Of course we don’t or we like to say we are not innovative.

The biggest failure today in pretty much every industry is failing to see the ability to innovate what we do.

And education is top on my hit list of places and process that have failed to even scratch the surface of innovative thinking.

The problem for educators today is that the system has become so rooted around architecture, space and time that the innovation we need is simply the thing of fantasy dreams.

Columbia makes cloths BUT they are also leaders in personal innovation, really.

Check out this video.

Cool Hunting Video Presents: Omni Heat Electric from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

If Columbia can be innovative with something as common as the boot, glove and coat what is stopping you from bringing innovation into your workplace?

You!

How do I let students know I am in the office even if I am not sitting in my office?

I could use an email, twitter, facebook but then I am faced with the problem a student is not tuned into the tech messaging network.

For under $5 I have come up with a great solution.

I have taken a welcome mat and placed it outside my door when I am in the office!

Simple, efficient and effective.

Sometimes old-school just works.

Too often when we think of innovation we are thinking technology or complication or huge investments of capital.

Innovation does not have to be expensive or complicated at all.

Just as I believe we are all creative I am also a believer in the idea that we are all innovative if we are in the right environment.

Soon to be are the three words you need to hang on.

At this moment the space I have moved my classes to is a big echoing box with a few desks for good measure.

Funny about the desks in my class, I only asked for chairs and the facilities crew brought desks for good measure.

The 1st thing my students said, “this room is different”.

The 2nd thing my students said, ” where is the projector”.

The 3rd thing my students said, “I don’t like the desks”.

I am teaching a media history, media ethics and public presentation course in this space.

What we do have is a great wifi connection and a lot of walls to stick paper on in this space.

I have never been one to go on about the space I teach in with my philosophy having been that it is the content and presentation that matter the most, I was wrong.

I think content, space and presentation all share an equal part in the mix of creating the best possible education experience.

Remember education is all about experience.

I am not sure how the space issue escaped me as I have been talking about moving classes all over the place for a long long time and event have put the idea of the coffee shop class out there.

But this room gets me well out of my comfort zone and presents a whole new canvas upon which to place my education/experience tools.

Take a look at this room day 1 and imagine what it might look like in 20 weeks if the construction process doesn’t start first!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why are our primary school classrooms so inviting and warm and the University classrooms or lecture halls so sterile?

Space Matters! Yet at some point we think the content or thought process is more important, it isn’t, when it is just another equal part of the equation.

There is a lot of innovation going on that we see and realize and even more going on that we don’t see.

The easy see is the blatant technology the iThis or iThat.

The more difficult innovation is the change in action or practice or application of ideas and concepts.

Take this speech by Howard Buffet.

I love the speech for the simple fact that it was delivered via Livestream video streaming.

I have been using Livestream to show the studio at DubaiEye while I am broadcasting for over a year and it is a dream to work with, easy and cheap. What Livestream allows is for any organization, professor, school, shop, place where something compelling is happening to be able to distribute that content!

Wow! Why aren’t more people using it?

That is more of the topic of Buffett’s speech.

It is great to talk and look at physical innovation but the real change and the real action comes from you and I doing things, small things but doing things.

We need to reorient ourselves to the fact that innovation rests in our hands by virtue that we have to start looking at the wild world of WEB2.0 or the new technology being tossed at us and figure out what we can do with it all.

We need to engage and remember that innovation is small and cumulative and not really the few great iThings we see.

Innovation does rest with us and I think we have been blinded by the show and now need to get back into the game, ready or not.

One of the problems of course is people/investors don’t know where to find the ideas.

Another problem is that people with ideas don’t know where to find investors.

And then of course the modern investor today is firmly rooted int he school of short-term return on investment and all sorts of other business complexities.

What if  business creaated an environment for ideas to be explored, even those ideas that there is no clear market for yet?

Crazy talk you are probably saying.

Huggies Diapers has taken this very crazy talk and created nothing short of an idea farm called the MomInspired Grant Program!

