card gives Michigan a 2006 grade of "D-minus" for entrepreneurial dynamism, down from the 2005 "D" grade and edging closer to the failing "F" grade that Michigan received for 2004. The Score Card project is a collaborative project of the Small Business Foundation of Michigan (SBFM) and GrowthEconomics, Inc. Financial sponsors are Automation Alley, Central Michigan University, the Edward Lowe Foundation, Lawrence Technological University, MERRA, the Michigan Entrepreneurial Education Network, Michigan State Housing Development Authority, Michigan Technological University, MiBiz, Next Energy, Schoolcraft College, Saginaw Valley State University and the Small Business Association of Michigan. The SBFM defines entrepreneurial dynamism as a composite measure of Michigan’s performance in entrepreneurial change, entrepreneurial vitality and entrepreneurial climate. “While Michigan has not achieved its full entrepreneurial dynamism potential, there are some things it does right – it is still making tremendous progress in areas critical to robust entrepreneurship, such as private lending to small businesses, university spinout businesses and entrepreneurial education,” said SBFM executive director Mark Clevey. “However, the economic impacts of factors like globalization and restructuring of old-line industries will continue to have negative effects on entrepreneurship. Michigan needs to do even more if it is to accelerate entrepreneurial dynamism and create more jobs for our struggling economy.” Here’s how Michigan ranks compared to other states: Entrepreneurial Change (the amount of recent entrepreneurial growth or decline in an economy): 46th Entrepreneurial Vitality (the absolute level of entrepreneurial activity): 38th Entrepreneurial Climate (the capability of an economy to foster entrepreneurship): 38th Business Costs and Productivity: 41st Quality of Life: 37th Government Efficiency and Regulatory Environment: 26th Infrastructure: 24th University Spinout Businesses: 16th Workforce Preparedness: 10th Education and Workforce: 8th Broadband Coverage: 4th Private Lending to Small Businesses: 3rd Although the Foundation does not advocate policy positions, Clevey says Michigan can improve its entrepreneurial dynamism by paying greater attention to entrepreneurial education, economic development strategy, access to capital, technology commercialization and developing a business climate that nurtures entrepreneurs. Promotion sponsors are Ann Arbor SPARK, Creating Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC), Michigan State University; Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, Great Lakes Angels, Inc., Great Lakes Entrepreneur Quest, Keweenaw Economic Development Alliance, Michigan Homeland Security Consortium, Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, Michigan Ross School of Business, Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance, Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity, James Madison College, Michigan State University; Midland Tomorrow, Michigan Venture Capital Association, Prima Civitas Foundation and Vision Tri-County. | |||
Author: Staff Writer Source: MITechNews.Com |
On Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurialism in Michigan
| Monday, April 16, 2007 Updated Study Says Michigan Still Struggles to Grow Entrepreneurs | |||
| LANSING - The latest Small Business Foundation of Michigan's Entrepreneurship Score Card, released Monday, finds that Michigan last year lost ground in developing new, high growth job-creating entrepreneurial small businesses. The Score Card gives Michigan a 2006 grade of "D-minus" for entrepreneurial dynamism, down from the 2005 "D" grade and edging closer to the failing "F" grade that Michigan received for 2004. The Score Card project is a collaborative project of the Small Business Foundation of Michigan (SBFM) and GrowthEconomics, Inc. Financial sponsors are Automation Alley, Central Michigan University, the Edward Lowe Foundation, Lawrence Technological University, MERRA, the Michigan Entrepreneurial Education Network, Michigan State Housing Development Authority, Michigan Technological University, MiBiz, Next Energy, Schoolcraft College, Saginaw Valley State University and the Small Business Association of Michigan. The SBFM defines entrepreneurial dynamism as a composite measure of Michigan’s performance in entrepreneurial change, entrepreneurial vitality and entrepreneurial climate. “While Michigan has not achieved its full entrepreneurial dynamism potential, there are some things it does right – it is still making tremendous progress in areas critical to robust entrepreneurship, such as private lending to small businesses, university spinout businesses and entrepreneurial education,” said SBFM executive director Mark Clevey. “However, the economic impacts of factors like globalization and restructuring of old-line industries will continue to have negative effects on entrepreneurship. Michigan needs to do even more if it is to accelerate entrepreneurial dynamism and create more jobs for our struggling economy.” Here’s how Michigan ranks compared to other states: Entrepreneurial Change (the amount of recent entrepreneurial growth or decline in an economy): 46th Entrepreneurial Vitality (the absolute level of entrepreneurial activity): 38th Entrepreneurial Climate (the capability of an economy to foster entrepreneurship): 38th Business Costs and Productivity: 41st Quality of Life: 37th Government Efficiency and Regulatory Environment: 26th Infrastructure: 24th University Spinout Businesses: 16th Workforce Preparedness: 10th Education and Workforce: 8th Broadband Coverage: 4th Private Lending to Small Businesses: 3rd Although the Foundation does not advocate policy positions, Clevey says Michigan can improve its entrepreneurial dynamism by paying greater attention to entrepreneurial education, economic development strategy, access to capital, technology commercialization and developing a business climate that nurtures entrepreneurs. Promotion sponsors are Ann Arbor SPARK, Creating Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC), Michigan State University; Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, Great Lakes Angels, Inc., Great Lakes Entrepreneur Quest, Keweenaw Economic Development Alliance, Michigan Homeland Security Consortium, Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, Michigan Ross School of Business, Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity Finance, Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity, James Madison College, Michigan State University; Midland Tomorrow, Michigan Venture Capital Association, Prima Civitas Foundation and Vision Tri-County. | |||
Author: Staff Writer Source: MITechNews.Com |
Thursday, April 19, 2007
On INNOVATION STATIONS and "Shade Tree Mechanics"
An Evolutionary Approach to Innovation
by Richard Watson
Can biology teach us anything about innovation? The essence of Darwinism is that progress is created by adaptation to changed conditions. What starts as a random mutation can also spread to become the norm through a process of natural selection.
