This is my talk at 1st NEGMA conference. I talked about innovation and creativity. Most of the content is borrowed from Innovators Way: Essential Practicies for Successful Innovation by Denning, Petter J.

1. Innovation & Creativity
By Mohamed F. Ahmed, PhD
Program Manager @ Microsoft

2. CREATIVITY

3. INNOVATION

4. INVENTION/CREATIVITY IS NOT ENOUGH

5. Rethinking How We Define Innovation
• The typical definition of innovation
– Inventing something novel, introducing new
ideas, making changes, or bucking traditions.
• What’s Innovation?
– Innovation is the adoption of new practice in a
community
• What’s invention?
– The creation of new ideas, artifacts,
processes, or methods, aka Creativity.

6. Inventions become innovations only
when they are adopted into practices
Innovation = Adoption

7. Innovation & Creativity are Related But
Different
Possibility
An opportunity
In a breakdown
Offer
for adoption
Practice of innovation
Practice of invention
Proposal
for consideration
Adoption
by community

9. Community
• The community is the set of people who adopt
the new practice
• Aspects of adoption relative to the community
– Fit
• The value of the new practice must exceed the cost of
the sacrifice they must make to have it.
– Size
• Vast majority of innovations happen in small groups
– Degree of change
• Sustaining innovation is usually a winning strategy if
have to start small.

10. Practices, Performance, and Skills
• Practice has four senses:
–
–
–
–
A customary way or pattern of behavior
Exercise of a profession or discipline
Development of a skill by repetition
Name of a space of human interactions
• To achieve a change of practice in a community
means:
– Change individual practices
– Integrate new practices into existing ones
– Change must be consistent with historical
concerns

11. Practices, Performance, and Skills
• Three levels of performance at innovating:
– Novice: act in accordance with one’s
understanding of the rules and steps of
innnovation processes
– Skillful: act from embodied skills in the key areas
coverd by the eight practices
– Masterful: act from an embodiment so deep that
their actions seem intuitive and unique as them
mobilize entire communities to think believe, and
value differently.

12. Practices, Performance, and Skills
• A skill is an individual ability to capability to
perform a practice acquire or trained by
repetition.
– It often carries the connotation of capabilities
that are relatively easily transferred from one
domain to another.

13. Adoption
• Adoption comes at three stages:
– Considering it
– Adopting it for the first time
– Sustaining it over a period of time

14. Success of Innovators
Domain
expertise
ADOPTION
Opportunities
Social
interaction

15. EIGHT PRACTICES OF INNOVATION

16. Structure of the Innovation Practices
The main work of
invention
• Sensing
• Envisioning
The main work of
adoption
• Offering
• Adopting
• Sustaining
The environment for
the other practices
• Executing
• Leading
• Embodying

17. Every innovation begins
with a new possibility.
Who cannot find
possibilities can not
innovate. Finding worthy
possibilities turns out to
be a challenge for many
people
1. SENSING

18. Sensing
• The sensing practice aims to generate new
possibilities for innovation.
• Four Strategies
– Source Checking
– Learning with Inquiry
– Speculating
– Sensing

19. Sensing
• Something is bothering you. Or you feel that
there is an opportunity to improve and radically
change.
Possibility
THINKING
FEELING
Sense
Articulate
Notice
Attend-hold

20. All things are created twice.
There’s a mental or first
creation, and a physical or
second creation
--Stephen Covey
If you can harness imagination
and the principles of a well-told
story, then you get people rising
to their feet amid thunderous
applause instead of yawning
and ignoring you.
--Rober McKey
2. ENVISIONING

21. Envisioning
• Vision is not enough and your audience can be easily get
disconnected from it.
• You need an envisioning story, which provokes three
reactions in listeners:
– They understand the future outcome clearly.
– They care about this outcome
– They see its value
• It should inspire your audience
– To believe that there is a better future, well worth
sacrificing what they do to gain it.
– To see that a blind spot has kept them from seeing this
future sooner
– To trust in your ability and commitment to make it happen
– To ask for more conversation about this future

22. Envisioning :: Story Architecture
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Where will you take us?
Why are we going?
How do we get there?
What’s in it for us?
What’s in it for me?
What do you want from me?
Why should I trust you?

23. 3. OFFERING

24. Offering
• An offer is not an event.
• It is a process.
• Offers evolve over time in conversations with many
people
• Anatomy of an Offer
– Readiness, the innovator’s preparation and
willingness to make an offer
– The offer act, the actual steps and interactions of the
offer
– Listener response, the assessments made by
listeners that affect their willingness to commit
– Anticipating yes, the steps needed to achieve the
outcome and manage the risks.

25. The resistance to change
exhibited by social systems is
much more nearly a form of
“dynamic conservatism” – a
tendency to fight to remain the
same.
-- Donald Schon
4. ADOPTING

26. Adoption
• Adoption occurs three times in every
innovation: in the mind, in the hand, and in
the body
• Anatomy of Adoption
– Understand the network
– Listen to and interact with the network
– Blend around resistance
– Recruit supporters and allies
– Learn what the network values.

27. Leadership is the wise use
of power. Power is the
capacity to translate
intention into reality and
sustain it.
-- Warren Bennis
To live for some future
goal is shallow. It’s the
sides of the mountain that
susstain life, not the top.
--Robert Pirsig
5. SUSTAINING

28. Sustaining
• It is about keeping the innovation relevant and useful after
adoption.
• You have to setup and provide and environment of your
innovation.
• Elements of Environment of an Innovation
– Structure
– Conceptual framework
– Technology
– Incentives
– Standard Practices
– Possibilities
– Breakdowns
– Moods

29. Management is not about making
decisions; it is about initiating and
guiding conversations.
-Fernando Flores
6. EXECUTING

30. Executing
• execution refers to the actions that convert
the possibility offered into a promise
delivered.
• No innovation can succeed unless members
of the target community trust the innovator's
ability to execute and deliver the promise.

31. Anatomy of Execution
1. Setting context and generating possibilities
2. Managing conversations for action
3. Managing the network of conversations to
coordinate fulfillment and deal with changes
and breakdowns
4. Managing breakdowns, changes, and
dissatisfaction

32. Leadership is the art of
getting someone else to
do something you want
done because he wants to
do it.
-Dwight Eisenhower
7. LEADING

33. Leading
• Leading is the skill of initiating possibility and
action with others through conversations that
evoke their commitment to a new future.

34. Anatomy of Leading
Innovation leadership relies on these seven principles:
1. Leaders look for opportunities to take care and produce
value.
2. Leaders engage others with new narratives for the future.
3. Leaders make offers, take stands for their offers, and
engage with disagreement and resistance to their offers.
4. Leaders inspire followers to make and sustain
commitments; in so doing they build power for themselves
and others.
5. Leaders initiate actions and conversations, accept the
risks, and learn from the consequences.
6. Leaders build a presence, a voice, and identity to have
their offers heard and accepted.
7. Leaders are continually learning and sharpening their own
skills.

35. 8. EMBODYING

36. Embodying
• When the community embody your
innovation, they will speak differently, act
differently, feel differently, and even see the
world differently.
• The innovator has to manage and maintain
coherence among the three dimensions of
every practice: language, body, and moodsemotions.

37. Sensing
Embodying
Envisioning
Leading
Offering
Executing
Adopting
Sustaining

38. Innovation & Creativity
By Mohamed F. Ahmed, PhD
Program Manager @ Microsoft
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