The Innovator's Cookbook

Chapter 6

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I think one thing that we don"t normally acknowledge is the power of our tools and technologies. We like to imagine that ideas pop fully formed out of our minds as the result of our internal creative processes. And we imagine that we then create the technologies we use in order to realize those creative flashes: so, cla.s.sically, a scientist has a theory and devises an experimental apparatus to test it. Although this does sometimes happen I think more often it"s the reverse that takes place: that it"s the technology that precedes the understanding of the principles. This happens in science a lot: a tool is invented, and the tool then leads to some new realization, something that you could now do or see or understand that you could never have understood before. I think that very often happens in the arts. My favorite example- because it"s the one I"ve spent my life working with-is the recording studio. The mult.i.track studio was invented for completely mundane reasons so that engineers could more easily balance the vocalist against the rest of the performers. They didn"t have to make those critical decisions before the recording; they could do it afterward. But of course, that humble invention gave rise to a whole different way of making music, really a completely different understanding of music.

So in my particular case, a lot of my creative behavior has come from looking at technologies, new tools, and thinking, "You know what, this allows you to do something that n.o.body ever thought to do before."

SJ: Is there a process for that? How do you explore a new piece of technology?

BE: I spend a fair amount of my time just fiddling around listening for something new. I"m always fascinated when I hear something I haven"t heard before, and think, "Wow, n.o.body"s ever done that before." And sometimes I think, "n.o.body"s ever done that before-but it"s fantastic! If I don"t get it out quickly, somebody else is going to discover it very shortly." [Laughs] So my process-you could call it noodling, really. It"s just playing with the materials, trying to understand where we are now that we weren"t yesterday. That"s how the idea for Discreet Music came about. It was a very simple discovery that if you connected together two tape recorders in a particular way you could create a very long delay, so that the echo of something comes back five or six seconds after you"ve played it, then you can play on top of it; and then you can play on top of the two of them, and the three of them. So you can build up dense layers of material in real time: one person becomes an orchestra. But you could never do that before; the possibility arises entirely out of the technology of tape recorders.

In fact, the funny thing about Discreet Music is that I first did it with three recorders, and it took me months to realize that I only needed two! I don"t know why but I had these three recorders in a row, and I had two playbacks and one record, and that"s how I used it for a long time. And it was at least months, possibly years, before I realized, "You know what, I don"t need that third recorder." [Laughs] It was very funny-it had been like magic the first time I did it, so I never questioned the format.

SJ: One other interesting thing about your career is that you"ve had such a big influence as a producer, in a sense coaxing new musical ideas out of other people. What strategies have you developed in that kind of context?

BE: First of all, the very fact of having somebody who isn"t in the band and who is suggesting new ways of working is in itself very powerful. Because that person is not part of the political/ diplomatic situation within the band itself. You know, any band that"s been together for a very long time has done it partly by being polite to one another; a certain level of decent human rapport. So it"s very difficult within a band if somebody does something and you don"t think it"s a very good idea-it"s still quite hard to say, "Look, that"s no good. Let"s not bother with that." You"re duty bound to go through the process of exploring it until the person himself says, "Yeah, it"s not that good is it?" Whereas having somebody from the outside coming and looking at a piece without any particular loyalties or prejudices, and saying, "Well, that"s working, but I don"t think this is working. And this bit over here could work. . . ." People are much more ready to accept an a.s.sessment like that from somebody that they know is not personally engaged in the work. So the producer as outsider just in itself is important.

Also, the fact of having to present things to somebody, which is what a band is doing when they"re talking to a producer, means that they have to articulate and package the thing, if you like-they have to bring it to some kind of position where somebody else can look at it. It has to be more than a vague idea. So I think it encourages the band to focus on what they"re doing. For instance, if I work with someone and I say that I"ll be in next Monday and maybe we can have a look at these pieces then. And just doing that makes the band say: "Okay, we"ve got about fourteen guitars on that one; we should really sort out which ones we want to use before Brian comes along to hear it." So the producer can be the person who catalyzes certain conclusions along the way, who says, "Okay, where is this thing at now-how does it really stand at the moment?"

SJ: We"ve talked before about your technique of having the members of the band play one another"s instruments in the studio. I love that idea.

BE: One of the other things that a producer can do is to think of ways to get people out of their habits. Any group of people who has worked together for a long period of time tends to fall into habits about how things are done. One person always tends to be the person who leads the process; another is the one who supports the leader; another, the one who comes in late and who doesn"t say much until the very end; and another one is the stub-born one, counterbalancing the enthusiastic one. And that"s all fine-that"s part of the chemistry of a group of people working together. But it gets very habitual and it gets quite boring, so I think of ways of upsetting that, turning it into a game actually. So saying today, "You are going to give all the orders; and you, the person who normally does all the talking, you"re going to just do what you"re told. And you are going to play this instrument that you normally don"t ever touch, and in fact that you can"t play." [Laughs] So sometimes that does actually yield an immediately usable result. But what does very often happen is that it loosens people up. And it enlarges the envelope of possibilities within which they navigate. I mean, if you tell somebody else to play drums, you have a very simple drumbeat normally, because the person who has taken over the drums isn"t the drummer, and, therefore, you start writing and thinking in a different way. It just immediately takes you out of the normal course you would have followed.

SJ: I would think that recording in different cities, which you"ve often done, would be helpful in the same way-you"re deliberately disorienting yourself with some new culture. I mean, I sometimes hear about people recording a record in some exotic place, and I think, "Why are they traveling all the way there when they can just record it at home?"

BE: I think one of the other reasons is simply that: getting away from home. So you"re not engaged with picking up the laundry and doing all the normal things for your everyday life. There"s nothing else to do except what you"re there to do. And I think that really helps a lot. It"s the strongest reason for going someplace else. The location is almost irrelevant. What"s more relevant is the fact that it"s not your normal location.

SJ: As you look over your career, are there periods where you see an unusual cl.u.s.ter of new ideas, where you just feel like you"re on some kind of streak? And then are there fallow periods where nothing is really working?

