Another Successful Pecha Kucha Series (#9!!)

This past March 20th we held the 9th Edition of our Pecha Kucha series at SeriouslyCreative. For those who are not familiar with the concept, Pecha Kucha is a Japanese format for presentations: 20 slides, 20 secs each slide. 6:40 mins. each presentation. Short impactful presentations. At SeriouslyCreative, the purpose of events is to inspire solutions for a better Puerto Rico. We hand pick 50 participants to create a diverse audience who challenge each other and collaborate to innovate. Here are the videos for the presentations from this, our 9th Edition.

Dana Montenegro of SeriouslyCreative with “Radically Collaborative” (click on link to watch)

Juan Carlos Pedreira of Social Matrix with “140 Character Revolution.” (click on link to watch)

Rafael Cancel with “La Clave está en la Gente” (click on link to watch)

Note: If you would like to be invited to our next Pecha Kucha, or would like to nominate yourself or someone you know to give a Pecha Kucha, please write: angie@seriouslycreative.com

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Consumer Trends to Watch Presentation for SME makes the News
This past January, Dana Montenegro as a team with Josian Alustiza Strategic Planner for Badillo Nazca

Here’s the presentation (note: it is 35 minutes, but worth it… you can have it playing in the background while you work…

Click on link to watch.

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YES WE DID IT!!! A SeriouslyGOOD dream becomes SeriousSUCCESS

The Idea: Get people Adults to remember the simple pleasure of Play. Get Adults back to being kids and enjoy playing WITH their kids.

The Cause: Escape Centro de Fortalecimiento Familar

The Date: April 22, 2012

The Dream Site: El Morro San Juan (make it feel like Central Park).

Our Radical Collaborators: Kilombo Productions, Abbott, MMM, AT&T, COSVI, Party Creators, Piccolomondo PR, Marriottt Vacation Club, Univisión, El Nuevo Día, SHRM, Brains & Motion, Caribbean Green Bikes, La X, Magic, Radio Vida, Fidelity y Puerto Rico Kindness Movement

Over 1600 people registered. Many more came… and here is a couple of highlights.

Video Summary: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150822042781291

More pictures and videos the event’s facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AJugarenFamilia

Parents and kids playing Dance Dance Feeze! Check it out!: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150831019051221&set=t.655891220&type=3&theater

Papa Caliente video: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150830970581221&set=t.655891220&type=3&theater

Here’s a beautiful blog recap from our friends at Papaheroes on the event. We hope you enjoy! And this is just the beginning. If you, your company, your organization, your school or you or your connection would be interested in collaborating to keep this movement moving… please write us: escape@escapepr.org

Rumor has it, we already have El Morro reserved for another date and we plan to do regionals in the west, south, central east and more…

¡Apúntense a Jugar en Familia!!! YAA!

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Meet the Creative Genius in your Kid

On the same note of going back to being a kid… Do you know Caine?

If you have not met Caine, please take a couple of minutes to meet our favorite creative genius this month. His story will surely demonstrate why we need to PROTECT and PROMOTE our kid’s innate creative potential. We are all born geniuses.. Remember that and protect that.

Go become Caine’s fan, right now!! http://www.facebook.com/cainesarcade

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Going Viral

So everyone talks about going Viral, but no one really understands how it works? Check out this incredible case study for anyone looking to really understand what a VIRAL Campaign, combined with the passion for GAMING and FANS together can “cook up”. This was a couple of years ago and imagine how technology advances today could improve this even more… Enjoy and thanks to our friend Amy Dávila for her inspiration… always!

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A couple of more SeriouslyCreative notes:

The SME’s 11th Annual Digital Forum is on May16th! Register today!

Getting ready for the Global Entrepreneurship Week in Puerto Rico, (yes it is in November, but we gotta make this year really count, if you know what I mean…) If you would like to collaborate or participate in this year’s events, please write: angie@seriouslycreative.com

Thanks to my friend Katalina for taking me to have lunch at El Departamento de la Comida on Tuesday. You have to try it!! Fresh organic PUERTO RICAN grown vegetables you will not believe!!! Bring home fresh fruit and vegetables.. while you always contribute to Puerto Rico’s sustainability. Yes we can! Kudos to Tara for such an AWESOME and NECESSARY concept, bringing quality products, integrity and hope for a better Puerto Rico!

Remember:
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – from the Lorax by one of SeriouslyCreative’s favorite innovators: Dr. Seuss – #whattagenius

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WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO: http://issuu.com/seriouslycreative2/docs/aboutus?mode=window&viewMode=singlePage

TRAININGS: http://issuu.com/SeriouslyCreative2/docs/training/1

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Twitter: http://twitter.com/idearocket and http://twitter.com/space4ideas

Blog: www.seriouslycreative.com/blog www.isladeideas.org

Website: www.seriouslycreative.com

The time has come for you (and anyone like you) to start applying your imagination, your creativity & your ideas to solve all forms of complex problems – personal, business or social.  What has always been true is becoming more self evident: growth, success and progress are not created by simply making something more efficient, by putting in a few more hours or by belt tightening alone.  The secret sauce is creativity.  Yes, your very own ability to take a collection of thoughts, inspirations, insights and disperse metal candy and make new connections in order to produce a new ideas.

