Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Are You Looking in the Right Place for Innovators?
Unfortunately, not everyone subscribes to the idea that innovative ideas can be found in all corners of a company or industry. But time and time again, it’s proven that inspiration comes from even the most unlikely of places — and often, where you’d never think to look at all. From Innovation Excellence:
“If you want innovation you need innovators. Innovators are people who can imagine and bring into existence what has not previously existed. So where are you going to find them and should you be looking for a particular age demographic?
Many people confuse innovation with technological innovation. If you conflate the two you run two big risks – you won’t be looking for the right people and you won’t be looking in the right place. Why? You’re more likely to assume innovators will be young as the new generation will be more technologically savvy. Second you’ll probably miss numerous opportunities to innovate because you won’t recognize breakthroughs as innovations and you won’t see how they might apply to what you’re doing.
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Late Again? Blame Your Brain
Finally — research showing that repeat tardiness is not just the byproduct of a suspiciously faulty alarm or late-night Netflix marathon! As it happens, being chronically late is actually part of the average human’s inability to accurately assess timing. But never fear; you can, in fact, retrain your brain to be more respectful of the clock. From Inc.:
“Researchers have estimated that chronically late employees cost the economy billions of dollars. If that’s not reason enough to encourage your workers to get to their meetings on time, extreme agitation triggered by other people’s tardiness probably is.
While it’s hard not to get offended by someone’s disregard for a set schedule, psychologists say there’s hardly any reason to take it personally. Mostly people are late simply because humans are terrible at predicting how long tasks will take them.
On average, people underestimate project completion times by as much as 40 percent, Roger Buehler, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, told the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, since this flaw is practically ingrained in our DNA, tardiness is one of the most difficult habits to break. But experts have come up with several techniques for improving the ability to better estimate a task’s length of time.”
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4 Ways to be More Innovative at Work
Truly, “innovation” is one of the business world’s most popular mots du jour. But with all the focus on making entire companies, products, services, and industries more innovative, it’s easy to forget to start small — specifically, with yourself. From Mashable:
“Ownership is becoming an antiquated concept, replaced by the shared economy. Companies like Zipcar, Netflix, Songza, Rent the Runway, and Dropbox have smashed ownership into oblivion. This “access” mode of thinking should apply to your business assets and resources, too. Rather than thinking about what assets you own, consider what assets you can access.
Suddenly, your world just explodes! Is there someone out there with distribution, audience, or resources you could utilize?”
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The post Fun Friday Links: The Right Places to Find Innovators, Tricking Your Brain into Timeliness, and Being Innovative at Work appeared first on via @Mindjet's Conspire #ideasquad.