BE: I think there are periods that, when you"re in them, seem desperately unfruitful, and you think, "Why am I doing this? I"m completely useless, and I"ve lost it all." Then an idea finally strikes you, and you suddenly realize that you"ve been working on it for quite a long time but you weren"t aware of it. You"ve a.s.sembled all of the mental and physical tools you need to handle it in what seemed like a fallow period. So I don"t really believe in fallow periods anymore. I just think there are periods when you"re aware that things are happening, and then other periods where things are happening but you"re just not aware of them. There"s a lot of time when I just don"t know what I"m doing. I was talking to Laurie Anderson the other day; she"s on tour and she phoned me and I said, "Do you sometimes wonder why we"re all still doing this?" When I look back over my life and think about the times when I felt absolutely confident about what I was doing-it"s probably about twenty periods of fifteen minutes or a half hour each, where I suddenly thought, "I know exactly what I"m doing now. I know what this is for; I know what I"ve been doing; I know what I"m about to do." It"s a fantastic feeling and it gives you the energy to keep going for a very long time-because it only lasts a few minutes, before all the-not difficulties really-the ambiguities of the situation become evident.

A Conversation with Beth Noveck Beth Noveck is one of the most important thinkers-and pract.i.tioners-of the new "open government" movement. While directing the Inst.i.tute for Information Law and Policy at the New York Law School, Noveck created the Peer-to-Patent community patent review project in collaboration with the U.S. Patent Office. The author of the book Wiki Government, she served as the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2010, and led President Obama"s Open Government Initiative.

SJ: It seems to me that one consistent theme through everything you"ve been involved with is the idea of widening the pool of potential experts, recognizing that there are gradients of expertise out there in a much larger part of the population. If government can engage some of that intelligence, we"re going to come up with more innovative solutions to the problems that we face. You"ve been a champion of the phrase open government to describe this movement, but there has been confusion about openness versus transparency, right?

BN: You"re exactly right that the notion of innovation is about generating new ideas faster through more interaction with new people and new ideas and creating new conversations. The question is how do you create the mechanisms for that richer and more diverse interchange of ideas so that you can get better ideas into government and solve problems faster. In the current political debates about budget cutting, I pull my hair out because to me the question is not how do I cut a particular service, but how do I deliver that same service using less money and innovative techniques to do the same thing for people that we did before. That"s the idea of creating an open government in the sense of open innovation.

If we talk about open innovation as the practices that many firms have adopted, [we"re talking about] being more collaborative, where it"s companies who are consulting their customers about what designs they should offer in their fall line or it"s companies who are talking to their employees about better ideas about how to do the work of the company more effectively, or talking to their suppliers about how they can be more efficient in what they do. A lot of companies are really beginning to get on board with this notion that we have to talk to everyone in the supply chain, if you will, including the suppliers, including the customers, including our employees. We think about not trying to do everything for ourselves, but instead, set up a network so that we can realize economies of scale.

So it"s this notion that we have the tools that allow us to be more collaborative and thereby act according to highest and best use. In the public sector, similarly, the question is how do we leverage, how do we collaborate better, across organizations of government, whether it"s federal, state, or local, across ent.i.ties within government, and between government and the public, to solve problems better by being more collaborative. Now, there"s many different visions of ways of making government work better. One of which is "open government" in the sense of "transparent," meaning if we make the workings of government more visible to people, government will become more accountable and work better. My own feeling is [that] that by itself does not produce innovation. We have in this country a very open government relative to a lot of other countries, and increasingly now we do things like publish records of who comes and goes to the White House. Ten Downing Street publishes the salaries, as does the White House, of the people who work there. That does very little in my view to actually change the way that government works. It"s very important, I think, not to be confused between transparency for its own sake and collaboration. Open government starts with the focus on how do I create greater collaboration between people rather than simply transparency for its own sake.

SJ: What are some of the mechanisms for that collaboration that you"ve been most excited about?

BN: I got into doing this work because of an experiment that I ran several years ago. Back in 2005, I posited the idea of what would happen if we actually tried to connect the patent office to an open network of volunteers who would help the patent office in making the decision about which invention deserves a twenty-year grant on monopoly rights. This is not the idea of crowd-sourcing the decision-it was again trying to preserve that independence and public mindedness of the bureaucrat by letting the patent examiner make the judgment. Instead, the idea was to crowd-source the knowledge gathering, the information that informs the decision, knowing that the examiner in Washington, with only a few hours in which to do the job of examining a patent, can"t possibly have access to all the relevant info from his or her desk to decide whether the latest component of your cell phone is actually new and original and deserves a patent, or whether the latest drug that"s been invented to cure cancer is actually going to, is actually a sufficient enough advance over what came before to deserve that very powerful twenty-year set of economic rights that you get. And so at that point, we didn"t have Facebook, we didn"t have Twitter. So we had to build the platform that would enable people to volunteer to contribute information to help the patent office, and we had to design a system that would respond to the incentives of the different actors involved. In other words, it wasn"t enough to simply say, "Let"s throw open the floodgates to any suggestion that anybody wants to give." We have to create a very structured system and then we have to use rating and ranking technologies, something that"s very prevalent today, where people rate and rank on Amazon and other sites. That pilot continues to be ongoing with the USPTO [the United States Patent and Trademark Office], it"s been launched now in Australia and j.a.pan, and is going to be launched in the UK as this notion of crowd-sourcing expertise becomes more accepted and prevalent. So this was kind of the first experiment of its kind, and it"s now something that"s in widespread use across government in many ways and in many countries.

The National Archives, for instance, now has a citizen archivist project where they"re actually getting help from citizens and tagging old records and going through old records because there"s so many more things to go through than their librarians can possibly do alone. I can go on and on and on with examples now, especially now that the technology is so prevalent that the policy is there, the political will is there, increasingly around the world, not just in the United States, to try some of this work. And the tools exist to do this much, much better.

SJ: One of the things I really like about what you"re saying is that you"re not eliminating that individual judgment. You"re not saying individuals and official experts still don"t make a.s.sessments of things; it"s just that those individuals are much smarter if they"re connected to a broader network of people, and if they have a broader and more diverse range of inputs to draw upon in making their decisions.

