Yesterday afternoon, I visited the Fab Lab at Century College in Minnesota. A Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is a small-scale workshop with an array of computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, and is the brainchild of MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld. The facility, faculty and institutional support for the initiative is amazing. Loaded with 3D printers, laser cutters, and other rapid prototyping and small-scale fabrication tools, allows uses to make “almost anything.”

My take on Fab Labs is that they provide school students and other members of the community with valuable expertise and resources to transform their creative ideas into tangible products … and, hopefully, meaningful outcomes and innovations. Since the Fab Labs blend social and fabrication technologies, I feel that school systems should consider either investing in the concept for every school, or collaborate actively with an institution that already has a Fab Lab.

Last November, I also had the privilege of visiting the Fab Lab hosted by the Waag Society in Amsterdam (the video in this link is worth watching). A couple of the key differences is that this Fab Lab is open to the public (at a cost), but is also integrated with the other services provided by the Waag Society (i.e., Creative Learning Lab, incubators) and its use is eligible for subsidization by the Dutch government through innovation grants.

An observation from my whirlwind tours of both facilities is that is the Minnesota-based Fab Lab seems to produce things that already exist, whereas the Dutch Fab Lab produces many new creations — things that have not existed yet. The question on my mind is, why is there a creativity gap? Is it a cultural phenomenon? Or, is it structural:

• Is it because our education system is no longer producing many creatives (focusing instead on creating functionaries)?
• Is it because the Dutch have access to a broader support system that draws creatives to the Fab Lab?

Or, is something else happening?

Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, and Nina Kruschwitz wrote an article in Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.‘s strategy+business on transforming business thinking to combat climate change.

We cannot meet the 80-20 challenge under the present industrial system. Success will require a sea change in the prevailing kinds of energy we use, cars we drive, buildings we live and work in, cities we design, and ways we move both people and goods around the world. It will require other changes that no one can yet imagine. That’s why basic innovation is so important: Humans must rapidly rethink and rebuild their infrastructure, technology, organizations, and approach to working with nature. Meanwhile, the growing recognition of this 80-20 challenge [to generate an 80 percent reduction of worldwide emissions in 20 years] — among scientists, businesspeople, and citizens — is itself a signal that the industrial age bubble has reached its limits, just as general recognition of the unsustainability of many Internet businesses preceded the bursting of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

Indeed, the industrial age is over (at least in industrialized nations), and the world is moving toward a socioeconomic system that favors knowledge and innovation over industrial outputs.  Global climate change is creating an imperative for ecologically sound, innovative transformations of industries and society.  The idea of “business as usual” is no longer economically sound or socially acceptable.

When we talk about schools going green, we often focus on energy efficient classrooms, lunchroom waste reductions, and conservation of office supplies.  Far less frequently, we talk about helping students build a capacity to innovate toward creating ecologically-sound solutions.  We’re producing students that will be successful in 19th or 20th century assembly line jobs, but not for roles they will need to assume in a knowledge- and innovation-based society.

No more business as usual means we can no longer do education as usual.

With this in mind, it’s perhaps appropriate to round off Cobo‘s list of skills for knowledge workers with a final point: be responsible. These are all items that schools should work on developing in the communities they serve:

1. Not restricted to a specific age.
2. Highly engaged, creative, innovative, collaborative and motivated.
3. Uses information and develops knowledge in changing workplaces (not tied to an office).
4. Inventive, intuitive, and able to know things and produce ideas.
5. Capable of creating socially constructed meaning and contextually reinvent meanings.
6. Rejects the role of being an information custodian and associated rigid ways of organizing information.
7. Network maker, always connecting people, ideas, organizations, etc.
8. Possesses an ability to use many tools to solve many different problems.
9. High digital literacy.
10. Competence to solve unknown problems in different contexts.
11. Learning by sharing, without geographical limitation.
12. Highly adaptable to different contexts/environments.
13. Aware of the importance to provide open access to information.
14. Interest in context and the adaptability of information to new situations.
15. Capable of unlearning quickly, and always bringing in new ideas.
16. Competence to create open and flat knowledge networks.
17. Learns continuously (formally and informally) and updates knowledge.
18. Constantly experiments new technologies (especially the collaborative ones).
19. Not afraid of failure.
20. Oriented toward building positive social, economic, and ecological futures.

