SwampFox

Yale gets InnoVenture. Sparks will fly!

Submitted by: John Warner on Nov 18, 2007 at 4:33 pm Tagged with: Entrepreneur, Innovation, InnoVenture, Southeast, swamp fox Source: Swamp Fox

We're about to ramp up the marketing of InnoVenture 2008. Our goal is to get a very diverse group of talented people into a room, create ways for them to intersect, and "Sparks will fly!"

Recently I read this blog entry from YaleGlobal: Cosmopolitan Masala: Diversity Enriches Us All. They make several interesting observations I noted.

The biggest economic benefit of diversity is that it stimulates new ideas, which are the source of most economic growth.

I believe this in the marrow of my bones. Many organizations in the southeast have cultures that place a premium on execution. That's important. Too often the leadership in these organizations stays in place 20 or 30 years. This helps them to reduce the variably that allows them to execute consistently. But without a constant influx of new ideas, any system will age and ultimately die, which is precisely what has happened to too may companies here. We have to change the paradigm of diversity from being something we do to include the other guy to something that is essential to getting the best solutions to achieve our objective.

The exceptional individuals who come up with brilliant new ideas often are immigrants. Instead of following the conventional wisdom, immigrants tend to have a different point of view and notice new details.

Those of you who were at InnoVenture 2006 heard John Sibley Butler from IC2 at the University of Texas say exactly this. This is as true for immigrants into an organization, as it is for immigrants into a community. Dr. Butler pointed out that immigrants tend to be much more entrepreneurial than the population as a whole because they are outside the current power structure and so they have to be entrepreneurial.

What really got my attention was this.

Most innovations nowadays come not from individuals, but from groups of talented people sparking off each other.

There you go. Yale gets InnoVenture.

Sparks will fly!