Does your business culture nurture innovation, or stifle it? Are you looking for ways to build your business creatively but finding daunting constraints at every turn? This course is designed to help you understand the forces that limit innovation, identify those barriers in your own business culture, and break free of them to realize the full value of your imagination. You’ll learn new skills and strategies that you can immediately apply to drive innovation in your group or organization, and you’ll build an understanding of the six most common constraints on innovation in both individual and group settings—that is, the six ways that creative thinking is often sabotaged before it can produce results. You’ll also learn to recognize stakeholders who are actively invested in stopping your ideas in their tracks. Finally, you’ll examine societal and technical constraints that you’ll need to overcome to foster a forward-thinking culture. Through case studies and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to: - Generate, assess, and implement great ideas in your organization - Build your organization’s capacity for innovation, including creating an innovative culture - Lead innovation projects, processes, and teams - Recognize big issues lurking on the horizon before they become constraints - Drive adoption of great ideas - Develop and manage an innovation portfolio - Innovate to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-changing landscape
Social Constraints
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From the course by Vanderbilt University
Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers
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From the lesson
Societal Constraints: Why My Innovation Means You Have to Change
Meet the Instructors
David A. Owens, PhD, PEProfessor
Practice of Management and Innovation
[MUSIC]
Some constraints of the constraints that have to do with others around us, and
I use this sort of with shorthand for
this week, why my innovation means you have to change.
So what we know to be true, remember in the logic of this class,
what we've done is we've taken a look at innovation,
at the problem of innovation from all these different perspectives.
They're all true perspectives.
But we wanted to understand which one way of these lookings, or
which one of these lenses shall we put on to generate the most power for
a particular kind of problem?
And so what we went through was the idea.
The idea's important.
Individuals have ideas.
So how is it we can have better ideas?
And the perception, intellection,
and expression is parts of these and the kinds of individual constraints.
Then we'll talk about group constraints, emotion, culture, environment,
and process, which are important because they stop us from getting
other people involved, from getting help from other people, from getting support
in the early stages of our ideas and turning them into innovations.
Next we talk about organizational constraints, or
the culture of the B-school constraints that were about business strategy,
organizational structure, and also the resources that we need
to be able to move our idea forward, to execute on the idea.
We talked about industry constraints, we looked at competition,
the role of suppliers.
What is the role of markets in the adoption of our ideas, and how it is that
those things are important to understand even if the can't directly control them?
Certainly important to understand about how it is that they're going to affect
the adoption of our innovation.
This week we're going to talk about societal constraints.
What we're going to say is in order for
a constraint to be accepted as legitimate that society has to say, yes, in fact,
that innovation is something that's good for us, something that we want.
So that's how we're going to look at it.
We're going to look through sort of these three particular questions of it.
The first being identity and values of these, ways that societies see themselves.
What's the role of values in a society?
Where do we get our identity from?
And does innovation offer to change our perception of ourselves?
We're going to talk about social control,
how is it that society asserts control over things and also history?
What's the role of history, what came before?
So we can think about this way, the values identity or beliefs, the beliefs a society
used to judge its members and the sense of self that we construct from that.
So our sense of self comes from those around us, and so how does that work and
how would that get in the way of innovation,
how would that constrain innovation?
We're going to talk about social control.
That's the formal ways and the informal ways that society guides behavior.
It really keeps people accountable for being meaningful members of society,
productive members of society, and to be not destructive to society itself.
Then we’re going to talk about history,
which are the obligations that come from what we did in the past.
We had beliefs in the past, we’ve done actions in the past, and
those things actually come forward through time, and
are things that we have to deal with when we do innovation.
Because innovation are changes, and
changes are in the context of these things.
And so we need to understand how does it work and
how does their life really change us?
When we talk about societal constraints,
one of the basic question is can we choose a changed society?
Is it something we can just sort of say, hey I want to change society?
I have an idea for this innovation.
Let's go ahead and change things.
And I just put it out there.
One thing to understand is we have very little control over society.
Society has a lot of different people a lot of history a lot of things that
we just dont have direct access to.
We have very little control of it yet society can stop change pretty quickly.
