InnoTown Nuggets

Five hundred people gathered on the edge of Norway's fjords in the charming, art nouveau town of Alesund (pronounced o-les-sund) to participate in a conference called InnoTown.  Founded by Cecilie With and Dag Lausund in 2000, it has now been joined by Innovation Norway and Spilka Group and considered the leveraging force for Norway's innovation future.  Until the recent  onstructions of many tunnels, travel in Norway was constricted by ferries and bridges.  This supported a rather inward looking, homogenous culture.  Therefore, one purpose of the InnoTown designers was to bring the world to Norway, so although most of the attendees were Norwegian, most of presenters were from outside Norway.

I was delighted to be part of this amazing conference and here is a list of speakers and one thought from each (the full report is being sent to InnovationNetwork members. For more info:
http://www.thinksmart.com/inmembership/index.html)

More information about InnoTown - (http://www.innotown.com)

** Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University and author of "Weird Ideas that Work" and "The Knowing-Doing Gap." (A genuinely nice guy, interested in almost everything, who travelled to Norway with his bright, engaging daughter Claire.)

- Success is closely correlated to "just doing more stuff."

** Miha Pogacnik, world renowned violinist, entrepreneur and cultural ambassador. (An elegant, passionate man who was not satisfied to follow the normal path of a concert musician.  He now plays and leads people to new ways of thinking in areas of crisis and need.)

- Leadership - you don't tell people what to do.  They do what they do because of who you are.

** Michael Tchong, trend analyst & producer, Ubercool LLC  (A bright guy who covered three, well-known metatrends with a lot of examples.)

- Pop-up stores -- Target truck selling air-conditioners in New York for six weeks.
- Successful new Zurich paper titled "20 Minutes."

** Helen Greiner, Co-founder & CEO, iRobot Corporation (A fun, self-proclaimed geek who likes to explore her world and fell in love with R2D2 when she was 12.)

- New product announcement: Scooba, the floor washer, was announced and will be released soon.  (Note to Helen:  everyone I talked to wanted one of these ... maybe it will surpass the Roomba in hitting the 2 million unit mark.)

** Charles Leadbeater, idea generator, strategist, author of "Up the Down Escalator.  Why the Global Pessimists Are Wrong" and "Living on Thin Air:  The New Economy."  (An interesting guy who follows 3 rules for what to do next (professionally):  it must be interesting, build new relationships and be able to make money.)

- Innovation is like having a really good conversation.  It starts somewhere.  There is no agenda.  It is reciprocal and mutual.  It melds and merges.  Participants listen and speak.  Generally held in neutral spaces.  Involves food and drink.  No one is in charge.

** Robert Malm, Brand Competence Manager, Volvo Car Corporation. (A quiet yet intense guy who explained Volvo's move to integrate the emotional with the rational ... weave more of a marketing mindset into an engineering culture.)  http://volvocars.com

- "If you meet the expectations of women, you exceed the expectations of men." -- Marti Barletta (There was some conversation about whether or not this quote could be applied generally or related just to cars.  We tended to think it was pretty general.)

** Rusty Rueff, Executive Vice-President, Human Resources, Electronic Arts and Hank Stringer, Founder and Chief Talent Officer, Hire.com.  Co-authors of "Talent Force" which will be published soon by Financial Times Publishing Group. (An unlikely pair who stimulate and bring out the best in each other.  Rusty is intense and cool; Hank is mellow and warm.  Both are passionate about the need to spend more time and energy recruiting, developing and maintaining "talent."  Rusty states, "Talent is innovation."

- Jobs page of websites is a great place to glean corporate intel.

** Tom Wujec, Fellow and principal consultant at Alias and author of, "Return on Imagination: Realizing the Power of Ideas" and "5-Star Mind." (Tom is a bright, passionate guy bubbling over with ideas about how to make information more visual and accessible.  He travelled to Norway with his co-author and artist-wife Sandra.)

- Great questions:  What are the right problems? What are you doing with your imagination?  What do you see here?  How do we love children of all species and all the time? (McDunough)

** Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of Coffee Republic and author of "Anyone Can Do It, the system of making it happen." (A beautiful, tiny woman with incredible "you can do it" energy.)

- No's are part of the journey to "yes." (When looking for a banker for their first coffee bar, Sahar and her brother were turned down by 19 bankers before the 20th said "yes."  (Typical response:  "Why would tea-drinking Brits want to have a coffee bar?"

** Michael Melvill, first civilian astronaut, SpaceShipOne, VP & General Manager, Scaled Composites. (Michael brought us to tears and to our feet in a standing ovation with his David and Goliath story.  Michael travelled with his obviously beloved wife Sally.  Burt Rutan, the CEO of Scaled Composits is a legend in the civilian aviation world and designed the "feather" that allowed the spacecraft to reenter the atmosphere without burning up.)

* Follow your passion.  Michael and Sally built a plane from one of Burt Rutan's designs and flew it to California (from Indiana) to show it Rutan their handiwork.  He offered both of them jobs on the spot.

** Toshiyuki Kita, designer, Studio Kita, Japan (Perhaps the bravest presenter on the program, Toshiyuki works with Stokke, a Norwegian furniture maker, and showed us many of his designs, very carefully reading English from a prepared speech.  He also introduced the first version of a new chair design to be produced by Stokke.)

- Monkey Mountain Sofa - idea in 1967, produced in 1991.

** Joyce Wycoff, partner, ThinkSmart LLC, co-founder InnovationNetwork, author, "Mindmapping," "To Do ... Doing ... Done!" and "Innovation Training."  (My role was to wrap up the conference, help people integrate their learnings and give them a chance to think about how they were going to apply those learnings
when they returned to their "real worlds."

- You don't need lots of tools -- just a few very powerful ones such as metaphors, story, artifacts, visual thinking, criteria maps, and Wouldn't it be great if ... ?

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Editor's question:  Isn't it interesting that a country of 4.5 million people has a governmental unit devoted to innovation (Innovation Norway, a division of the Ministry of Trade and Industry) while in the US we have a governmental group which has just released a report but has not taken action to help businesses
implement innovation?

Comments

[Hans Henrik]

I wish I've been there....

Joyce - is it possible for you maybe to post your "nuggets" over at www.cph127.com?

All the best
Hans Henrik
cph127-pilot