December Innovation Workshop on Creativity, Communication, & Collaboration

UW-MANIAC is offering a motivating two afternoon innovation workshop in December. Registration is open for Developing Innovation through Collaboration, Creativity, & Communication.

The Three C’s of Collaboration, Creativity, and Communication can help you to develop new innovations that can contribute to doing meaningful new things, improving processes for problem-solving, and having greater success in your work. You will meet new people and work with others to systematically generate and develop new ideas for the challenge of your choosing. Be guided step-by-step and activity-by-activity through an innovation process to develop and take action on new ideas for your real project. Learn the fundamental “best practice” activities for innovating and leave the workshop with more advanced innovation skills and a portfolio of new developed ideas.

By learning and using innovation tools and activities to create, collaborate, and communicate you will get important work done at this workshop away from the routine of your office. You will innovate how you work and create new innovations to take action on what is needed and wanted. New ideas that can make a difference in your work and life are motivating and engaging for you and your colleagues. Here are some key learning outcomes and actions we will take at the workshop:

Create:
+ Generate a wide range of relevant, new and different ideas based on
your challenge or opportunity through creative thinking tools.
+ Analyze, synthesize, and develop the best ideas into a portfolio of
concepts to act upon based on a best practice development system.

Collaborate:
+ Develop relationships quickly with fellow innovators to collaborate
in groups with at the workshop and beyond.
+ Connect one-on-one with fellow innovators through guided activities
designed to help you gain new insight and validation of your concepts.

Communicate:
+ Learn a simple and effective idea presentation format used by
innovative organizations that will allow you to showcase your new concepts.
+ Practice communicating your best concepts in ways that are engaging
and memorable using involvement, story, visuals, and metaphors.

Darin Eich is an innovation facilitator, researcher, and author who teaches individuals and organizations how to better ideate to innovate. Darin has a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Next UW-MANIAC Breakfast - "Stone Tool Making and Innovation" with Jeff Shokler

The UW-MANIAC network is engaged in a wide array of innovative programming this fall, starting with last week's "Jammin' in the Fall" networking session and continuing with our first Breakfast Series event on October 12th at the Union.

"Stone Tool Making and Innovation: Old Technology and New Ways of Thinking" is Jeff Shokler's passion… How can a very old technology, chipped stone tool production, give us new ways to think about what we do and how we do it? Join us for a flintknapping demonstration and exploration of the insights and new/different ways of thinking this old process can reveal to us. If you don't get anything else out of it you'll still start the morning off with a "bang!" as you get to see someone break rocks and make sharp things!


The second part of our session will be a dialogue around the topic, "Harvesting Inter-generational Wisdom in the Workplace." Using Appreciative inquiry, an asset-based approach to understanding and addressing a wide range of issues, we will facilitate an initial conversation around this important topic effecting our workplaces. This idea was sparked at a spring MANIAC Café, and our plan is to explore innovative ways to build from the dialogue in future conversations.

To register, go to the course site. For additional information, contact Harry Webne-Behrman at OHRD, 262-9934 or hwebnebehrman@ohr.wisc.edu

Get involved! Become a MANIAC. Innovate. Collaborate. Inspire meaningful change.

100 million effect: Kauffman Foundation Program Seeks to Catalyze Large Scale Education Innovations

Posted by Darin Eich

When I heard about this opportunity I thought this had MANIAC potential. Maybe there is a MANIAC who will apply or maybe a mini model of this can be done at UW. The Kauffman Foundation is offering a bootcamp and salary funding to selected founders who have a startup idea that can impact at least 100 million people in education or generate $100 million in revenue rather quickly. Incubator models like this with bootcamps are becoming popular in the world of venture funding and programs like this could directly educate education.

This press release speaks to an innovation in improving education at the national level. Foundation sponsored programs like this that provide training, knowledge, network, resources, and some founder salary could encourage new innovations to improve education.

New Kauffman Foundation program launches search for passionate, aspiring founders of high-growth, scalable education enterprises

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) July 14, 2010 – The Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition isn’t the only program focused on dramatically improving education. Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation, an initiative of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, announced today a competitive search for up to 20 aspiring founders to launch high-growth, transformative companies in the education market.

Those selected for the Kauffman Education Ventures Program will be immersed in an intensive, hands-on program designed to catalyze the creation of companies with the potential to generate thousands of jobs and dramatic economic benefits.

“This program is the opportunity of a lifetime for high-potential entrepreneurs who don’t have the resources to quit their day jobs and take the leap of faith to start their businesses—businesses that they think will grow fast and transform education in a powerful way,” said Bo Fishback, vice president for Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. “Education is a more than $1 trillion market where innovations can produce massive benefits to the world and also create huge change in the lives of individuals.”

The Education Ventures Program will equip founders with the time, resources and skills to take their ideas from thought to implementation.