BN: That"s the interesting thing about the kind of hybrid of bureaucracy and network, or hybrid of inst.i.tution and network that I think is the really interesting form that we have yet to fully evolve. Because there are really good things about bureaucracy. The word bureaucracy obviously has a really bad connotation. But there are things that are good about this notion of independent, public-minded decision making that is not subject to the influence or capture of market forces or of the political popular will of the moment. So the notion that we have a state that is intended not to veer wildly from one direction to the other with changes within the administration-we have a very small political layer, and then we have this kind of ongoing, four million people whose job it is to keep the ship of state running, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and to ensure that we don"t have these wild swings. Otherwise, we would be Libya. It"s one of the great inventions of American culture: the bureaucracy is one of the things we"ve done best, ironically. It"s the stability of the state, and having this regularized procedure and this notion of public-mindedness. One of the things I loved about my time in government [was] the people in the civil service who I met who are inspiring, truly public servants. The stereotype of the bureaucrat, somebody who shows up at 9:01 and leaves at 4:59 and is clocking a paycheck-I didn"t meet those people. These are people who are smart people, who do what they do because they care deeply, and they want to do what"s right and they believe in their mission of independence and public service. And so the combination of that set of values with the kind of rapid idea generation, creativity, and innovation that the network brings, put together, is a pretty powerful thing. But we don"t have the custom yet with how to ask questions or how to answer them across that divide. So that"s [what] the interesting, I think, experiments and work of the next couple of years looks like.

SJ: I"m also really interested in something else you"ve written about and worked on: prizes. A prize-backed challenge is a structure whereby the state creates alternate markets for innovation where the market refuses to incentivize people to generate something on their own. So you create this artificial market where the government or some other inst.i.tution says: If you solve this problem that serves some social good, that the market isn"t solving on its own, you"ll make $10 million or you"ll make a million, and even in some of the software challenges we"ve seen, all you need is $10,000 in prize money. You don"t need that much money.

BN: You only need free T-shirts!

SJ: But I think that"s a pretty interesting s.p.a.ce right now.

BN: What I love about the prize-backed challenge as a way of working is, first of all, it helps people on the inst.i.tutional side frame a question. When you talk about things in terms of a challenge, particularly a challenge backed by a prize, it creates a certain discipline that gets those with the knowledge of what the public interest is and what the social imperatives are-call those the government people, although I think people on both sides of the divide have suggestions about what the suggestions should be. But it gets the public servants to frame the question in a way that people know how to help and how to respond. The big problem right now is, there"s lots of people right now who say, "I would love to be involved in and do public service. I would love to be involved in the life of my democracy. I"ll gladly do something." But they have no idea what to do. During election season, I know what to do. I know about getting out the vote, I know what that means. I may know what it means to sweep up my local park, or do some kind of local volunteerism, but you tell me, be involved in policy making? What am I supposed to do?

SJ: By the way, one of the reasons why I think all this networked collaboration worked first in elections is that elections have built-in game mechanics. So people always know there"s a scoreboard- BN: There"s a winner!

SJ: There"s a winner and a loser and I know how to play games. So here, if I do this, I can see this number go up and I"m getting better and I get new privileges. It"s as if there"s this giant video game that"s built into that environment and we have technologies and we have usage patterns that allow people to lock into that. But we don"t have them built into civic partic.i.p.ation in the same way, once the election is over.

BN: And that"s why there is some really interesting thinking being done increasingly on the question of game-ification and you"re hearing people like Jesse Sch.e.l.l and others who talk about, wow, if we actually turned it into a game that could get [me] tax credits for turning down my heat, how cool would that be? Jane McGonigal has talked about this: within a game, I know what I"m supposed to do-it"s as simple as that. And what prize-backed challenges do partly is this: they tell me what to do. The other thing that"s really exciting about challenges is that I think it creates this kind of wonderful, flourishing ecosystem of innovation around a particular problem. What I like is that in some cases, it responds to a market failure by offering a prize to compensate for a lack of funding within the private sector. But in many cases, what it also does is [it] just generates attention and eyeb.a.l.l.s and demand around something, and actually allows people to create ideas that then become successful businesses.

SJ: You"ve seen a lot of projects up close from your work inside the Obama administration and in other capacities. What"s one of your favorite examples of open government at work?

BN: One favorite project that I have is the Federal Register 2.0 project. The federal government publishes the Register every day. It"s one of the great innovations of our democracy, above all other countries in the world: the fact that we have a daily gazette, a daily newspaper for our government, in which we put out, every day, all the news about grants that are available and regulations that are pending, actions that are taken by the president.

SJ: I"m not sure I knew that"s what the Federal Register was! I"ve heard about it a million times, but I don"t think I fully realized exactly what it was until now.

BN: You don"t know what it is because it"s never been something that the average person would read because it"s so densely written in legal jargon; graphically, it"s an interface culture we live in and it"s very hard to read a doc.u.ment that"s intensely small print; it"s very hard to look at. So companies hire lobbyists and lawyers who read the Federal Register for them and tell them that there"s something they should be aware of. So there"s a lot of middlemen that make their money in tracking the Federal Register. Journalists also read the Federal Register to find out what"s going on in government. So we have this practice that"s existed for seventy-five years, since Roosevelt, of publishing this daily newspaper-we put the information out but you have to get people to read it for you. It"s as if we were publishing it in another language known as legalese.

