TEI 006: Studies In Organizational and Open Innovation - with Researcher and Professor Karla Phlypo

Karla Phlypo is an avid dreamer, builder, artist, and scholar. She holds a Ph.D. combining research in social innovation, knowledge management, and decision science. Her background is in automotive product engineering. Although she has many interests, the common thread is contributing to a culture of sharing and innovation through collaboration.

Highlights from the discussion include:

• Karla’s innovation experiences began as a young girl when she dismantled her father’s lawnmower, without permission!
• “Appreciative Inquiry†is a tool for facilitating a group innovation session that focuses on positives (not problems) and understanding different perspectives (see short tutorial)
• Karla studied how people participate in innovation environments (open, crowdsourcing, and collaborative communities)
• Key contributors needed in innovation environments are solution providers that tend to be quiet (may not offer ideas until asked to do so), non-political, and boundary-less with a systems view
• Quirky (https://www.quirky.com/invent) is an interesting open community for inventing and influencing new product designs
• Organizational innovation is improved by knowledge managers who aid the flow of knowledge in an organization and identification of best practices
• “Hardy perennials†are not flowers, but problems that keep showing up in product efforts that need to be pruned
• Inspiration comes from many places. A GM engineer found inspiration by examining toy cars
• Idea management systems that collect suggestions for employees can destroy trust when they don’t understand how their ideas are used – they can be counter-productive when not managed properly
• Open innovation requires trust and coherence.
• Cob building, construction with mud and straw, is in Karla’s future.

Connect with Karla on her blog, Distilled Wisdom.

“I have no special talent, I am just passionately curious.†– Albert Einstein

Thank you for joining me again. I love discussing product development and learning from the successes and failures of product innovators. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product innovation professional by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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