Selected founders will receive six months of training and education on every aspect of running a business, personal coaching to bring their ideas to market and competitive compensation to focus full-time on their ventures. The program will include helping founders establish a brand, develop negotiation and presentation skills, go to scale, build financial models, validate the market, perform customer diligence, find funding, build a management team and develop a board of directors.

“The rapid pace of change in the education field in terms of technology, the growth of charter schools, new demands for post-secondary education and shifting priorities provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to catalyze their ideas,” said Sandy Miller, director of Advancing Innovation at the Foundation. “We are looking for the bold, visionary founders of entrepreneurial ventures that are poised to grow, show promise to be truly scalable and are able to adapt to the changes in the field.”

Through an open application process available to anyone over the age of 18 with a transformative idea, Kauffman Labs will identify up to 20 entrepreneurial concepts for the education market and work with the aspiring founders to establish their organizations. Candidates may be individual entrepreneurs or teams of up to three people. Businesses from concept through young startup that offer a product or service to help people learn, directly or indirectly, and could change the face of education are eligible. Successful candidates will need to travel to Kansas City for extended periods of time to attend training and education workshops but can otherwise live and work anywhere in the United States.

Individuals interested in learning more or applying should visit www.kauffmanlabs.org. Completed applications are due September 20, 2010.

About Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation
Part school and part business accelerator, Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation is a new approach to developing the next generation of high-growth firms. Tapping the Kauffman Foundation’s vast entrepreneurship knowledge and networks, the program seeks to accelerate the number and success of new firms by offering a new method for teaching and training entrepreneurs of dynamic, fast-growth, scalable businesses in a lab setting, while studying the “science of startups” in the process. For more information, visit www.kauffmanlabs.org.

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I originally featured this program on my innovationlearning.org blog and participated in their conference call on August 18th. At that point they had 850 people start the application! Other innovators I've talked to are excited about this program. Sounds like models like this are gaining traction. We need innovation in education in grand ways!

CEO's Poll Indicates Importance of Leadership in Creativity and Complexity

We MANIAC's have known for some time that we are engaged in worthwhile efforts that can result in some truly amazing solutions to perplexing problems. But it's always nice to receive some external validation, and this came in the form of a recent report published by IBM, cited in a cover story on the "Creativity Crisis" in Newsweek magazine. The IBM Report, based upon a survey of over 1500 CEO's across 60 countries, concluded that skills in leading through complexity were required for the 21st Century, and that this meant inviting creativty throughout the organization to address changes in buisiness models, infusing 'disruptive innovations' into planning processes, and otherwise managing ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity.

Sounds like what MANIAC is all about, doesn't it? I encourage you to read the Newsweek article as well, as it cites a number of other interesting aspects regarding our education system and how it is failing to teach these core competencies, as well as research on creativity and brain research that shows the links across creative processes in the arts and engineering. To me, this points to the benefits of more personalized, holistic, integral approaches to education, such as those championed by Sir Kenneth Robinson, Parker Palmer, Alfie Kohn, and others (whose talks and books I encourage you to peruse), as well as insights shared by W. Brian Arthur in his recent book, The Nature of Technology. Arthur painstakingly charts the processes of innovative change across domains and history, concluding that we must both become expert within specific fields and simultaneously lower the boundaries across fields so we can encourage intentional infusions of ideas and perspectives that may not mesh with our dominant conceptual paradigms and modes of inquiry.

Finally, I want to encourage you to view a recent Charlie Rose interview on public television, in which he spoke with one of the Newsweek reporters (Ashley Merryman), the editor of Science magazine (Bruce Alberts), and a Harvard professor doing research in this field (Aaron Berkowitz).

What do you think about these things?

Harry

New MANIAC Toolbox

Hello MANIACs!

I have developed a new resource tool for you to explore! I have collected the innovation and collaboration tools, exercises, articles, web links, and activities from past MANIAC events and posted them in a "Toolbox." Check it out here!

This reference tool will help you continue the learning from MANIAC café, soirée, and breakfast workshops in your everyday work.

If you have any additional links or resources you wish to share with the MANIAC community, please forward them to Sarah Hurley at shurley@ohr.wisc.edu

Happy toolbox browsing!

Quantum of solace

Quantum of solace

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UW Innovation Competition Yields Fabulous Fruit!

The recent UW-Madison innovation competition for students yielded a great tool for treating fruit trees: the Automated Pest Elimination (APEL) system was developed by mechanical engineering student Tom Gerold, offering "a smarter way to spray" that is safer and more environmentally friendly. The overall competition, an annual event, provided a number of exciting ideas that you should check out.

It also invites the question to the UW-MANIAC community: Is there a role for us in sponsoring events that encourage the development and submission of creative ideas that could improve the campus?

Harry