But then a few years ago, in response to a prize-backed challenge to do something with a government data set, three guys sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco went on data.gov and looked for the biggest data set they could find. And that was ten years" worth of Federal Registers in a raw, downloadable format by the National Archives. They said, "We"ve never heard of the Federal Register; we"ve never looked at it, but man, is this hard to read. We could make this look better." Long story short, they enter their prototype in the compet.i.tion; they don"t get first prize, they get second prize, but the National Archives and government printing office that publish the Federal Register noticed and saw their entry and thought, Wow, that"s pretty good. And they called up the three guys in the coffee shop and they said, "How would you like to remake the Federal Register for us?" So three guys, never done business with the federal government before, know nothing about government-they"re three citizen coders-they get the job, and within three months, in the rotunda of the National Archives before the Const.i.tution and Declaration of Independence, the new Register 2.0 is announced by the archivist of the United States, with a copy of the Magna Carta in the background. I mean, the Founding Fathers might as well have been in the room, and these three guys who had to buy a suit for the occasion unveil the new Federal Register. If you go look at it at federalregister.gov, it"s beautiful. It has pictures, it"s searchable, if you want to find out what"s new today in your home state. Now, it"s still written by government bureaucrats in a language that"s not yet as accessible as it should be, but the fact that it"s now published in a form that people can read is, I think, if you go and look two years from now, I would bet you the language will be easier to read, because people are now writing it for a new, wider audience. The short of it is, making transparent a government data set, reaching out to citizens with a prize-backed challenge, to do something with that data, is enabling citizens to play a role in making their government work better, make it more effective, and efficient. These are people who you would not have thought of as experts in the Federal Register, but what they knew something about was good interface design, how to use technology to solve a problem in a way that folks within the government never would have thought of for themselves. So now we have an innovation that has made the government work better for all Americans.

And the story gets even better-they took the code of their project and made it freely available as an open-source project. And now other people can take it, and in fact I know of other people who are working on the platform, a totally different set of people, who are seeing if they can adapt it so that any city that wants to create its own newspaper can now use that code to be transparent [and] to publicize opportunities for people in the munic.i.p.ality.

These three guys still, at the moment, have day jobs, but it"s very likely that what will happen as a result of [their] work is that they will be able to start their own business. So there will be another happy ending to this story, which is generating entrepreneurship, creating new jobs and economic growth. So I love the story because it"s very high-minded, involving the National Archives and the Declaration of Independence and three guys sitting in a coffee shop who end up making government work better for all Americans.

A Conversation with Jon Schnur As the cofounder and chairman of New Leaders for New Schools, and an important contributor to the education policy of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, Jon Schnur has been actively involved in reinventing the American education system for almost two decades. His work has focused on teacher and school leadership quality, charter schools, and reforming urban school systems. He helped create the Race to the Top program, which was introduced as part of the 2009 stimulus package, and is now widely considered one of the most successful innovations in education policy in recent years.

SJ: I think we all agree that something has started to change in the education s.p.a.ce over the past five years or so, in that there"s a new interest in innovation in how schools work: how we teach teachers, how we compensate them, how the cla.s.srooms are structured. People seemed open to new ideas-why is this happening now?

JS: I started working on this full-time in 1993, and it felt like those of us who were working on education did not have that sense of national focus and urgency and possibility then. And that has changed. I think there are a few drivers. I think one of them is the economic shift; the country"s understanding of the role that education plays in tomorrow"s economy. It"s gotten both educators but also business leaders and the media interested in education. In the 1970s, a quarter of jobs required postsecondary education, and today more than two-thirds require it. In a few decades, to have that kind of macroeconomic shift, it"s seismic. People recognize that education is really the key to economic compet.i.tiveness, so that"s driven people across the political spectrum and the labor business world.

The second thing is that one of the great successes over the past ten or fifteen years is that we in this country now have hundreds of schools serving low-income kids that are getting dramatic results, which is really dispelling the myth that poverty and social background [are] the driver of educational outcomes. When you have really quality schools and quality teaching, they can be a powerful strategy in countering poverty, though of course it"s not the only thing that"s needed. So we have these proof points of schools that work-some in the betterbranded charter schools, but some in traditional public schools, too.

And the third thing that I would say-and this is something that comes out of our work at New Leaders-we started looking in 20042005 at schools that were getting really dramatic results compared to schools that were getting only average results. Our team visited a hundred schools and we looked at what patterns were leading to breakthrough improvements in those schools-and the patterns were so consistent. It wasn"t just that there was this amazing, charismatic leader who could somehow defy gravity. It was that there were some consistent patterns in different neighborhoods all around the country that actually were pretty similar. So it"s not just that individual schools can generate success, but the patterns that drive that success are so consistent that it gives you a sense of confidence that we actually can take this to [a] greater scale.

SJ: Let"s talk about the innovation in education that you"ve been most closely a.s.sociated with: Race to the Top.

JS: Race to the Top is one vehicle in education to try to support taking some of these breakthrough successes we"ve seen and help take them to greater scale. During the transition period after the 2008 election, President-elect Obama set aside almost a seventh of the stimulus package for education, and what he proposed was a large amount of funding to prevent layoffs of teachers-in return for significant reform and innovation in the schools. The piece that became the center of the reform and innovation component was Race to the Top. It was essentially a $5 billion carveout that became a compet.i.tion. There were three components, but [the] main compet.i.tion involved $4 billion. Essentially, Obama said to the state governors and state superintendents: "If you agree on significant reform and innovation, if you really focus on continuous improvement in your schools-if you really come up with a plan to do this, we"ll give you a share of four billion dollars in this compet.i.tive process." Actually, this compet.i.tive funding is a small share of education funding nationally-it"s $4 billion out of more than $400 billion being spent on education.

SJ: What"s appealing about the structure of it is that you have essentially this mix of top down and bottom up: you have the federal government saying here are some macro goals that we think are important, but the specific changes and new ideas and innovation that are going to be most helpful in achieving those goals-we"re not going to tell you what those are. That"s a very powerful mix.

JS: And it was controversial! When the president proposed this, most of the Republicans opposed it because they didn"t want to increase education funds. Many of the Democrats opposed it because they didn"t want to fund compet.i.tion. They just wanted to put the money into existing programs. So there was no const.i.tuency for it. And the only reason it got done, I would say, is because the president said, "This is a top priority for me, and in order for me to support this package, I want this to be included." There"s no other way this would have happened. There were a few individual members of Congress that were intrigued by the idea, but at the time, it just ran counter to the way both parties were working.

SJ: Are there good metrics on how well it worked?

