Today, I attended Tom Kelley's keynote at Rochester's "Eyes on the Future" economic development summit. While I'm not sure why it was called an economic summit--can you really have a summit with one speaker and a bunch of booths from banks and recruiters--the keynote was great. Kelley is the GM of IDEO, a design and development firm that has been involved with creating many innovative products.
He describes "The Ten Faces of Innovation:
The Ten Faces described
- The Anthropologist
- The Experimenter
- The Cross-Pollinator
- The Hurdler
- The Collaborator
- The Director
- The Experience Architect
- The Set Designer
- The Storyteller
- The Caregiver
As I look through this list, i think back to my career. In 1985-1990, I conducted ethnographic studies of people at Xerox in order to develop better products (#1). At Element K, I was always trying to improve processes and not be tied to a specific tool (#2). And so on.
I was doing so many of these things before they were even defined. So where does that leave me? An I am innovator? Why couldn't I leverage any of my experiences into fulfilling work?
Sometimes I think I was always just a little bit ahead of my time. Or maybe I was too lazy to take advantage of the situation and make it happen. Certainly something to think about.
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