Air-cover: Innovation's secret ingredient

Bill Fischer has written about how innovation can flourish in organizations (see his latest book The Idea Hunter (co-authored with Andy Boynton),Jossey-Bass, 2011). You need a great team that can work freely. That is a necessity. But, what he finds as more important is to protect this team from the day to day problems and the usual business related stress and strains. Someone with enough authority, within the organization, can do this. Such a person would need to be visionary enough to understand what's needed, what's possible, etc. and have faith in the team. Usually, such person will be a hard nosed businessman, but needs to have this head in the cloud kind of imaginative bent of the mind too. Mr. Fischer provides many examples of this collaboration over time. Steve Jobs succeeded, repeatedly, in nurturing such innovation. May be, this is a necessary combination to get innovative products/ services generated in an organization!


Air-cover: Innovation's secret ingredient - Forbes:

Observations about Academia

I met a principal of an engineering college in Hyderabad. We got to talking. The topic turned to evaluation of faculty members. I have several posts on how, in the present way of administering things, you cannot reward good performance of teachers. Having worked in industry for a long time, rewarding performance is something routine and one of the best tool to encourage someone to give his/her best. I discovered that is not possible here, how do you provide positive reinforcement  to some one doing well!


Having listened through a lot of presentations, I was a little surprised how performance issues are never discussed in such gatherings. Performance issues, particularly, teaching performance need to be evaluated and really good teachers need to be encouraged. Looks like this issues is an aversion universally. I have been following up on "lecture capture" for sometime now. One of the biggest barrier seems to be the aversion of teachers to appear in such lecture capture sessions.The resistance coming from the fact that the video may be used for evaluation. Student evaluation, often is not usable. Then what do you use for evaluation. Research performance and other aspects may not tell you anything about the teaching capabilities.


There is another side to teaching capabilities, comments on that later.

Another Seminar and Some Observations About Academia

I was at a place named Sirhind in Punjab on 16 th. and 17th Dec. There was a seminar about the role of regulatory bodies in higher education. That is a significant issue. I presented a paper on " Technological Changes Impacting Teaching-learning processes". This talked about some significant changes happening in technology related to education. To me, the most significant thing is the changes now possible with text books.


From the time text books were created as printed material, since the time of Gutenberg, text books have been quite static.By the time it is published and start to get used in classrooms, the material is already behind times. One of the criticisms about text books have been that text books are out of date compared to what is happening in industry. Even when newer editions come out, they take 2/3 years and thus never in sync. If you create a ebook now, it is possible to be absolutely current. Even if the text book were to be updated, it can be done very frequently and distributed easily.


Text books can be customized for a course being run on different colleges, different course and for different instructors. A student can add material to it and customize it further. It can be updated as he learns, researches the material, the book can be a living document. For professional courses this can keep being updated through the students' working life too!


Would it not be nice if the book could keep updating itself!


Comments on Academia remains reserved for the next post, hopefully in a couple of days!