How do you and your team innovate on yet another Zoom or MS Teams meeting?

Everybody is talking about innovation these days, it has almost become a cliche, maybe some people are suffering from innovation fatigue. And then of course there’s the added constraint of the new workplace rules about mitigating the spread of COVID. Back in the day we all used to pile into a room and jump around shouting at each other, we fed off each other’s energy, we brainstormed, we blueskied, we intercommunicated. But it seems like, for the moment anyway, creating those kinds of collaborative environments IRL (In Real Life) are a thing of the past. So we have to find new ways of providing that community where people feel inspired to come up with new ideas. We have to help people feel like they’re part of an ecosystem where new ideas are welcomed. So how do we drive a culture of innovation using MS Teams or Zoom, Google Meet or even (seems old-school now) Skype?

Culturally we’ve been led to believe that creativity is about producing something decorative – a rock band in a jam, a painter in a field of poppies, a ballerina being a swan.

Socrates said that the route to wisdom is though wonder. Picasso said ‘learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist’. And these guys know what they’re talking about.

In her book, Natalie Dixon describes creativity as ‘the engine for innovation’, and creativity as ‘the ability to toggle between wonder and rigor’. I mean wow. Just wow. So improvisation or randomness coupled with the order and structure of knowing the theory, having the experience, doing the research – that’s where innovation happens.

So how can technology help you to create wonder which is about imagining, pausing, dreaming, being curious, while at the same time constraining the wonder, giving it an actionable framework, and making it strategic. How can the hardware in your office talk to the software in the computers to allow people to feel comfortable enough to embrace wonder, while providing the mechanisms to capture the ideas, assign ownership of the actions and verify the outcomes of the meeting?

Find out about Audio Visual Innovation to learn more about creating innovation on Zoom meetings.

If you want to talk to someone who knows a lot about the hardware and software that can help you connect your various technologies together, to your people and to your building drop a note to Stephen: stephen.lyons@hereworks.ie