Here’s a challenge for you. Find me a firm, any firm, that isn’t telling it’s people, it’s customers and it’s investors that innovation isn’t important. Can you imagine that? Telling these constituents that innovation isn’t important is like telling people that oxygen isn’t important. So, let’s take as a given that most firms advocate a bias toward innovation.

How about schools or colleges? How often do we bring up innovation (or discussions of creating pathways toward continuous innovation) with educational leaders only to receive a response of, “oh, we’re already doing that?”

Too often.

In my experience, I would say that perhaps 10-20% of school leaders I’ve talked with believe that they’re “already innovating” or are “innovating enough.” Innovation, by definition, means doing something substantially different, and it’s something that everybody can do. Perhaps what educational leaders are telling us is that we’re failing to define what innovation is and means what we need to do in educational contexts.

Can leaders see the pink elephant in the classroom if they’re looking at their organization through rose-tinted glasses? It’s time to start looking at our institutions differently.

Conservative front group Family Security Matters (FSM) today released its list of “The Ten Most Dangerous Organizations in America.” Universities and colleges earned the #2 spot in the rankings. FSM writes that these 10 “hate” organizations are “growing powerful in the world of politics” and share a common “unwillingness to bend in their strictly biased view of the world.” Here are 10 most dangerous organizations:

10. ThinkProgress
9. Muslim Student Association
8. CodePINK
7. American Civil Liberties Union, National
6. Family Research Council
5. Center for American Progress
4. League of the South
3. MoveOn.org
2. Universities and Colleges
1. Media Matters for America

(adapted from ThinkProgress)

Creating Schools of the Future through Systems ThinkingFebruary 1, 2006

Verna Allee, Verna Allee and Associates

Verna Allee, M.A., is recognized worldwide for her work as a pioneer in the field of knowledge management. She is a practitioner, thought leader, author, and frequent keynote speaker on value networks, knowledge management, intangibles, communities of practice, and new business models. Through her value network of colleagues, she consults with a wide variety of organizations—from global corporations and entrepreneurial startups to government agencies and global action networks. She will speak on bringing the wisdom of knowledge management and systems thinking into our schools.

Verna’s publications include The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks (2003) and The Knowledge Evolution (1997), which is a continuing best seller in the knowledge management field. She is also co-editor with Dinesh Chandra of What is True Wealth and How Do We Create It? (2003). Verna is a contributing author to several books and journals and is on the editorial board of Knowledge Management magazine.

Schedule

February 1, 2006 from 8:15 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

• Morning session: 8:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Speaker presentation
• Afternoon session: 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. Practical application and dialogue that draws upon information from the morning session through the use of leadership frameworks.

Location

Doubletree Hotel Conference Center
1500 Park Place Blvd., Minneapolis
(near Hwy 394 & Hwy 100)

Registration

Registration deadline: January 25, 2005

• Register online or
• Download and mail registration form [PDF]

Fee

• ULA member school district participants (Minneapolis., St. Paul, North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale, & Mounds View) pay no registration fee.
• Non-ULA member school districts pay $90 per person for the half-day session or $150 for the full-day session. Lunch and/or continental breakfast is included.

CEUs

Pre-approved continuing professional education clock hours for administrators are available. Please contact John Moravec at moravec@umn.edu or 612-625-3517 for more information.

The New York Times reports that “the cutthroat environment of ever increasing competition could actually hinder future technological advances.” The drive for innovative business models in an increasingly deregulated and globalized environment creates rapid continuous change in the global economy. An American school textbook publisher, for example, must now generate most of its material in New Delhi to remain competitive. But funding for new technology development has significantly decreased since the 1990′s. The article suggests business reorgination in favor of competitiveness causes companies to no longer consider the “long view” of their development strategies. In exchange for competitiveness today, companies are neglecting innovative technological development.

Van der Heijden builds upon the ideas in Scenarios and delves into more modern approaches to scenario planning. He argues, scenario-based continuous learning is the best approach for organizations to identify and plan for external environmental inputs into their systems. Scenario planning does not help determine the future, but explains the nature of the future, allowing organizations to respond appropriately.

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