Win: The Innovator's DNA

Today, my interview of Clayton Christensen, one of the leading authors on innovation, goes live as the cover story of the November Personal Branding Magazine (click for sample).  In the interview, I questioned Clayton about the qualities of an innovator, how people can learn to be more innovative, and how they can demonstrate their innovative skills to others.

The Innovator's DNA is a really interesting book.  The three authors - Clayton Christensen Jeffrey Dyer, and Hal Gregersen - studied innovative leaders and surveyed thousands of executives to identify what makes a person truly innovative. 

They discovered it came down to five activities that innovators do: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Experimenting, and Networking.  They also found that innovative skill isn't purely a result of talent - instead innovators spend an average of 50% more time on those activities than non-innovative people!

This is very important info! A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the “leadership competency” of the future.

That's really discouraging if you don't think of yourself as naturally creative.  BUT, if you view creativity as a learned skill... suddenly the future is wide open!

So, if you want to learn to be more creative, here's a chance to get your hands on a great resource! This week, I'm giving away a copy of The Innovator's DNA to one lucky reader.

How can you win it?

Simple, all you have to do is give me one idea. I'll even tell you how to get it!

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to use the associations you think of with a Random Word to come up with "fresh ways to improve cell phones".

It takes only four super quick steps to be entered to win...

1. Get a Random Word.
   Use the generator below.  The word you'll get will be completely unrelated to mobile phones. You have to use one of the words that comes up.
2. Think about what comes to mind when see that word?
   Don't worry if it doesn't feel related to the problem!  That's the idea!  For example, if your Random Word is Cat, you might think about how your cat purrs when she's happy.
    
3. Then, use that association to come up with an idea to improve a cell phone.  For example, just like your cat purrs when she is happy, perhaps your cell phone could make a soothing background noise to let you know how the person you're talking to is feeling.
   
   Note: You can't just combine your random word with a cell phone to have an idea. For example, if your Random Word is "Wine"...
   
   • Creative Idea: A cell phone that checks the alcohol content on my breath and tells me whether I can legally drive according to the rules of my geographic location.
   • Lazy Answer: A cell phone that has wine in it.
   
   Don't worry if your idea is funny, crazy or silly. The whole point of this contest is to push our thinking on cell phones so that we come up with ideas beyond faster, smaller or better connectivity. Let your random word bring you somewhere completely different.
   
   
4. Write your fresh idea in the comments (with the random word that got you there) and you're done!

Now, get started!  Close your eyes and point at one of the Random Words in the list below. (All the words are hard. Just go with the first one you get.)

Adult Airplane Airport Album Apple Army Baby Backpack Balloon Banana Bank Barbecue Bathroom Bathtub Bed Bee Bible Bird Bomb Book Boss Bottle Bowl Box Boy Brain Bridge Butterfly Button Cappuccino Car Carpet Carrot Cave Chair Chess Chief Chisel Chocolates Church Circle Circus Clock Clown Coffee Coffee-shop Comet Compass Computer Crystal Cup Cycle Desk Diamond Dress Drill Drink Drum Earth Egg Electricity Elephant Eraser Explosive Fan Feather Festival Film Finger Fire Floodlight Flower Fork Freeway Fruit Fungus Game Garden Gas Gate Gemstone Gloves Grapes Guitar Hammer Hat Hieroglyph Highway Horoscope Horse Hose Ice Ice-cream Insect Jet fighter Junk Kaleidoscope Kitchen Knife Leather jacket Library Magnet Map Maze Meat Meteor Microscope Milk Milkshake Mist Money  Monster Mosquito Mouth Nail Navy Necklace Needle Onion PaintBrush Parachute Passport Pebble Pendulum Pepper Perfume Pillow Plane Planet Pocket Pool Post-office Potato Printer Prison Pyramid Radar Rainbow Record Restaurant Rifle Ring Robot Rock Rocket Roof Rope Saddle Salt Sandpaper Sandwich Satellite School Ship Shoes Shop Shower Signature Skeleton Slave Snail Solid Space Shuttle Spectrum Sphere Spiral Spoon Sports-car Spot Light Square Staircase Star Stomach Sun Sunglasses Sword Table Tapestry Telescope Television Thermometer Tiger Torch Torpedo Train Treadmill Triangle Tunnel Typewriter Umbrella Vacuum Vampire Videotape Vulture Web Wheelchair Window  

Then use that Random Word to come up with new ideas for cell phones and leave your answer in the comments.

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If you need some help starting your thinking, go to Do You Have Trouble Being Creative? for examples about using this technique.