The same is surely true with innovation. New ideas are mutations created when two or more old ideas combine. For instance, Virgin Atlantic Airways is what happens when you cross an entertainment company with an airline business.
Virgin itself is also a good example of mutation and adaptation. The music retail business was created when a postal strike threatened to shut down the fledgling mail order record company. Virgin Atlantic was the result of an unsolicited approach from outside the company. Virgin Blue (a low-cost airline in Australia) is a similar story.
In my experience, what makes Virgin innovative is a strong sense of self, an ability to experiment, the skill to cross-fertilize ideas, and a willingness to change. The company has largely grown, not through the unfolding of some master plan, but through an accumulation of learning and ideas caused by threats, accidents and luck.
So, if external events and adaptation are the driving forces of biological evolution, is it possible to develop an innovation process that seeks out accidents and mutations?
This is an idea being developed by companies like Brand Genetics in the UK and Dr. Ron Alexander in Australia.
The list of things created by accident is certainly impressive; Aspirin, Band-Aids, Diners Club, DNA finger printing, dynamite, inoculation, Jell-O, Lamborghini, microwave ovens, nylon, penicillin, velcro and Vodafone to name just a few.
However, one of the defining characteristics of business is a preoccupation with orderly process ("If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."). So it's hard to imagine corporate cultures embracing randomness -- or agreeing with John Lennon, who said, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."
Accidents are born of experimentation, but the automotive and fashion industries are almost the only industries that publicly experiment with radical mutations. What, for example, is the soft drink industry equivalent of a concept car at the Detroit Motor Show?
Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, is a classic example of experimentation and adaptation. Store managers send customer feedback and observations to in-house design teams via PDAs. This helps the company to spot fashion trends and adapt merchandise to local tastes.
Just-in-time production (an idea transferred from the automotive industry), then gives the company an edge in terms of speed and flexibility. The result is a three-week turnaround time for new products (the industry average is nine months), and 10,000 new designs every year -- none of which stay in store for more than four weeks.
The analogy of biology also leads to an interesting idea about whether companies are best thought of in mechanical or biological terms. Traditionally, we have likened companies to machines. Organisations are mechanical devices (engines if you like) that can be tuned by experts to deliver optimum performance.
For companies that are looking to fine tune what they already do, this is probably correct. A product like the Porsche 911 evolves due to a process of continuous improvement and slowly changing environmental factors. The focus is on repetition. Development is logical and linear.
However, if you're seeking to revolutionize a product or market, the biological model is an interesting thinking tool. In this context, biology reminds us that random events and non-linear thinking cause developmental jumps. Unlike machines, living things have the ability to identify and translate opportunities and threats into strategies for survival. A good example is Mercedes-Benz working with Swatch watches to create the Smart car.
Creative leaps are usually the result of accidental cross-fertilization (variation) or rapid adaptation caused by the threat of change. Hence the importance of identifying an enemy, setting unrealistic deadlines and using diverse teams to create paradigm shifts.
The latter is a route employed by MIT who mix different disciplines together. As Nicholas Negroponte puts it, "New ideas do not necessarily live within the borders of existing intellectual domains. In fact they are most often at the edges and in curious intersections."
This is a thought echoed by Edward de Bono, who talks about the need for provocation and discontinuity. In order to come up with a new solution you must first jump laterally to a different start or end point.
For example, if you want to revolutionise the hotel industry you need to identify the assumptions upon which the industry operates and then create a divergent strategy. This could lead you to invent Formule 1 Hotels (keep prices low by focusing on beds, hygiene, and privacy), or another value innovator, easyHotel (keep rooms cheap by making guests hire their own bed linen and clean their own rooms).
What else can you do to create these jumps? A good place to start is to look at the edge (fringe) of existing markets. Here you'll find the misfits and the rebels. Companies that see things differently. People young enough not to realise that new ideas are impossible, or old enough not to care.