JS: I think a lot of people would say Race to the Top has been a great success so far, but in another way, I think it"s still too early to tell. The successes are-for one, there has been great focus and energy around reform and innovation in education, which has been pushed further by this; and two, I think people cite a lot of the policy changes that states have made, saying that this has been the biggest example of the federal government incent[iviz]ing and driving change in policy. So there are states that had barriers to innovation that have been removed: things like caps on the number of high-quality charter schools, or prohibitions on looking at results-oriented evaluations for teachers and princ.i.p.als. It"s interesting-and this is really connected to innovation-a number of states have adopted this "common core" of a.s.sessments. Which may not seem like it"s related to innovation, but it"s actually crucial to innovation, because one problem in the country is that we have all these different bars for success . . . many of them fairly dumbed down. So creating a much higher bar for student success, that"s also streamlined, so we have fewer, higher standards for student success across the country-that actually creates a kind of s.p.a.ce for innovation nationally. If people can figure out ways to help kids do well on those, they can now have their tools and their ideas spread across the whole country the way you couldn"t before.

So I think when you look at it that way, I think you could see Race to the Top as a big success. But, my view is that the proof in the pudding is actually in what happens in schools and school systems and student learning. So in a sense, we"ve created an opportunity, but the question is do we seize or squander that opportunity over the next three to five years in leveraging those policy changes to drive really dramatic improvements in the way kids learn and teachers teach.

In a sense it"s the opposite of No Child Left Behind-instead of mandating something to the entire country, let"s empower leaders around the country to figure what they"re going to do. And now there are twelve states that have won grant money from Race to the Top-and, you know, there are going to be failures. That"s one thing that government has a hard time doing: accepting that there will be failures, and systems that don"t succeed. But there are also going to be huge successes, and those successes are going to happen because there wasn"t a one-size-fits-all approach that was mandated.

SJ: I"m also interested in the idea itself, and how it came about-it"s been attributed to you in many media accounts, but I imagine it"s a more complex story than that.

JS: People love to identify one person as the leader or inventor, but in my experience, that"s just not the case. With Race to the Top, it was really the product of years of work by a lot of different people. My own perspective was grounded in schools that had breakthrough achievements, and we came up with some very consistent patterns in terms of what was driving those improvements. And again, we didn"t train our leaders to do these things; the best leaders just came up with them on their own. It was just that no one had gone around to look at what all these school leaders were doing around the country. So we created this Urban Excellence Framework, but all it was, was this distillation of the patterns that were created by hundreds of leaders and thousands of educators and tens of thousands of students around the country. We just tried to codify that-it"s an example of how I was advising President Obama during the campaign, trying to translate everything effective educators and leaders had taught us into policy recommendations.

And then once Arne Duncan was appointed secretary of education, we had a very short time to make a recommendation of what to do on the stimulus and so at that point I was able to work with Arne to put together a memo that was seizing the opportunity of the stimulus to use it as a vehicle for a lot of these ideas. But all that was, was a channel to communicate what people around the country had already been working on.

SJ: What"s on the horizon in terms of educational tools that you are really excited about?

JS: One thing I"m really excited about is this process for the common core of a.s.sessments that are going to track what it really takes to be able to succeed in college and in a career, and not just fill in the bubbles on some multiple-choice test. Those will be in place, if states choose to adopt them, by 2014, and I think that streamlined higher level of expectation will be enormously helpful.

SJ: It"s a bit like the innovation power that you see in technologies when you have a standardized platform. On the one level, you look at it and you say, "Well, the platform just got more boring because it"s standardized"; but on the other hand, it allows other people to build on top of it in reliable ways because the platform is defined.

JS: Exactly-and then you"ll have healthy compet.i.tion for who can develop the best curricula. Who can develop the best model? So that"s one.

But then there"s also something that is more small scale now, but that I think is going to develop into something much bigger in the long run. There are very new innovations that are essentially personalized learning, that give individual kids what they need through a blend of very new technology, with a reinvented teaching role, which creates a new kind of school. People will debate whether it"s over the next five or twenty-five years that this becomes much more pervasive, but I think the future of education is going to be in this blend.

There"s a new approach being used by schools like Rocketship in California and School of One in New York. At School of One, they have three cla.s.srooms brought together in one nicely designed s.p.a.ce to work with kids in sixth, seventh, and eighthgrade math. Instead of three separate cla.s.ses of say, twenty kids, they actually have a larger number of groups with seven to twelve kids supported by teachers or teacher"s aides or sometimes working with computers. Data is collected every day on how every kid is doing through a little exit ticket where the kids complete a fivequestion quiz that measures how they are doing on what they did that day. The responses are a.n.a.lyzed by people and technology after the kids leave and based on what that a.n.a.lysis finds, each night a new schedule is created to help them with the skills they need the next day. So instead of one teacher saying, "Here"s my next unit that I"ve planned three weeks ago for all thirty kids," lesson plans are designed for small groups of kids who are working on different sets of skills that actually draw on different materials and bring them what they need that day. So it sort of reinvents the cla.s.sroom. It"s far from using technology to replace teachers-it actually empowers teachers to meet the needs of every student. It helps teachers decide: How do I create the right learning environment in my cla.s.sroom? How do I best deploy the technology?

Now, I don"t mean to overstate or oversell this-it"s still early. I don"t think it solves everything or makes it perfect yet, but I do think it gives you a window into what"s possible over time. Certainly it is next to impossible for teachers to meet the needs of each individual student in their cla.s.sroom in today"s environment. This opens up a world of potential-with a blended model, technology can be used to ease the administrative burden we put on teachers and enable them to spend more time on instruction.

A Conversation with Tom Kelley Tom Kelley is a professional innovator. As the general manager of IDEO, the global design and development firm, Kelley helped lead the firm through thousands of innovation programs over the last twenty years. According to a 2008 ranking by Fast Company, IDEO is the fifth most innovative company in the world. Kelley is also the author of two acclaimed books that explain how to build environments and companies that support the creation of new ideas, and do a better job of bringing those ideas to market: The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation.