Somebody can say well, hey we're not interested in that.
That thing you're saying like what on Earth?
You can't possibly do that.
So, that's what we have to understand about societal constraints.
Well in 2003, Dr. Bridget Boisselier, a French doctor and geneticist,
she claimed the birth of the first cloned human, so
what she claimed to have done was to clone a human from some other cells.
What happened next, society came out and said you can't do that.
This is incompatible with the dignity and protection and human life.
Like what on Earth are you thinking?
Human cloning was banned.
And so there's some questions that we might want to ask in regard to this.
First of all, why did Dr. Boisselier think this was a good idea?
Why did she think this was a good idea to clone a human?
Was this act, was this an innovation act?
Did she think, well I'm innovating?
I'm doing something positive and valued?
And this is a good thing.
Or was this not an innovative act?
Certainly it was something that hadn't been done before,
he's done it a new way, was an innovation.
Why did society stop her?
What was it in society that said, don't do that?
You can have your own opinions about why you don't want it to stop,
why you don't want her to do that.
But why did society step in and do that?
And so, if we have a general way of understanding how society acts,
we can understand is the problem that we're proposing,
the innovation that we're proposing, likely to get stopped in the same way?
What are the other ways that society might have stopped this?
In this case what they did was they made it illegal to do human cloning.
They also, what ended up happening, she and
her company were forced out of the United States.
They went to a different country and were forced out of that country, and so
now they're sort of in hiding.
That is, they're not telling people where they are.
And so are there other ways that society might have stopped this activity as well?
Are there other activities that society might deem unacceptable,
either associated with cloning or not associated with cloning?
So if we could predict what activities society might say you can't do that,
that's unacceptable, then it actually it might have a good chance at understanding
how our innovations are likely to be viewed by society as well.
I'd like to start this part of the lecture really just talking about societal
innovation and how society constrains innovation and
the perspective this week is really the perspective of sociology and anthropology.
So those are really the two ways, the academic ways of looking.
We want to understand how they think about this thing called innovation and
how society behaves with respect to it.
I like to think of this as how society projects its values.
So innovation is in fact a way that society projects its values.
The way that we assert ourselves, the way that we intervene in the world,
the way that we change the world in ways that actually are in line with our values.
But also, it's how society protects its values, and so how society says this
witness thing is special to us, and your innovation threatens that, so
we're not going to allow that happen, or we're going to ignore that thing, or
ban that thing, or make it illegal for you to do that thing.
And so this is what we're interested in is how society puts its values out in
the world, but then also how society acts to protect those values.
The three things we're going to look at, we're going to look at values and
identity that is from the collective beliefs that a society holds.
And how it makes sense of those things and where identity comes from.
We're going to talk about social control.
Again, the guidance and the behavior and holding people accountable and
how that works.
And also the history.
What came before?
What are the obligations that we incur, because of what came before in the past.
So, this is the view of the things we really need to think about and
actually understand.
How is it that these three things can constrain innovation for us?
Let's start with social values and personal identity.
So the collective beliefs and sense of self that we have.
These, whether we are part of something whether we
feel like we're part of something, whether we stand apart from something,
these things are all defined with respect to society, right?
That there have to be other people around us in order for
us to have these, the sense of belonging, or the sense of difference.
And, separation from something else.
And so this social identity, us talking about is who we are.
So as a society, who are we?
What are we aspired to?
What doare we feel like we hold dear?
What are the things that are important to us as a society?
Let me give you another example here.
How we are together.
So when you get old, apparently you're supposed to go play a lot of Bingo, and so
we see in America at least, there's a cultural understanding of this game Bingo.
Bingo is a parlor game.
It's a game of chance.
You have a ball in a little thing, and you pull a ball out, and
basically you have to put marks down on your card.
And what happens is very different from this thing we call gambling,
like going to a casino.
In some ways, it's sort of the same.
But sort of it's not, actually,
because gambling in casinos is a very different thing.
Bingo's considered a genteel sport.
It's something that is acceptable, right, versus gambling,
which is something that is actually looked down upon in our society.
Well interestingly, a company came up with a way to combine these two things.
