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.
Why You Need to Start Daydreaming More at Work
Here it is: definitive science proving that letting your mind wander at work should be considered productive — even if it causes you to miss the start of a meeting, or fail to hear your boss yelling your name from her office. From Inc.:
“According to research in the journal Psychological Science, mind-wandering spurs what neuroscientists call ‘creative incubation.’ When you’re stumped on a challenge, you need to engage your creative thinking. Picking up your smartphone and encountering a barrage of new information overwhelms your brain. But if you let your mind wander, it can subtly tackle the challenge by making connections you wouldn’t be able to when actively thinking about things.
Think about where and when you get those breakthrough ideas, such as in the shower or relaxing over a beer. There is a reason why so many big ideas have been hatched during idle times.”
The Idea Economy: How Is Your Industry Ripe for Disruption?
Innovation today sits squarely on the shoulders of speed, disruption, and scalability. With all of the moving parts that go into mastering enterprise innovation processes — like data analysis, market research, crowdsourced ideation, and so, so much more — are you prepared to do what it takes? More importantly, do you have the right tools in place to do it? From Hewlett-Packard:
“Today, the tools that enable disruption – things like cloud computing, mobile technology, big data analytics – are so easily accessible and affordable, they have given rise to a new class of entrepreneurs. And, these challengers of the status quo are revolutionizing entire industries at a pace and scale never seen before.
In the Idea Economy, no industry is immune to disruption. Whether in energy, healthcare, manufacturing or telecommunications, companies – be they start-ups or large enterprises – can only survive if they have both the vision and technological agility to respond to market opportunities and threats and quickly turn ideas into reality…
Time is arguably the biggest enemy any company faces today. While cloud, mobile and big data give you the ability to accelerate time to value, most organizations have been built with rigid, inflexible IT infrastructures that make it difficult, if not impossible, to implement innovation quickly.
And, for big companies, the scale and scope that was once their greatest advantage can now be their biggest liability, as more nimble players move quickly into their markets.”
Next Step, Innovate the Open Young Minds
Since the children will basically always be our future, innovation in education — as both a concept to be taught and a strategic practice to be used — just makes sense. But it’s easier said than done, which is why one Memphis-based organization developed an Innovation Boot Camp for students. From Innovation Excellence:
“No offense, but it is an almost insurmountable challenge to open the minds of career-track, socially-conditioned professionals to see the city through the lens of pure possibility. To remedy this business-centric application of innovation, we are making strides to take the Bootcamp to high schools, both public and private.
If we can teach Design Thinking to the emerging generation it will achieve many benefits, including: stopping the brain drain from the region, mixing multi-generational teams of volunteers working together to make the region a healthier and more vibrant community, seeing the region with eyes of potential, stimulating a culture renaissance, and, most important, teaching creativity and critical thinking to the generation who will inherit Memphis.
The impact of design thinking in education has two overarching, positive benefits: First, it insists upon a multi-disciplinary approach—design thinking demonstrates that bringing together seemingly disparate perspectives can be key to discovering effective solutions.”
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