SJ: So the interesting thing I think about IDEO is this: Most businesses at least pay lip service to being interested in innovation and some are quite good at it. But with IDEO it is literally your business: your job is to come up with new ideas and new products both for other people and for yourselves. And you guys have been in the s.p.a.ce for two decades now. Have you seen something change in the climate over that time, in how people think about innovation?

TK: The big one is that innovation [is] now almost universally perceived as this irrepressible force. When my first book, The Art of Innovation, came out, I found myself in situations where I had to justify innovation-especially in Europe, I was like, wait, you"re kidding, right? And that"s completely gone away. Everybody gets it, that they are competing on a global basis with almost everybody else. It"s a hot, flat world. And in that world, clearly, you have to innovate. And to be honest, if you"re in a high-cost country like the United States or a region like Western Europe, you"ve got to be extra innovative-because you have to compensate for the cost differential that you have compared to some pretty darn compet.i.tive and clever places in the world.

SJ: You know, that brief history of the firm reminds me of a question I"ve actually thought about a lot-you actually probably have the best answer to this. The question, really, of design. So much of the material that I"ve been writing about is about open networks and open-source models and big collaborative systems and things like that. And yet I think there is this sense that people have, that design is one of those things that doesn"t work very well in that context-that design by committee is a negative phrase for a reason. And yet you guys have figured out some kind of way to be real innovators in design, to kind of come up with new, collaborative models at the same time. Is there a way to design within a larger group that actually works?

TK: I think that a way that we"ve succeeded in design is to redefine the word. Because, inescapably, when I joined IDEO, design was about styling. And we didn"t start from styling. We were called at the time David Kelley Design, named for my brother. But we had no industrial designers; we did zero styling at the time. Our designers were all engineers; in fact they all had master"s degrees in engineering from Stanford. But I think the way that the design world, writ large, has succeeded is stretching it from design, meaning styling, to design thinking, which is to say, a thought process. Back when I was speaking mostly about design, I could see the brains of some business people shutting down. The old definition of design seemed exclusionary. You had to wear a black turtleneck to be a member of that club. But the great thing about design thinking is it"s accessible to everyone. It involves mental muscles that some people haven"t been using lately, but that everybody has from their childhood.

SJ: And how would you define that kind of thinking, as opposed to other forms?

TK: I am shying away from the use of the words left and right brain. It involves some humility, this form of thinking, or let"s say problem solving, because you don"t start with the answer. With the highly trained a.n.a.lytical minds that people are walking around with, you see a problem and you have a reaction. You have an instant answer in some cases. You would say that that answer comes from your expertise, from your informed intuition. And sometimes that answer could be the right one. But the design-thinking approach says: "Of course I see possibilities here. But I want to defer judgment a little bit-I want to take a humanistic approach, I want to first check in with-you know, what do humans do, what do humans need with respect to this problem?"

And then, a part of the design-thinking process is this iterative prototyping. Now, understanding what the human needs are, I think I have some answers, as opposed to the answer, and so a good design thinker is really facile, really quick with prototyping, and uses the quickest, cheapest prototyping approach available. Sometimes that approach doesn"t involve going to the machine shop at all. Sometimes it involves storytelling, storyboarding, making a video, whatever, but they get these multiple ideas out on the table, and then they get feedback. In complex problems, they get feedback from all the const.i.tuents, and then armed with that, the observation they got from looking at human needs, and then the prototyping, where they learn from each prototype, then they"re able to go forward, to pick which thing to implement and then go forward with it. But it starts with that humility-the humility of "I have approaches, but I don"t have the answer."

So my brother David formed this school at Stanford called the "d school"-the d is for design. And the concept is that all these great universities in the United States and elsewhere have "B schools"-business schools-and the concept is to try to create something that has the same respectability. So when he went to the president of the university to pitch the idea of the d school, he said: "At Stanford University like at all great universities, we have n.o.bel-laureate-quality people drilling deeper and deeper into fields of knowledge. Some of those fields are technical knowledge and some are the humanities, but these are brilliant people, working and writing about stuff that lots of people don"t even understand because it is so deep and complex." And so David said, "Look, I would like to propose that there might be problems in the world today that are not going to be solved by specialists drilling deeper into their field of knowledge. That there might be problems out there, and it seems like there"s kind of a lot of them out there to me, that are going to be solved by going broader, by getting a business person in a room with an economist in the room with a scientist in the room with an engineer."

SJ: This is something we"ve both written quite a bit about, the idea of cross-pollination-trying to make those connections across different fields, or different problem s.p.a.ces. How do you cultivate that?

TK: The example that pops to mind, and you may know of it, is the Aravind Eye Hospital in India. Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy comes to America, he visits the McDonald"s Hamburger University in the U.S. and gets a view into their operational efficiency, and he says, "I wonder what the McDonald"s of health care is." And so this is very far afield from health care by definition. But he"s sitting in a fast-food restaurant and he cross-pollinates across national boundaries, across industries, comes up with the Aravind Eye Hospital, and it"s an amazing place. I have not been, but I"ve read a lot about it. They"ve done something like a million cataract surgeries at an average cost of twenty dollars. And they"ve got health care outcomes compet.i.tive with U.S. companies. So I actually think now there"s a second-order opportunity for cross-pollination, which is from Aravind Eye Hospital back to the U.S. health care system. There must be ideas that we could reimport from the Aravind Eye Hospital.

There"s a story I"ve told to a lot of my business audiences about a doc from the emergency room going to watch the pit crew at the Indianapolis 500. He"s actually with a group of docs, and they"re initially thinking they have nothing to learn from people with grease under their fingernails-but in fact, while they"re there they notice that when the guys jump over the wall to service the race cars, they have everything at their fingertips. Each person knows exactly what their job is, and each person has all their tools, all their materials, all their supplies right there at arm"s length or in pockets, ready to go. And one of the docs says, "Hey, I work in a business where seconds matter, too, and I don"t have that. I see somebody with something major, arterial bleeding, I still gotta send people to get the piece parts, you know, get me three of those and two of those and whatever." So one of the docs said he was going to start pre-kitting stuff right away, that he was going to have on hand, right at his fingertips, some of the things that he was going to need.