If you'd like to see the fantastic ideas people entered in my last Random Word contest about how to improve cars, go here:

• Ways to Improve Cars - Ideas from the Random Word Contest (Part 1)
• Ways to Improve Cars - Ideas from the Random Word Contest (Part 2)

Comments

[chris]

Rifle. A cell phone app where you play essentially "duck hunt" by tapping on the part of the screen you want to shoot, and you shooot there. It eventually gets hard b/c of increasing speed and decreasing size of the targets.

[Pavel T]

Word: Onion

1. Onion consists of layers, you can remove them one by one.
Idea: removable parts of your phone.
--- Smart phones are large by definition (screen size, etc.). Very often it is not convenient.
However sometimes you need just PHONE, and this part could be small.
I think it should be possible to separate pure phone (as a small part) from whole cell phone body and use just phone separately.
--- Other version of this idea: ability to remove large screen and use physically smaller body (with limited functionality, probably) when you need.
--- Removable small GPS unit.
Let's say, GPS unit you could use with your big photo camera.
--- Not remove, but add.
Extra devices for specific needs.
Particularly, extra battery - why not to have an option to attach extra battery? DSLR photo cameras have such option.

2. Onion is Food.
Very specific food, actually: it's not recommended to keep other vegetables (like potato) close to onion - they will lose quality much faster.
Let's think about phone as a "potato" - could phone alert you if you are close to something dangerous?
BTW, dangerous doesn't necessarily mean something deadly, some alerts could be useful even when your are at home.
Let's say, you want to lose weight. You can carry with you small GPS unit disconnected from your phone (See idea #1 above). Each time when you are approaching refrigerator or place where you keep snacks, phone alerts you (rings from another room). First - you will get out of kitchen, and your craving for "guilty pleasure" gets disrupted. Second, if you really need to visit your refrigerator, extra trip from another room will contribute to your weight loosing idea.

3. Onion is very healthy, but (for some people) it is not pleasant food to eat.
Ability to measure blood pressure combined with reminder (could be extra attachment to the phone - see idea #1 above?).
Reminder to take medications according to the time.

[Valerie Keener]

Necklace. Would love to have a necklace designed to incorporate earbuds. They would be part of the design of a necklace, yet could be extended and inserted into ears when phone rings. La-ti-dah.

[Martha Hamilton]

Coffee - bad breath tester.

[MattJ]

Kitchen Knife: A cell phone that much like a "Swiss Army Knife", has accessories integrated into it.

[Sabera]

Word: Grapes

I thought of how juicy and sweet grapes are and how refreshing they can be when i eat them on a hot summer day. Grapes are also nutritios and are very high on an important atioxidant - reservatrol, which is cancer fighting! This work totally spoke to the foodie in me. Some ideas:

1. A bio-degradable phone, made of materials that fully decompose when broken apart.

2. Raw food / cancer fighting foods app: an app that tells tourists or busy professionals where they can get nutritious raw meals from. The app works much like a GPS, but is backed by some research on local restaurants that serve raw food (could even be a salad at panera), calculates the amount od antioxidants and nutrients etc. App users can then search, and then pick and choose which place to go to, based on each restaurant's raw / healthy food 'menu'.

Another version of this app - Cancer patients are on special diets that are very high on antioxidants. The app will provide info on places they can go to, to buy cancer-fighting food.

[Innovationfeeder.wordpress.com]

Word: Butterfly

How about a mobile that has added functionality for during the day but then literally "unzips" to reveal a slimmer mobile with limited functionality i.e. just call and text functions which is more slim fitting to go into your pocket for a night out on the town....

I WOULD LOVE THAT!

[Don Mathews]

Word: Guitar

Hmmm... at first thought, I should have randomly picked a different word. Oh well - let's see what I can do.

I know that guitarists frequently use a guitar tuner to tune their guitars. It would cool to see a cell phone double up as a guitar tuner. Since the cell phone already has a microphone, the musician wouldn't need to connect with a cord through a pick up element.

Thinking more, cell phones can already record audio. Why not make an app to transcribe the notes to sheet music. There are plenty of guitarists who don't read music - they just feel it.

Better yet, for those of us who don't play, nor read sheet music, we could take a picture of the music sheets. The cell phone could read it in and then play the music so we would know what the song is supposed to sound like.

That same technolgy could used to tranlate braille to visible words. That would be useless for the blind, but it would be very helpful for those who should be proof-reading braille signs. Do you know how pissed off the blind get when the word "Exit" is in a foreign language, or upside down? This is a real problem, and your cell phone could someday save a blind person from a misunderstanding.

[Nirvashnee Seetal]

Word: Baby

A cell phone that can be used as a baby monitor, especially when you travel (stay out) with baby alot and don't want to be carrying his/her usual monitor around (because there's usually so much to carry when you have a little baby to worry about).

[Kailee]

Just the type of iingsht we need to fire up the debate.