Speech in Dubai on Teaching People to Innovate

I
have not been posting much lately because I went on a trip to Dubai last week
and a group of us at the d.school are working like crazy on our new class “Clicks-n-bricks:
Creating Mass Market Experiences,” which starts Thursday afternoon.  I had a fantastic trip to  Dubai, where I spoke at a conference that was
organized by the Emirates Higher Colleges of Technology and the  MIT Entrepreneurship Center.

  The
organizers were very excited because Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan was going to attend the conference and giving the opening speech.  The event started over an hour late we – an audience
of perhaps 1000 people –waited for his Excellency to arrive, and when he
did arrive, there was all sorts of wonderful ceremony, an entourage of perhaps
50 people, 20 or so members of the media, and fantastic music (an IBM executive
told me that they had hoped to have indoor fireworks, but the ceiling was too
low).  After his Excellency’s speech,
there were some lovely dancers, and then Azim Hashim Premji –
Chairman and founder of Wipro, plus the wealthiest person  in India, – then spoke for
about 15 minutes.

I was next, and as I was walking up to speak, one of my hosts ran up
to me and whispered “you have to make it fast, his Excellency has to leave!”  Also, before the speech Pat Toole from
IBM whispered to me that I should start the speech by saying “Your Highness,
Your Excellencies, and ladies and gentleman.”  That was different and it was fun.

So I hit a
small number of points and hit them quickly.  Being a professor, I can talk on and on, but
one of the lessons I learned on the trip is that a good 8 minute talk is a lot
better than a bad 30 or 60 minute talk.  As they say in show business, it is
always better to leave the audience wanting more than wanting less.

I
talked about what I’ve learned about teaching people to innovate from academic research,
teaching classes in the d.school
and Stanford Technology Ventures
Program, and from working with companies like IDEO, HP, and SAP. I
emphasized five points and their implications for policy. I doubt that many of you will be surprised by
any of these ideas, but knowing is not the same is doing.  Few of these practices are used at the
university level – not just in the AER, throughout the world.  Here are the five points: 

1 Producing smart individuals is the first step;
teaching them to collaborate is the second step.

2 Teach people how to fight as if they are right and
listen as if they are wrong.

3. Teach experts to seek out novices, and novices to
seek out experts.

4. Teach people to treat innovation as an
import-export business.

5. Teaching people how to succeed isn’t enough;
teach them how to fail too.

I also added that renowned innovators – from Charles
Darwin to Steve Jobs – not only have good ideas, they also always seem to be
able to sell their ideas or to hook-up with people who can do it for them.

We had some other crazy adventures later in the day,
as Canadian Entrepreneur Evan Chrapko
and I were in car (with other speakers in four or five different cars) that
raced to
to meet another member of the royal family in Abu Dhabi (about an hour from Dubai). It turned out that his schedule wouldn’t
allow it, but racing along at 180 kilometers (with our host pressing the driver
not to drive faster and faster) was pretty fun.  Indeed, everyone kept telling us that the AER
had the highest automobile fatality rate in the world – not a shock based on my
limited experience.

P.S. Here is the Powerpoint for my talk Download teaching_people_to_innovateii.pdf