Michael Karnjanaprakorn

This year, one of the common themes that I will talk about will be around innovation. The New York Times ran a couple of great articles in the past week about innovation. The first article was titled, “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the article.

“It becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.”To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”

This is another argument of why we need to collaborate. With technology the way it is and the increasing demand of innovation, we can’t focus on creating breakthrough ideas within the confines of our own company. In fact, we don’t even have to rely on people with x amount of years within our industry. Some would argue that you can still get innovative ideas from people that know absolutely nothing about your brand, product or customers.

One way to incorporate this into your own company is to compile a network of outside thinkers that you can call upon whenever you need to do an innovation session or workshop.

Another great article from yesterday, The Falling-Down Professions, talks about the falling status of the law and medicine professions within our culture.

“In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own start-up businesses, said Trudy Steinfeld, the executive director of the Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University.

“There’s a sexiness to starting something cool,” she said. “Now we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use all over the world.”

With books such as A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink where he states that “the future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.” No longer will analytical jobs such as accountants be respected or valued but the creative, innovative, entrepreneurial jobs will be respected. It’s because we’re moving into the conceptual age. And now it looks like the law and medicine professions or moving down a notch as well.

So what does that mean?

We’re about to see an explosion of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. I think we’re on the brink of an Innovation Movement that will change the business culture.