What they did was they actually built a device that has a bingo math, so
in terms of regulating,
this thing runs at like a bingo machine as a server in the back room.
And what happens is a bingo game is called and
the results are paid up as a slot machine.
If you get black out like in Bingo, which is a certain square,
then you would get three bars.
Bar seven, bar seven, bar seven, win a jackpot in that way.
It looks like you're playing a slot machine when it's actually
a Bingo machine.
How would they do this?
It turns out that Bingo is regulated differently than slot machines.
Slot machines are these very highly regulated gambling machines and
they're not called games of chance, they have odds,
they are very tightly regulated.
There are only certain states in the United States where you are allowed to do
this a thing called playing on gambling, do proper gambling.
On the other hand bingo, bingo you can do pretty much anywhere.
And so what happened was a lot of these machines started appearing in places where
people conventionally had not wanted gambling, they had not seen gambling.
And so when you go to the machine and
say hey this looks like a slot machine, they say no it's just a bingo machine.
And so in many municipalities they had to begin to change the laws and
really sort of crack down on this kind of subversion of the law that society says,
you know, bingo is not this.
Bingo is this.
Bingo is this kind of person, this nice person,
this person not doing it for money.
She's not trying to live off this.
She's also not ruining her life or
gambling away her life savings, like people who spend time in places like this.
And so here a company has actually taken something that was a positive,
this positive value around bingo, and changed it into something else.
What's society's response to that?
Well, society will kick back and say this is not us.
This is not how we see ourselves.
I'm going to return for a second to the human cloning example in the same way.
And so, Dr.
Boisselier thought, for some reason, this might be a good idea to clone a human.
Why would she think that's a good idea?
What do you think it is in a person that would say, you know,
I'm going to clone a human?
An act that basically calls all the world to turn in revulsion and
turn against you, ban what you're doing, what you're trying to do.
One of the things she may have thought was a good idea was because of this guy.
This is Rael.
Rael is an interesting character.
Back in the 70s Rael was a Frenchman, back in the 70s,
Rael was driving his car and he saw a light on the top of a volcano.
And so, when you see a light on the top of a volcano,
normally you don't drive towards that, you would drive the other way, right?
because there's a light on top of a volcano, maybe the volcano's exploding,
maybe a meteor's hitting, whatever.
But Rael went up to the mountain.
And when he got up there, he said he saw this silver craft.
And with the door down.
And out of the door, came someone.
And this was who came out.
This was actually not the real alien, this is an artist's rendering of the alien.
But this alien being came out of the spaceship.
It was a spaceship.
And it came down and this alien being came out.
And the alien being talked to him.
And the alien being, he calls him the designer, and the designer is basically
an alien who had done some cloning and put us here.
We're actually, humans are here on Earth because we're the result of these cloning
experiments, or these cloning colonizations, you may call it.
I've not spent enough time understanding the religion to understand this,
but basically Rael founded a religion around this.
Ideas that these aliens came to him and
talked to him about what it is that, the reason that humans are on Earth.
And it turns out that Dr. Boisselier, so this is Dr.
Brigitte Boisselier, is a bishop in his church.
And so as a bishop in this UFO religion, which is centered around cloning,
of course she's going to clone.
That becomes the highest value, that becomes something that they want to do,
that they think cloning is important,
because we are here because of these clones of alien races.
So she's going to help us get closer to that being by doing this
thing called cloning a human.
In fact, they were thinking about, at least there's some suspicion,
that they were going to clone Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson was big supporter of this organization.
And so, but they claimed that, well they won't give you a lot of information about
whether in fact they're going to try and clone Michael Jackson or not.
So Dr. Bosilleir claimed the birth of the first cloned human, why?
Because it was central to her society's values, so
she was outside of the dominant society there, cult like organization.
She's a high member, a high priest in that cult.
And so this idea of cloning was central to her values,
even though she wasn't looking around and
sort of seeing what was going on around outside the dominant society's value.
And so again, these values are driving this behavior at the same time.
So driving her behavior from the inside,
whereas society outside is pushing back and saying, that's not okay.
[MUSIC]
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