John Seely Brown's wasn't groundbreaking or life-changing, but it was certainly interesting - if only because it was given by the person who oversaw so much during his Xerox PARC days.
He started his talk by using the fate of clipper ships as an example of path dependency - even with the advent of steamships, shipbuilders concentrated on building bigger clippers with more sails, oblivious to the fact that a paradigm shift in transportation was about to put them out of business. To JSB, innvoation is the only way out of the trap.
He touched upon the copy machine that started Xerox, one that IBM passed up because they felt it would never sell. Xerox proved IBM wrong, but not just based on technology alone - they also found a way to infiltrate organizations by offering the machine for free, and charging on a per-copy basis. Come to think of it, Google is employing a very similar strategy, riding the acceptance wave of its free products. But, back to the talk.
JSB discussed how PARC tried to foster innovation, from forming multidisciplinary teams to setting up long tables in their subsidized cafeteria to force people to sit close together. His definition of "innovation" was interesting too: "changing one's mental model", or "mobilizing somebody's action". To do that, PARCers used story telling and a technique that he called deep engagement: playing footage of some pre-recorded scenarios in front of executives, and asking them to come up with the next scenario. Interestingly, my coworker tried story telling once to sell a difficult concept to the project team (and it worked beautifully), and I've used footage of usability tests to engage others in coming up with a solution (worked pretty well, too).
JSB went on a couple of related tangents: explaining how Amazon invested a lot of effort into a platform that now allows them to build prototypes with a blazing speed, and highlighting emotional and communication intelligence as important traits that one needs to survive in today's fast-changing world. His most amusing story was an inside take on Steve Jobs. We all know that Apple was, hmmm, "inspired" by the work at PARC, but here's JSB's interpretation of what happened: Xerox bought a large stake in Apple early on, and Steve was given unfettered access to their research. Unfortunately, Xerox's CFO sold their interest in Apple three years later, not realizing that it takes time to productionalize ideas.
So, the moral of the story is, innovate all you want, share ideas, but be vary of smug bastards wearing turtlenecks!
