Innovation Inspiration - Robert Burns

It's Burns' Night here in Scotland.

Perhaps the only day in the calendar (in any country in the world) set aside to celebrate the life and works of a poet. For one day at least let us be encouraged us to focus on art, love and culture.

Rabbie's life (and work) was a mass of contradictions. The ploughman poet. A man from a poor background who wrote some of the most beautiful (and long lasting) poetry of all time. A man who espoused devotion and life-long love - but had a (well founded) reputation as a womaniser.

Take time this evening to read some Burns (try www.robertburns.org ), and raise a glass of whisky to art, to love, and to poetry.

And if you want to find inspiration to help you solve a problem or generate ideas, ask yourself these questions:

"What could we borrow from the past and improve?" (Burns regularly used themes, tunes and poems from the past to inspire his own poetry)

"How could we become more self-aware?" ("O wad some power the Giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us")

"What could we do to treat all our customers (or staff) as equal?" ("For a' that, an' a' that, it's coming yet for a' that, That Man to Man the world o'er, shall brothers be for a' that")

And remember - "Freedom and whisky gang thegither!"

I saw an ad this morning for a TV/Phone/Broadband Package, with the headline "You Watch, You Talk, You Tube".

I wonder if it's running in Glasgow, where the last two words have a very different meaning.

And they're usually spelled "Ya Choob".

Innovation Provocation

At least once a week I'll be posting ideas, questions or challenges to help you with your Innovation challenges. If you apply the Innovation Preovocation to a business or organisational challenge you're working on, it might help generate new ideas, new products or services, or new ways of working.

The best way to use these is to apply the Provocation directly to your issue - to think the way the Provocation tells you, use that to generate new streams of ideas, and then to 'come out' of the question, and apply these new ideas to your challenge.

Over time, the various Innovation Provocation will build into a set of tools you can use in brainstorms, idea generation sessions or team meetings - either by keeping a list of them yourself, or by referring back to the relevant pages on this blog.

Good luck, and have some fun applying them!

Here's the first Innovation Provocation:

What would your boss suggest if they were sitting in this meeting?

What different way would they have of looking at the problem? What suggestions might they have? What would they want you to concentrate on? What would they discard? What new approaches might they want you to take?

Try it in your next session - and keep an eye out for new ideas, new approaches, and new ways of thinking.

There's a brilliant ad appearing on TV at the moment, promoting School Diplomas. Produced on behalf of the Department of Education, the commercial shows rapper Kano completing the recording of his new single, then walking through the crowd of technicians and production staff.

As the 'staff' are identified by name and role, we realise that they are not professionals, but actually kids studying for diplomas in the key roles of construction, sound, PR, Business Admin etc.

It's a superb example of solving the problem creatively by looking within. How do we encourage kids to take up the Diploma (which connects academic study with workplace learning)? Why don't we show students actually producing something - and it's a brilliant and effective use of a celebrity who makes sense in terms of connecting with the target audience.

You can watch the ad here

Naturally, the ad has created some opposition (great ideas always do). The Times covered it with the headline "Foul-mouthed rapper helps Ed Balls". But reading Kano's response in an interview published online here in The Guardian I think his heart is in the right place. But maybe the next single should speak out against knife and gun culture, Kano?