Category Archives: Innovation

The Practice of Practicing

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by Rebecca Cochran

What did you practice today?

Practicing isn’t just for musicians. Or ballerinas. Or Olympic athletes.

practiceWe all need to practice in order to improve. In order to learn. In order to ingrain strong habits within ourselves.

Practice enables us to do things. Even simple things like cooking. Or gardening. Or blogging. Practice also enables us to do things well.

The act of regular practice helps us to get better at innovating within our companies. According to The Innovator’s DNA, practicing innovation skills such as questioning, observing, networking, experimenting and associating, can enable us to effect change within our organizations.

Practice doesn’t have to be complicated or even time-consuming. Any of us can do it. The key to accomplishing anything is to establish a practice routine. Your routine may be weekly, semi-weekly, daily or whatever. The important thing is to carve out time on your calendar to engage in regular practice of the activities or skills that are important to you.

I think we all need to practice practicing. Or, as Aristotle so adeptly put it, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

What constitutes your practice routine? I’d love to hear what works for you.

Design & Thinking Documentary Redux

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Design & Thinking at the Rialto, Raleigh

by Rebecca Cochran

Last evening, I had the pleasure of a second viewing of the documentary, Design & Thinking. My initial viewing of the film was nearly a year ago at the North Carolina screening premiere in Greensboro. Last night’s screening was arranged through the Raleigh chapter of AIGA. The excellent opening remarks were given by David Burney, CEO of New Kind and former VP at Red Hat.

The film is very well done with an energizing soundtrack and inspiring interviews with designers from a variety of disciplines. I particularly enjoyed the spots featuring writer and former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, Roger Martin, IDEO’s David Kelley and Udaya Patnaik of Jump Associates. Each is a clear communicator and truly passionate about design thinking. I included excerpts from them and many others in my 2012 post on the film.

Despite some recent nay-sayers who’ve suggested that design thinking may already be a thing of the past, my take is this. It doesn’t matter what term we use (if we use one at all). What does matter is that each and every one of us, no matter what our role in business, can and should learn to be designers. In fact, we should become design do-ers. Whether we’re designing things or designing services, rapid prototyping and failing early and cheaply are the best ways to discover the customer’s true needs. Or, as Innosight’s Clayton Christensen has been reminding us for decades, how to determine the customer’s job to be done.

Coco and Igor As Innovators

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by Rebecca Cochran

I just returned from a private* screening of “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky,” the Jan Kounen film which closed the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and is now showing in U.S. theaters. Beautifully filmed and acted, the film spoke to me on multiple levels. As a serious classical musician, lover of Stravinsky’s music and passionate devotee of French culture, Kounen had me from the downbeat.

And, what a downbeat it was! The opening scene depicts the tension leading up to the 1913 world premiere of Diaghilev’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, set to music by Stravinsky, at Le Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The unsuspecting audience, so accustomed to ballets like Swan Lake and others from the late-Romantic Russian repertoire, riots. The dancers and orchestra musicians are barely able to continue performing. The entire scene is wildly disruptive.

Interestingly, Coco Chanel is in the audience and she seems to be one of the few listeners who understands Stravinsky’s music. The complicated love story (and aren’t all French love stories complicated?) picks up again in 1920, once she and Stravinsky have each made names for themselves in Paris.

I was struck by the fact that Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky were immediately simpatico, perhaps because they were both innovators. He, a Russian composer then living in Paris, was writing music with uneasy, syncopated rhythms and disruptive harmonies new to the world’s ears. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel turned the women’s fashion world upside down, designing clothing that was not only chic, but thankfully, comfortably corset-less.

Mark Bernstein, CEO of the Palo Alto Research Center, defines innovation as “a valuable change, unconstrained by the way things are.” If his definition is accurate, then Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel should take their places at the top of a list of early 20th century innovators. Although we usually see the term “innovation” attributed to late 20th century corporations such as Procter & Gamble and Apple, let’s not forget some of the world’s earlier innovators who helped to change the way we think.

Which other early 20th century innovators would you add to this list?

* My screening was private only by accident. Pity no one else showed up to enjoy this incredibly insightful film with me.

This post was originally published in August, 2010