So how can you stoke your personal creative flame?  There are tons of things you can do but we have compiled our favorite eight.

Ask More Questions. If you want more ideas ask more questions.  Too often we keep the one big question we are struggling with in our head like “how might I improve awareness of our cause?”  But if we start by asking what are all the questions we might ask that might help us discover new ideas we find that there are dozens more that provoke new thinking.  The trick is to write down all the questions we have around a specific challenge like “who might be able to help us understand the problem better?” “What might we need to understand first?” or “In what new ways might we approach this challenge?”

Think Humanly. Most challenge we face are human in nature.  Our chance of success in solving it is deeply rooted in satisfying a need of specific audiences – customers, staff, team members.  But we are so absorbed with what we want to accomplish for ourselves or our business we forget about our targets needs.  Start by asking what it is your target needs, thinks, wants and feels.  Then go out and talk to them and observe them in the real world environment that you want to influence.  It is often in this “people watching” that we discover articulated needs that give us insights that ideas can be built around.

Share with more people. Creativity can be a very personal and individual pursuit.  But it doesn’t have to be and, in fact, when we choose to be creative with others we are often more creative ourselves.  If you want to be more creative start sharing your insights and challenge with other people and get them involved in producing new ideas with you.  There is an incredibly infectious energy when a group of people are asked to create new ideas that fuels everyone to go just a bit further with their thinking.  A good way to start is to ask others for their most outrageous idea to solve your challenge.

Experience more stuff. But creative thinking is not so much about being an expert as much as it is about being exceeding curious about a wide variety of things.  Creative thoughts are more likely to happen when we make connections between two or more things that don’t often naturally go together.  This means that the more you fill your mind with interesting and diverse things the more stuff your brain has to make unique connections with.  Spend some time reading things you don’t often read, going to new and different events, get involved in new activities.

Suspend Judgement (and go wild). Our natural instinct is to quickly eliminate ideas that don’t seem to fit or are “unrealistic.”   But Einstein warns that “if an idea is not at first absurd there is no hope for it.”  We need to get more comfortable with both producing and accepting wild ideas if we really want to come us with something great.   My son and I play the “How might you” game where we need to come up with all kinds of wild ways to solve a challenge like how to get an elephant into space.  In the game we compete to see who can come up with the most outrageously creative solution without regard to how practical it is.  If you get used to floating “crazy” ideas you will come up with better ones.

Write it all down (and keep it visible). Ideas are truly valuable things but we sure don’t treat them that way.  For the dozens of ideas we may come up with in a day we write down only the one that we feel we might do.  But we should be writing them all down and posting them somewhere visible where we will see them over and over again.  Great ideas are not always self evident but if we save them and see them we have a better chance of molding them into something we use and make connections between them and other ideas that together create a solution.  Our fridge is flooded with Post-it notes with ideas.  Another great practice is to keep a small journal with you and write down any idea you have in the moment so you don’t loose it.

Dare it fail. Ok, I’m not talking crash and burn and bury the company “fail.”  The point is we need to get comfortable with the idea that if we want to do new things there are going to be failures along the way.  We need to see failures as a natural part of the process that we can learn from before our next attempt.  Thomas Edison said “I have not failed but instead found 10,000 ways it will not work.”  The secret is to fail fast and cheap.

Try rather than justify. In business we often want to prove an idea will work by doing the analysis that proves our point of view right.  But often the only way to really know if something will work is to simply try it.  This means doing lots of cheap and quick prototypes of new products or services to see how they work out in a real work situation and then learn from it, incorporate the learning into the final solution and then put all the money and effort behind it.

Maybe the most important thing you can do to be more creative in 2012 is simply to try and practice random acts of creativity.  If you simply decide to be more creative you are more likely than not to be more creative.  And that’s a great thing.  Enjoy!

Carlos Frontera, Manny Morales, Dana Montenegro & Eric Torres

Last week we waited with baited breath like a true beauty pageant contestant for the announcement of the winner of the Guaynacan Group EnterPRize business plan competition.   It would be nice to say that we can in first but, in the end, we took second behind Cutting Edge Technologies – a team with a ready to launch way to reduce the cost of an MRI by some 40%.   Our idea, a new business model where people bring a reusable RFID enabled container to a refilling station machine that dispenses environmentally friendly cleaning products like laundry detergent, was the labor of love of Manny Morales who developed the patent for the machine after discovering how much plastic waste is not recycled and ends up in our landfills.  Over the past months he recruited me (Dana Montenegro) along with Eric Torres, a strategic planner at Walmart and Carlos Frontera formerly of the conglomerate that runs KFC and Taco Bell in Puerto Rico and now the founder of a marketing firm. (find out more about our concept at www.facebook.com/GrassLark)

Looking around the room of the other four finalist teams we were truly impressed.  In addition to the MRI winning team there was a need exportable food product, a team with a low cost weather radar system of South American countries where only 1% of the land mass has a real sever weather warning system and a algae farming business that takes algae and converts it into fuel with similar properties to diesel.  To be in the company of other innovators – other people pursing new ideas and trying to launch startups – was inspiring.