So in fact, I would argue with cross-pollination, it"s the only way, if you really want to innovate. Because if you think you"re going to innovate by reading your industry"s trade magazine, good luck with that. Because every other compet.i.tor has that trade magazine on their desk. And so it"s good for keeping up with your industry, but it"s not good for getting ahead of your industry. And so you almost have to be looking elsewhere.

SJ: How do you do that in terms of the internal organization of the company?

TK: Well, one thing is just to make it clear that it"s important. So I used to, for years, run some of the management meetings at IDEO. Before that, my brother ran them all. And I would say that the first twenty years of the firm, nearly every group Mondaymorning meeting started with show-and-tell. And if you think about it, show-and-tell is very childish, it"s very kindergarten-y. But if you think about what show-and-tell is, it"s cross-pollination. And so if you have a culture that welcomes that, then you"re getting this continuous stimulation of ideas from the outside.

SJ: And what are they showing at show-and-tell?

TK: It"s everything. It is a new technology that they"ve uncovered, it"s an interesting book that they"ve read, it"s an event that"s going on. If you think of your most precious resource, in any organization, it"s attention. The attention of the leaders and the team. Just the fact that you"re willing to devote that attention, that kind of precious time, to bring stuff in. Not knowing whether it"s going to be good stuff or not. It says it"s important.

SJ: One other thing that I think is interesting in the book [The Art of Innovation]-you have a whole chapter on brainstorming. And brainstorming, there"s been kind of a backlash against it in the last ten years. Is there a legitimacy to that backlash, or are people doing it wrong?

TK: I think those are mostly straw-man arguments. Sure, many brainstorms are being done badly, so they don"t get good results. So then let"s do them well! At IDEO we get extreme value out of brainstorming. Part of the value comes from tapping into the whole brain of the organization. As a practical matter, on any given project, whether it"s an internal project or a project in our case for a client, we may have 550 people at IDEO but you only get like five of those people on your team. So that"s a limitation. But, through brainstorming, you can get, for one hour, anybody in the firm. And so I am no longer limited by the content knowledge of my five project team members.

SJ: It sounds like what you"re saying is that it"s not your normal, everyday team that brainstorms. Instead, the idea is to get new people in, from around the organization-so you get a much more diverse mix of folks for that session.

TK: If in your company, if you walk into the room and you can"t tell in thirty seconds, in ten seconds, is this a brainstorm or is this a meeting-then you"re not doing brainstorming right, I would argue. In fact, the social ecology of the two are opposites. In a meeting, the boss gets to run the meeting. In a meeting, people take notes; it shows respect for what"s going on in the room. In a meeting, if somebody says something stupid, or something that would be a problem, I owe it to my colleagues to say, "Oh, remember, we tried that last year and it failed." So in a brainstorm, all the opposites are true. In the brainstorming, especially in companies where brainstorming is not well entrenched, I gotta ask the boss to leave the room. If people are posturing, if people are waiting for the boss to say something and piling on, that is disrupting the free flow of ideas. The boss should set up the problem if he or she wants to be there, say how important it is, and then leave, so that the ideas can flow. In a brainstorm, I would never want anyone to be taking notes because that withdraws them from the fray. I want them to be right in there. And so, of course, the thing where you share your expertise, your critique, that happens right when the brainstorm is over. But [if] we really critique, it just kills the flow of ideas. So there"s an energy to a brainstorming session that makes it unlike a meeting in many, many ways. It"s a sprint, not a marathon. You don"t-the type of brainstorming we are talking about, you don"t do it for eight hours. You don"t even do it for the whole afternoon. You do it for sixty or ninety minutes, and then if you"ve still got more to be done, you bring in another team to work on it, because it"s kind of mentally exhausting.

SJ: You have in your Palo Alto offices-there is some amazing, fairly celebrated work s.p.a.ce there. How can s.p.a.ce be used to encourage this kind of thinking?

TK: Sure, this is a slightly frustrating topic for me because I just feel like there"s resistance to the idea. I feel like when I walk around, when I visit corporate America, and I"ve worked personally with fifteen hundred clients, it"s as if somebody decided that s.p.a.ce is not important. It"s as if they said, "I just want to get everyone on my team a desk, a chair, and a wastebasket because anything more than that, any more attention or effort paid on s.p.a.ce, would be wasted, like electricity, or plant watering." It"s a utility. We believe the opposite. We believe that s.p.a.ce can be strategic, that if you get the s.p.a.ce right, it can affect the att.i.tude and performance and behavior of the people on the team. There"s a great book out there, it"s a coffee-table book, called I Wish I Worked There, or something. And it"s these great s.p.a.ces, I think not including IDEO"s s.p.a.ce, but places like Pixar and Google, and Apple, places like that. And you think, "Wait a minute, so these are the companies that routinely go to the top of the mostinnovative-companies-in-the-world list, and they have the most innovative s.p.a.ce. Hmm, could that be a coincidence?" You know, I don"t think so. It"s not like s.p.a.ce does the whole thing on its own, but I think that s.p.a.ce contributes greatly. And I don"t mean beautiful s.p.a.ce, I mean, s.p.a.ce that has the kind of functional aspects that you want.

Even in Palo Alto, where we"re paying some of the highest rents in the world, everybody"s got two s.p.a.ces currently. Everybody"s got some personal s.p.a.ce and that personal s.p.a.ce is shrinking every year, because there"s more s.p.a.ce being allocated to project s.p.a.ces. So the practical matter, at IDEO, you spend, as one of the professionals (as opposed to the support staff )-you spend ninety-eight percent of your life in the project world. So that"s why we define these project s.p.a.ces. This is an expensive idea, by the way; the cheaper and more traditional way would be to have conference rooms, so you got your desk and when you meet you go to the conference room. Well, that"s a problem, because in a conference room, you gotta generate your energy from scratch every time. So imagine you and I are on a project to change health care in America. And we get together in the conference room, and we"ve got tremendous energy going on, we"ve got pictures on the walls of the patients we"re thinking about, or the doctors. We"ve got a diagram of the network of how health care gets paid for in America, and we"ve got all this stuff-and then the hour"s up. We take that stuff down off the walls, our hour"s up, we gotta leave the room. Whereas in a project room, all that information stays up for the length of the project. So then you get what"s called "persistence of information." As soon as I step back inside of that s.p.a.ce, I"m in that project again. That picture of that patient is still up on the wall, and that really complicated network of how the docs interact with the insurance companies is still up there. In fact, it gives me a chance to build on it. Imagine that that complex network gets written on the wall in the conference room, and then it gets erased. Even if you write "Do Not Erase" it gets erased within forty-eight hours.

