50 exercises to ignite your OSS innovation sessions

Every project starts with an idea… an idea that someone is excited enough to sponsor.

  1. But where are your ideas being generated from?
  2. How do they get cultivated and given time to grow?
  3. How do they get pitched? and How do they get heard?
  4. How are sponsors persuaded?
  5. How do they then get implemented?
  6. How do we amplify this cycle of innovation and implementation?

I’m fascinated by these questions in OSS for the reasons outlined in The OSS Call for Innovation.

If we look at the levels of innovation (to be honest, it’s probably more a continuum than bands / levels):

  1. Process Improvement
  2. Incremental Improvement (new integrations, feature enhancement, etc)
  3. Derivative Ideas (iPhone = internet + phone + music player)
  4. Quantum Innovation (Tablet computing, network virtualisation, cloud delivery models)
  5. Radical Innovations (transistors, cellular wireless networks, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory)

We have so many immensely clever people working in our industry and we’re collectively really good at the first two levels. Our typical mode of working – which could generally be considered fire-fighting (or dare I say it, Agile) – doesn’t provide the time and headspace to work on anything in the longer life-cycles of levels 3-5. These are the levels that can be more impactful, but it’s these levels where we need to carve out time specifically for innovation planning.

If you’re ever planning to conduct innovation fire-starter sessions, I really recommend reading Richard Brynteson’s, “50 Activities for Building Innovation.” As the title implies, it provides 50 (simple but powerful) exercises to help groups to generate ideas.

Please contact us if you’d like PAOSS to help facilitate your OSS idea firestarter or road-mapping sessions.

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