The 2009 FIRST LEGO League competition is behind us. As a coach, it has been an amazing experience of the good and the not so good. We learned tons, especially about how to deal with frustrations spawned from having to use a very poor development environment, i.e. LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT software. Following my mother’s advice, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, so I’ll focus my energies on how your users’ emotions dictate their perception of the quality of your software.

• Don’t make me feel and look stupid
• I need a dependable buddy
• Grow with me
• When you piss me off, say you’re ‘sorry‘
• When it’s time to part ways, don’t get angry

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A brilliant spectrum of reds, yellows and greens… That is what I see out of my office window, and I realize that it has been a while since I posted. This is party due to my summer vacation, but mostly due to my sabbatical from writing about innovation. With over 26M hits on a Google blog search with the topic of “innovation”, it is making me rethink my approach and my value-add to the blogosphere.

I have been spending my free time by going back to my roots: engineering and software development. My time is spent acquainting myself with the Django platform, reading about product design, and coaching a FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) team with my husband for a robotics competition coming up in December. With that, in recent weeks, I have been playing with LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, including turning my dining room into a robotics lab! I have to admit, I am new to this, since LEGO® was not part of my life when I was growing up. And although my son has been involved with LEGO for most of his life, I have only been an occasional sidekick, helping out when he needed it. I must say, I missed out, but now I’m working hard to make it up.

Though we are coaching 10-13 year-old boys, I noticed an amazing amount of similarity between playing with LEGOs and managing engineering projects. I hope you enjoy my observations, and please let me know if I left out anything.

Note that I find job titles personally challenging… Though I specifically mention engineering managers, for me this covers anyone that has the duties of managing a technology and product combination, along with the responsibilities of people management.

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Here are a few design and design thinking related articles that caught my attention recently. Enjoy.

From Fast Company’s Think.Design blog by Ken Musgrave:

• The Enduring Power of Brand: Leica vs. Panasonic — Power of emotional connection
• Beyond Design, 10 Skills Designers Need to Succeed Now — This list is not just limited to designers

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We are all creative. But, we need inspiration and motivation to turn our creativity into action. Lately, I have been too focused on details, and as a result, I am starting to feel disconnected from my creative side. Here is a reminder, at least for me, of the many ways we can inspire our creativity. What works for you?

Just show up

As with anything in life,  showing up is the first step. You need to prioritize and schedule your creative time. This may not seem like an inspiration strategy, but what came first: the chicken or the egg?! With that said, you do want to tune into your natural creative rhythm to avoid swimming against the current. For me, trying to engage in anything before my morning coffee is a futile exercise (i.e., I am not a morning person). However, by mid-afternoon my creativity starts to flow and by early evening I feel intense focus. My challenge is to work my life around my creative rhythm; like weeding the garden, it’s never ending work…..

To discover your natural creative rhythm, you just need to pay attention. Pay attention to when you feel most creative, when ideas are flooding out and when you can tap into that energy with ease. Once you find that rhythm, figure ways to arrange your life around it, however you can. Your creativity and productivity will thank you.

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For me, there is something about the college environment, college town, … The diversity, intensity, energy, … it draws me in. For the next few weeks, I will be hanging around the University of Washington campus and University District in Seattle. No, it is not for my PhD, though that is something I would like to do.

Though I been to the University Bookstore before, this is my first time at the campus. It is quite large and very pleasant. Since it is the summer break, campus is also quiet. However, you will see many middle school kids running around (10-14 year olds) — future Huskies — which one of them is mine.

As I discover more about the area, I plan to upload photos to my Flickr account in the University of Washington set.

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review has published a research article on How to Manage Virtual Teams (registration is required). The research highlights the fact that virtual teams, despite their challenges, can deliver significant performance and outperform their colocated counterparts. The article also points out that any distance can be a challenge when it comes to collaboration.

Don’t underestimate the significance of small distances. Our research shows that performance is noticeably lower for teams with people located in the same building but on different floors when compared with teams where all members are on the same floor.

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Note: This article is written from the perspective of technology development and leading R&D teams.

Developing technology is a relatively simple task when compared to the challenge of getting it diffused and adopted throughout the intended ecosystem. Although there are others, understanding customer needs, wants and overall psychology is one of the big hurdles that has to be overcome for success. This journey starts at home with your Customer Support team. Yet, there tends to be a gap between R&D and Customer Support teams during the innovation process. Here are my experiences on where the gaps can occur and strategies that worked for me for closing (or, when needed, widening) them.

Prioritize Customer Support correctly

On the road to your product release, you may be tempted to prioritize Customer Support behind everything else. After all, what could be more important than schedule, cost, functionality, … Believe me, it will happen, I have been there. And everyone in the program team will agree to that prioritization…. However, for new products and innovations, it is the wrong decision. Innovation is about change. Your Customer Support team is there to help your customers manage that change effectively. By prioritizing Customer Support low, you are under valuing the role that they play in supporting and hand holding the users of your products.

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I have been blogging since October of 2006. Below are my top 10 articles since the start of this blog. What do you think? What else should I write about?

1. Strategy 101: Revisiting low-cost leadership with Dell
2. How to identify forces impacting your innovation
3. Metrics gone bad and steps to recovery
4. Good, bad and ugly: Organizational silos
5. Best practices: SWOT analysis revisited
6. Strategy 101: What is your core competency?
7. Effective strategies for surviving culture tax
8. Create value at every touch point
9. Strategy 101: Characteristics of disruptive technologies — Wii has bad graphics!
10. Intrapreneurs: Navigate the corporate maze for innovation

I am behind my reading….. However, these two articles from the Innovation Playground got my attention while I was quickly browsing thru the Google Reader.

The Six Most Common Approaches To Innovation. Tell Me Which One Works For Best For You?

Idris Mootee highlights the 6 most common approaches to innovation. As I think about my past experiences, even within the same organization, I utilized different innovation approaches based on the changing problems and context. And, I would agree that ‘Throw-Plenty-Of-Ideas-Around‘ is my least favorite method. In some cases, combining one or more of these approaches could further focus your innovation process, such as refining the killer idea by prioritizing problems.

• Find-New-Ideas-To-Power-Up-Growth-Strategy
• Find-Customer Needs-First 
• Find-A-Killer-Idea-First
• Throw-Plenty-Of-Ideas-Around
• Define-The-Problem-First
• Hide-In-The-Dark

“Sustainability” Has More Than It Means. There Are No “Sustainability” Without “Social Innovation”. Many Of The Solutions We Have Are Simply Too Tactical, Not Dealing With The Systemic Issues.

In this blog, Mootee tackles the challenge of defining sustainability. You can also read my ramblings on this topic: There is more to sustainability that just being green.

“The first problem I have with is the narrow definition of sustainability. …

If all of this sounds not confusing enough, there’s more. It is basically a humanity issue more than an environmental issue. We are not seeing the whole if we only see environment. How do we provide a decent life on this planet is a problem facing all humanity? Well I am making the problem too difficult to solve. This is a wicked problem; it is both systemic and maybe the ultimate challenge.”

– Idris Mootee, Innovation Playground