SJ: I love that because I feel like there is this att.i.tude out there of "yes, we need to be more creative with our s.p.a.ce, let"s put a foosball table in, and then we"re done."

TK: I really do believe that you can tweak the s.p.a.ce in ways that make it work. One way that you do that is, you make it a little less sacred. There"s a large, successful Fortune 100 company who shall remain nameless, and I spoke at one of their brand-new innovation and learning centers. It was a gorgeous building, and it"s only been open like a week, and I went to put up these giant Post.i.t notes on the walls and they said, "Oh, no, we"re not allowed to put anything up on painted surfaces." Come on, you"re kidding? If you look at the d school at Stanford-they spent millions of dollars retrofitting this old building there. And you look at it and you think, "Wow, it looks like a kindergarten cla.s.sroom here." So there"s nothing precious in the s.p.a.ce at all. Everything"s movable, everything"s rough-and-ready. And if you"ve got that going with your s.p.a.ce, then everybody feels empowered to make it work for what we"re doing today, as opposed to thinking, "Oh gee I have to call somebody in facilities. I"d like to move this from point A to point B, but I"d better not touch it." I think that"s a part of s.p.a.ce. So I"d be the first one to admit, our s.p.a.ce is not always beautiful. It"s certainly not cleaned up. It is very messy. But it works.

A Conversation with Katie Salen Katie Salen is a pioneer in one of the most innovative hybrid s.p.a.ces today: the intersection between games and education. The coauthor of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, Salen has been the director of graduate students for the Design and Technology Program at Parsons the New School for Design. She is also the executive director of Inst.i.tute of Play, which promotes game design in educational environments. She"s also actively engaged in bringing these new approaches into real cla.s.srooms, as a cocreator of Quest to Learn, a public school in Manhattan that bills itself as a "school for digital kids."

SJ: You are right in the middle of two very interesting innovation s.p.a.ces right now: the world of education and the world of gaming. Let"s start with education: what are the new possibilities for teaching kids that you"re most excited about right now?

KS: One of them is a bit of departure from thinking about the cla.s.sroom as the sole s.p.a.ce of learning. For a number of years, there"s been a kind of pressure on schools that says the inst.i.tution itself needed to teach kids everything. And I feel like we"re in a moment right now, partially because the digital media stuff allows for connections across s.p.a.ce and time, to begin to open up that notion of where kids are learning. In the design of the Quest schools, the school is just one part of the learning ecology of the kid. And when we begin to think about experiences that we"re designing, we want to think about those experiences as connected . . . they partially take place in the school and are supported by the kinds of structures that schools are pretty good at doing, but they also implicate the after-school s.p.a.ce and they implicate the home s.p.a.ce. And they tend to be wrapped together by things like a social network site that we designed for the school that allows kids to also have connections to people beyond the walls of their neighborhoods and beyond the walls of their school. So that notion of the connectivity across time and s.p.a.ce and people and resources is, I think, something to be hugely excited about.

SJ: That"s great. Obviously there"s been so much focus on the game principles that the Quest schools are using. How is that working, now that you"ve got kids actually in cla.s.srooms?

KS: What we tried to do is design the school from the ground up around core principles of games. One way that manifests itself is in cla.s.ses that deal with more than one subject. In a game you would never just encounter math or science on its own; you"re actually working on a complex problem that calls in different kinds of knowledge simultaneously. So we have cla.s.ses with names like The Way Things Work, which is an integrated math and science cla.s.s. We have one called Codeworlds World, which integrates math and English-language arts. And each of those cla.s.ses is trying to look at a core method or way of working with knowledge. That"s something that games do. The curricula are structured around complex problems that kids are dropped into that last ten to twelve weeks. The problems are really engaging and interesting, but there"s no way on day one that students can solve them. So it gives rise in kids to what we call a "need to know." And that"s the core thing we care about in terms of curriculum design. Can we create really compelling learning experiences where kids have an interest in learning about fractions or have [an] interest in learning how to write a memoir or persuasive essay because they"re working on a problem they think is interesting? That"s one way that the game stuff manifests itself: we call them "missions," and the missions get broken down into smaller cla.s.ses, which are sort of smaller problems that help kids do work on a bigger problem.

In addition, kids design games as part of the curriculum. We have a big focus on systems thinking in the school. We think that"s a key twenty-first-century literacy. And we"ve found that when kids make games . . . that they"re a really great tool for understanding how systems work in action. Games are like little super minisystems, and [the kids] can see change over time, and they can understand the core principles of systems thinking. And so we have a yearlong cla.s.s in game design in sixth grade. Kids learn how to makes games, they learn the language of games, and then they"re able to take that language and apply it to systems, which they"re then working with in all of their other cla.s.ses.

SJ: My kids have been playing this game Dawn of Discovery, which is an incredibly cool game. And they"ve been obsessed recently with building a cathedral in the game. It"s amazing all the different kinds of problems you have to solve to get to the point in the game where you can build a cathedral-and all the different kinds of thinking that they have to do. They have to think like a city mayor, they have to think like a merchant, they have to think like a farmer, because of all the different layered objectives. They will claw their way downstairs to be able to play this game to build a medieval cathedral. So to me, the question is: how do you tap that in other environments?

KS: Exactly. One other key part of the Quest schools is that we have a group of game designers that are embedded in the school, and they"re there every day, and they work with teachers to codevelop the curriculum. And so we have this little working game-design studio called Mission Lab, and our designers build games for part of the curriculum. They help the teachers come [up] with ideas around these interesting problems to drop kids into, and help develop learning acti

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