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I have been researching innovation for awhile now. Here's a video taken at UNC of me discussing what exactly is innovation. It's even on YouTube, because UNC has its own channel. Thanks to Gary Marchionini for making this possible!
More wisdom from Clayton! I have been telling colleagues for several years that benchmarking can only get you so far, that looking to see what others do and then trying to do it that way, gets you close to the level of another organization, but it doesn't mean that you are providing excellent service. It seems to me that benchmarking is a way to begin to improve a service that has been subpar. It certainly doesn't mean that you are innovating! Clayton Christensen writes that using the past as a predictor for future success (which is what benchmarking hopes for), only works when future conditions match past conditions. Now, given what we know about the pace of change, how often do you suppose this is true?? And how often are the conditions at your library likely to be in the future what the conditions were in the past for the library you are imitating?
I have been reading a lot about various innovation theories. Right now, I a reading:
Christensen,
Clayton M., Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth, Seeing What’s Next: Using
the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, Boston, MA: Harvard
Business School Press, 2004.
Christensen is fast becoming my favorite writer on innovation. He understands economic theory, brings it into his writing, and Christensen is creating theories about innovation by studying attributes of successful innovators, and determining when those attributes can be applied in other industries: when will a strategy succeed in creating innovation?
One theory that is making me think about how libraries can restructure themselves to promote innovation is RPV:
“The resources, processes, and values (RPV) theory explains why existing companies tend to have such difficulty grappling with disruptive innovations. The RPV theory holds that resources (what a firm has), processes (how a firm does its work), and values (what a firm wants to do) define an organization’s strengths as well as its weaknesses and blind spots.”
If organizations decide not to pursue disruptive innovative ideas because their values are set in another direction, and thus they use their resources to incrementally innovate, than perhaps library directors should take a harder look at any disruptive innovation that comes their way! Libraries are at risk of becoming commodities. Disruptive innovation is occurring outside our walls (Wikipedia, for example) and we often fight against these ideas, rather than leverage them for the good of our patrons and the long term survival of the library.
NYU profs Chang and Dhar studied blog posts and number of MySpace friends and how these impacted album sales. They found a positive correlation between the two! There isn't a lot of research showing that social networking really does impact behavior, so this really caught my eye. Especially since I have been blogging and encouraging librarians to market their services in Twitter and Facebook. Take a look at the report and see for yourself: social networking does matter.
Link: Archive@NYU: Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales.
Our findings are as follows: (a) the volume of blog posts about an album is positively correlated with future sales, (b) greater increases in an artist’s Myspace friends week over week have a weaker correlation to higher future sales, (c) traditional factors are still relevant – albums released by major labels and albums with a number of reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone also tended to have higher future sales. More generally, the study provides some preliminary answers for marketing managers interested in assessing the relative importance of the burgeoning number of “Web 2.0” information metrics that are becoming available on the Internet, and how looking at interactions among them could provide predictive value beyond viewing them in isolation. The study also provides a framework for thinking about when user-generated content influences decision making.
For the elections, Google and Twitter are collaborating. Have you seen this? It has election results, google map, and on top of the map, comments from Twitter -- showing the location of the author. Very cool! Can you imagine doing something like this for your campus?! I've heard of GIS librarians doing mashups, but this really takes it up a notch.