And it is such a simple idea!

The Huggies® MomInspired™ Grant Program accepts grant proposals for thoroughly considered product ideas and small businesses that nurture the relationship between mother and child. Eligible applicants are women who are 21 years of age or older and currently reside in the United States. Applicants with business partners are welcome to submit grant proposals as long as those business partners meet the above criteria as well.

Sure this could be called a variation of the micro finance idea, maybe with a twist.

What I find intriguing is that this program has been pulled together around the theme of Mom’s and Children first.

I also wonder why other businesses, like Huggies, have never thought of ways to tap into their tribes/communities of flowers in a manner that is beyond the use or consumption of the product they sell.

Check out the examples.

I like these two!

Lynette Mattke :: PicPocket Books

Keeping your toddler entertained while on the go can call for toys, books and any number of other gadgets, which means one thing – more weight you have to carry. Harnessing the convenience of today’s portable devices, mother of 3 and aspiring entrepreneur Lynette Mattke is offering parents the ability to shed some of this weight while out-and-about by bringing children’s books to iTunes.

PicPocket Books is being further developed and is scoped to add new features soon

Q. Has your design been successful and what are your plans for the future?

A. I believe so. Marketing through social networks and a group I helped cofound called MomsWithApps, which supports app developers who are also parents, we’ve released a total of about 30 applications. Currently, I am further developing PicPocket Books by adding new features, and am hoping to hire additional programmers. As for the future, I plan on publishing 50 picture book apps per year, possibly partnering with a publishing house to offer their full line of books, and expanding our marketing efforts.

Q.What inspired your Huggies® MomInspired™ award-winning design?

A. Basically, I wanted to make quality picture books available to children by using the iTunes platform. Partially because of the convenience it offers parents on the go, but also because of the interactive and educational elements.

And this one!

Q. Has your design been successful and what are your plans for the future?

A. We hear every week from moms and nurses using Buzzy! Initially there were mostly “good shot” stories, but now people are using Buzzy and the distraction cards for first aid at home, too. MMJ Labs, our company, has grown by at least 20% a month since we launched in May of 2009. Buzzy has been adopted by 4 hospitals and is on trial in another 80 around the country. Looking to the future, we’d like to increase our presence in pharmacies and hospitals, and offer personal pain products for home splinter, scrape, and sting first aid. Eventually I’d like to hire a new CEO so that I can continue researching the body’s pain relief systems.

Q.What inspired your Huggies® MomInspired™ award-winning design?

A.When my kids got shots I’d use the numbing creams or distraction toys research supports. Consequently, they were all really good shot takers until one person refused to wait and told my son his shots would really hurt. He developed a huge phobia, and I developed a passion to find pain relief moms could use quickly without delaying medical procedures. Combining a variety of accepted medical theories I created Buzzy, a small plastic bee that uses vibration and cooling to block sharp pain. It works the same way putting a burned finger under cold water instantly makes burns feel better.

Hat off to Huggies for creating the Idea farm.

Wouldn’t it be great if more business jumped into the ring in their particular domain of interest?

There is a lot of noise out there today and too much of it revolves around innovation that is not innovation at all.

Mark Hurst of Good Experience spends a lot of time looking at the experience we have in a retail and even education environment and has tapped into 3 examples of innovation on the cutting edge.

• Sal Khan runs the world’s biggest school, and it’s completely free. The Khan Academyis a collection of 1,600 instructional videos, all posted on YouTube, all designed, illustrated, and narrated by Sal himself. Anyone with an Internet connection can learn math – from “one plus one” all the way through advanced calculus – or various topics within biology, history, and finance – just from watching Sal’s videos.

• The Gregory Brothers are creating hit music in a brand new way, by auto-tuning popular news clips they find on YouTube. Their Auto Tune The News project recently spawned two songs that made it onto the pop charts - Double Rainbow and Bed Intruder.