How else can you use a Darwinian approach to innovation? Here are five ideas:
- Look at the big evolutionary picture -- what are the driving forces?
- Create mutations -- unusual combinations of people and ideas.
- Look for new ideas and conditions that could disrupt your market.
- Treat accidents as opportunities for divergence and adaptation.
- Cooperate with other companies (create mutually beneficial eco-systems)
Finally, remember the words of Charles Darwin, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Garage Shop Innovation
by Richard Watson
Too much experience, too much familiarity, or too much money can kill innovation fast. That's why game changing ideas tend to come from a lone inventor or two in a cramped garage.
A while ago I wrote a piece for Fast Company called "An Evolutionary Approach to Innovation." The central idea was that Darwinism teaches us quite a bit about innovation. In particular, random mutations and adaptations caused by a particular local context or by rapidly changing conditions can spread to become the norm through a process of natural selection. Innovations are generally mutations created when one or more old idea is cross-fertilized by another.
The same is true with trends. New trends emerge when someone starts to think or behave differently -- or starts to create or customize something because existing offers do not fit with their needs or circumstances. If conditions are right a trend will become widely accepted, eventually moving from the fringe to the mass-market and from early adopters and trendsetters to laggards. Trends that occur at an intersection of other trends may also turn into megatrends, which are the key disrupters and drivers of innovation and change across all industries.
Creative leaps also tend to emerge when someone with a differing perspective tries something new -- either through bravery or sheer naivety. If that person is young or comes from another place (i.e. a different discipline or perhaps a different country) things sometime start to happen. Put two or move differing people together and the sparks can really fly.
But why is this so? In my experience it's because older people have usually invested too much under the current system and therefore have too much to lose if a new idea displaces an older one. Equally, people that don't move around or come from the same department or discipline sometimes fail to see what is hidden under their own noses, whereas people from ‘somewhere else' often see it.
For these reasons game changing ideas and radical innovations tend to come, not from well-funded industry incumbents (i.e. large organizations), but from lone inventors or a couple of individuals in a cramped garage. In other words, too much experience, too much familiarity or too much money can kill innovation faster than phrases like "I like it but" and "We tried that once."
Perhaps this explains why, for instance, 25% of Silicon Valley startups are created by either Indian or Chinese entrepreneurs. They see things differently. Another example of outsider thinking and mutation is Virgin Atlantic Airways. Richard Branson managed to shake up the airline industry precisely because he did not have an airline industry background. So when other airlines were worrying about legroom, routes and punctuality, Branson was cross-fertilising his experience from the entertainment industry and worrying about why flying wasn't more fun.
Not all new ideas and innovations make it of course. It's a case of survival of the fittest (or luckiest). Eventually, however, the sheer number of new ideas that are hatched means that a few emerge and make it into the mainstream where they do battle with deeply set vested interests. Then it's usually youth and energy versus experience and money. Organizations are like this too in a sense. They start of hungry, agile and curious and end up bloated, lazy and stiff.
So my question is this. If external events and adaptation are the driving forces of innovation, is it possible to develop an innovative culture and process that seeks out change and mutation? Moreover, if evolution is the result of genetic accidents is it possible to replicate such accidents through experimentation? An imminent threat of extinction would certainly explain why it often takes a crisis to spur a lazy and bureaucratic organization to adapt and embrace change.
My answer is that generally speaking it's not. This may be a heretical statement, especially coming from someone that makes a living advising companies how to create innovation systems, but I think it's true. Some large companies are excellent at innovation. It's their reason for being and is imprinted in their DNA.
However, for most large organizations innovation is an inconvenience. Organizational cultures develop a kind of corporate immune system that subconsciously suppresses or rejects any new idea that could threaten the existing business. Quite right too. The primary aim of established organizations is to extract revenue and profit from legacy businesses and not to do anything that would upset the apple cart.
This primarily means executing flawlessly in the present and requires tight control and strict hierarchies. Small companies, in contrast, have less to lose and are not encumbered by their history. Their mental models about 'what works' are less fixed and they are more open to picking up weak signals about change.
So here's my idea. If your organization is the kind that does innovation well, then great. Equally, if you're halfway decent at innovation, keep with the program and perhaps play around with some of these thoughts about using trends as a framework for innovation and scenario planning. If you're lucky you may give birth to a strange mutation. If this happens recognize it as a gift and run with it as far as it goes.
If, however, you are the type of organization that's not very good at innovation then give up. That's right. Throw in the towel and get into hunting instead of agriculture. In other words stop trying to grow your own through research & development and go out hunting with mergers and acquisitions instead. Seek out small innovative companies and buy them.
Big organizations, even ones that are really bad at innovation, are very good at scaling up an idea and dealing with everything from intellectual property and sales to marketing and finance. This is handy because these things are precisely what startups and small companies are often very bad at.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
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