Table Of ContentReviewers’ Comments
Carol L. Stimmel casts a wide net to explore innovation, collaboration, and
performance across natural and human-constructed systems. She pulls together
useful and usable examples to encourage businesses to look beyond the current
ways of thinking about product-focused organizational structures, roles, and
processes. It is important for business leaders and product teams to consider her
call to look beyond the ways everyone thinks innovation happens to be open
to the sometimes messy, imprecise, and unexpected results of openness and
fl exibility. Loosening the grip of metrics and trendy methodologies can make us
uncomfortable but creates possibilities that might be missed when rigidity rules.
— Lyn Bain
UX Strategy, Research, and Design
Chili Interactive, LLC
Carol L. Stimmel’s OpenXFORM model incorporates natural systems (bio-
empathy, animal form and function, diversity) and human-centric design
processes (shared responsibility, interdependence) for achieving meaningful
innovation in future tech. Th e framework anticipates organizational success
while valuing individual dignity and worker satisfaction. Stimmel brilliantly
derives her schema from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s exhortation to civil rights
activists to persevere and maintain forward momentum. She incorporates
elements from diverse fi elds (biology, anthropology, sustainability, law and
intellectual property, economics, industrial and organizational psychology) to
develop this new paradigm. OpenXFORM can serve as a framework for progress
in design, engineering, business, manufacturing, entrepreneurship. Th is model
is fl exible and could easily be adopted by noncommercial organizations seeking
to eff ect change: government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofi ts.
— Sarah E. McCleskey, MA, MSLS
Head of Resource and Collection Services, Hofstra University Library
Until corporate leadership is ready to get out of their own shorts, the term
“innovation” will remain a useless buzzword thrown around in Board Reports
and advertising. True innovation requires abandoning fear. Th e fear of being
wrong. Th e fear of giving up control. Th e fear of being uncomfortable in
front of shareholders, Board members, and employees. Th at’s not something
most leadership is prepared to do. But that’s exactly what’s required. And
that’s exactly why massive industries continue to get disrupted. In Evolving
Innovative Ecosystems, Carol lays out a detailed view into both the psychology
and process required to escape that fear, understand the pain that drives true
innovation, and create a leadership that embraces the primal energy that true
innovation unleashes.
— David Mandell
Founder and CEO, Pivot Desk
Carol Stimmel applies exhaustive thought and research into her writing. I know
after completing one of her works—whether a research paper, brief, or book—
that I will walk away having learned something concrete I can apply to my
own work. When I learned her latest would be on innovation—a word that has
permeated our dialogue so much that it means everything and nothing at the
same time—I knew it would be an important read. For any executive wanting
to not only explore the role innovation can play in their organization, but learn
how to harness it, I highly recommend Carol’s latest.
— Brad Langley
Director of Marketing, Tendril
If you’ve ever spoken with Carol Stimmel, she made you think, made you
challenge every assumption you had. It was not a confrontational challenge but
neither was it placid.
Th is book is clearly Carol’s: it makes you think. A simmering tension
underpins nearly every paragraph: the tension of openness and innovation with
corporate objectives and self-perpetuation. Even this book itself is in tension.
When Carol writes, “Our digitally enabled society is faced with the colliding
traditions of property ownership and the use of incentives for effi ciency to
increase profi ts,” I think of her intellectual property within and wonder if she
has written Steal Th is Book for the 21st century.
But tension it is. Th is book is a travel guide for the tightrope walkers of future
tech. Free fl owing information is indispensable for innovation, especially in
multi-stakeholder undertakings such as smart cities. But what of the companies
such as utilities that have invested billions of dollars building the infrastructure
whence comes that data? Tightropes abound. And tightropes imply an appetite
for risk.
My favorite sentence in the book is: “It is invaluable to be proven wrong.”
Is that counterintuitive? Certainly I like to know as soon as possible when I’ve
turned onto the wrong Interstate. And what of rejoicing at being proven wrong?
Can our results-oriented culture tolerate such humility?
Tension.
Carol faces head-on that innovation is often hands-on dirty work. Ideas
are nice but solutions matter. Th is book includes a route map from idea to
solution. Not an etched-in-stone path. Just as your phone gives you a detour
when an accident occurs, the path to an innovation requires your willingness to
pivot. To change routes when half-way there. To change destination if a better
opportunity presents itself.
Finally, this book reminds us that innovation can be incremental, not always
in grand scale. A series of incremental innovations has in one generation reduced
AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic illness. Who made that happen?
Countless mostly anonymous heroes. Th e fi ght against AIDS is far from over
but the increments, in aggregate, are stunning.
Innovation isn’t just cool. It’s required of a world that produces enough food
to feed all its inhabitants but has no idea how to get the food to those who are
starving. It’s required of a world where decreasing the digital divide implies
energy consumption on a scale never imagined. Th ose and other challenges will
not be met by extrapolating the past.
Here is a route planner to the future.
— Bob Lockhart
Vice President of Cybersecurity, Technology, and Research
Utilities Technology Council
Evolving
Innovation
Ecosystems
A Guide to Open Idea Transformation
in the Age of Future Tech
Evolving
Innovation
Ecosystems
A Guide to Open Idea Transformation
in the Age of Future Tech
Carol L. Stimmel
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Rabbi Deborah Ruth Bronstein, a teacher of great
compassion and an inspiration to many in her work for social justice. As my
teacher, she taught me to set aside an attachment to rational explanation in
exchange for enjoyment of the mysteries found in a single moment of contem-
plation that requires no justification.
Kol hakavod v’rav b’rachot
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