Innovation Killjoy

Here's a great list of the 100 lamest excuses for not innovating on the Heart of Innovation website.

If you need to innovate, but find yourself procrastinating, your excuse is on this list. While you may have all the "proof" you need to prove yourself right, being right doesn't necessarily increase your odds of innovating. So, take a look, note the ones that bug you, and find a way to go over, under, around, or through them.
1. I don't have the time.
2. I can't get the funding.
3. My boss will never go for it.
4. Were not in the kind of business likely to innovate.
5. I've got too much on my plate.
6. We won't be able to get it past legal.
7. I'll be punished if I fail.
8. I'm just not not the creative type.
9. I'm juggling way too many projects.
10. I'm too new around here.

The recommendation for how to go beyond these excuses sounds very Basadur-like or NextD:

HOW TO GO BEYOND THESE LAME EXCUSES
1. Make a list of your three most bothersome ones.
2. Turn each excuse into a question, beginning with the words "How can I?" or "How can we?" (For example, if your excuse is "That's R&D's job," you might ask "How can I make innovation myjob?" or "How can I help my team take more responsibility for innovating?"
3. Brainstorm each question -- alone and with your team.
4. DO something about it within the next 48 hours.

The whole list is here.

This article in the New York Times, "In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores," the difficulty in finding positive metrics to support the introduction of technology into the classroom is examined. At this juncture, technology may not be the lever in improving education scores that many were hoping. From a systems design standpoint, the root cause of declining or stagnant scores is most likely outside the tools of the classroom.

“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

Read the entire article here.