• Louise Sacco helps run a Boston museum spotlighting “bad art” - called, yes, theMuseum Of Bad Art. Sacco and her fellow curators pursue a mission of “bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences.”

Only very few people have the stomach for innovation, the speed, time and risk involved seem to weed out the leaders from the followers.

What we need in our University environment today are pockets of encouraged education innovation where those who have the stomach for it can cut lose and make things happen, or not.

Think about it for a minute, we want people to take risks, create the next best thing, work as teams and WOW the population.

And we learn this where? School.

Sure we have IB schools that claim to do this BUT every IB school I have been to talks a good game BUT is not practicing what the preach! Sorry IB people but the sad reality is if you are going to teach IB you have to be IB and all I see is the old system with a new coat of paint.

Other models exist but for the most part they do the same old thing 8-3, lunch, homework… repeat!

Sure our schools have the elements to create the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs BUT the problem is there is a reality detachment and the biggest piece of this is TIME!

Change happens in real time not in the slow motion that education acculturates us to!

You have 20 weeks to make magic in a school! The real world is have it on my desk in 3 days!

School does not teach us how to manage a team, my own school for example, is eliminating conflict resolution from the curriculum as we move forward, but is the management of people not fundamental to the new social economy?

We are living a social experiment BUT do we really know how to socialize?

So, here we are in search of the next best thing and the cards are stacked against us as we wrestle with imperfect inputs to the system!

Is it any wonder that the most innovative ideas emerge from those people or groups who work outside the system?

Maybe that is what we need from our education, a model that is decidedly outside the norm. We need to seed the next best thing and so far all I see is the field being plowed over, again and again!

Just a little morning rant!

Business schools do not talk to design schools who do not talk to education schools who do not talk to IT schools and nobody is talking to the cooking schools.

Well, if the core elements of our education system are not relating to each other what chance do you and I have when we leave the ivory tower?

I try to keep up with Tom Peters (and others see the blog-roll on his site for a start) to be grounded in business think, TED to see how the divergent converge and I think it is working.

What we really need to remember is trust in ourselves, we never trust we have anything figured out.

Tom Peters talks about a few people who made trust and circumstance work for them, give it a watch it is very good!

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what is stopping you from starting that thing?

Give the book a glance.

I think ‘The Road’ might be one of the most personally instructive (by way of reminding me what I have) book’s I have picked up in a long time.

I had not followed this book as an Oprah selection, I just happened upon it and it could not have been a more fitting read to bring in the New Year.

What is 2010 going to be about?

Hope, Innovation, Using what you have, Conversation, Love, Trust, Change, Challenge, New Reality…

And what is  ‘the Road’ about, well all of the above!

Sure the context of ‘The Road’ and my 2010 are a bit different, but the goals are really very similar.

What are my goals?

To make sense of the changing environment and take advantage of the opportunity presented to make the environment, the greater living environment both physical and psychological, better for as many people as possible. I think the 1st step is making practical education available to all who want it. Education in a new way!

Get a taste of the movie made from the book, I think it frames the ideas above. Everything needs to be re-thought!

Watch the movie trailer on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So what do we need in 2010?

Hope, Innovation, Using what you have, Conversation, Love, Trust, Change, Challenge, New Reality… and you and I know what we need to do and actually we know how to do it.

So start and don’t be afraid!

When you think it impossible to do what we know needs to be done read ‘The Road’ or watch the movie as many times as it takes for you to just get on with things!

Most of us have been using some variation of the slide projector/asetate presentation format all our lives.

But you know what? We now live  in a whiteboard era. Can you imagine using a chalkboard?

Yet we still use the pimped up slide method of presentation.

Today I removed PowerPoint from my toolbar!

I am a PREZI convert. Check out this demo!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I filled a whiteboard with ideas for a new journalism course called SMART-journalism and now I am elaborating it in PREZI to present, here is where I have gotten to.

The point is simple, why present in snapshots when you can do it as you think on a canvas of the whole?