The real winner of the night was Puerto Rico.  We desperately need more companies like Cutting Edge Technologies, GrassLark and the others in the competition who image big things, innovate and think about their marketplace as the entire world.  Congratulations to all!

See the article about GrassLark and about Cutting Edge Technologies at Endi.com or in the Negocios section.

Our sister company friends at Inotivity and we here at SeriouslyCreative often use visuals (photos, posters, images online) along with provocative words and questions to help trigger people’s thinking and to shake them out of the normal patters that inevitable lead them to the same old answers.  These cards are stimulus for our brains and help us make connections between what we know and what we might imagine which is the perfect mix for new ideas and innovative solutions.

You can find an example of what we are talking about on our flickr site here: http://bit.ly/rOosHK

HERE IS HOW TO USE IT:

1) Identify a Goal, Challenge or Problem you want to solve and that needs you to come up with new thinking and ideas.

2) Go through the cards reading the title, the questions and looking at the photo and image how any of these three might apply to the issue you are dealing with .  (Think flexibly and not too literal about the cards and let any idea come to your mind)

3) Quickly write down ANY (any – no matter how vague, radical, unsubstantiated, varied) thought that comes to your mind as you review the cards.  It might be good to write them on Post-it notes with one idea per note.

4) Now review your ideas and see how any of them might be modified, improved or applied to your challenge.

Enjoy!

Issac Asimov imagined robots and created the Three Laws of Robotics in 1941 – long before robots existed.  What he imagined is only now starting to become possible.  Suba diving was imagined by Jules Vernes in 1875 in his book “20,000″ Leagues Under the Sea.”  In 1932 Aldous Huxley published “Brave New World” and introduced us to the concept of “test tube” babies.  Mark Twain gave us the image of the “telelectrascope” that would allow people to hear and see what was going on anywhere in his 1898 publication “The London Times of 1904 – an image of today’s internet and teleconferencing.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, put it best: “It is staggering how much of what we do today is last generation’s science fiction.”  His point was that science fiction imagines what is impossible at the time but, with time and innovation, will become science fact.  Think about all the things that are a part of our current science fiction, long distance space travel a la Star Trek or lazer wepons in Star Wars?  How about time travel imagined by H.G. Wells and seen in so many movies the goofiest of which was “Back to the Future” (shout out to all my 80′s lovers)?  Just fanciful imagination or something yet to be invented?  Well, if history is any indicator these far out science fiction dreams are just projections of what will be possible for someone in the future.  And at the rate of change and invention today that future may be sooner than you might think.  What will get us there is a appreciation for innovation.

I love the saying that “all things are possible.  The impossible just takes a bit longer.”  What seems impossible to you today but, if possible, might improve your situation?  Now overcome the impossible.

(check out the promo for the Science Challenge’s upcoming show “Prophets of Science Fiction starting this Wednesday night)

There is a tremendous problem with this.  In essence, critics are punishing the President for taking a risk, making a bet on a new venture and for the eventual failure.  But this is EXACTLY what we need.  Innovation is a risky venture and it take some bet making on new things.  By it’s nature, some innovation project do fail.  Especially the greater of a leap they are trying to make into the unknown.  When it comes to truly transformative technologies like clean energy no one company or even one bank is going to take that kind of a leap.  That is where the government must come in a make many bets on many things knowing that many, if not most, will fail.  The pay off is in the few project that do success that revolutionize industries and give us, the American people, the lead in a new technology that the world will want.

Think about the space race.  What would have happened if everyone was criticizing the government when they had failures.  And failures their were.  The kind that cost not just money but the lives of brave men.  Without the willingness to work beyond the failure much less the wiliness to take the risk in the first place it would have never been done and all the technology we gain from it would never had been.  The same story is true in so many things.  Silicon Valley, the heart of our current advantage, was born in investments made by the US government and especially military funding in the 1940s.  Yes, Apple and Google are the beneficiaries of a government bureaucrat writing checks.

If America is to be the world leader again we are going to have to innovate, take risks and, yes, fail.  So the next failure you see in an investment in something really new – celebrate, it means we are closer to the solution.

(to see some examples of government funding that lead to leaps in innovation check out this article from CNN Money:  http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/technology/1110/gallery.government_inventions/index.html )

Our talk focused on how business need to transform into “innovation enterprises” – business that are constantly using change to their advantage, actively seek to disrupt the status quo, are constantly developing new ideas in products, technology, organization, service and business model and who work as multidisciplinary teams rather than divisions with specific tasks.  This is very different from the way most business are today but it is the reason some of our most iconic businesses like Apple, Virgin, Gore (the people behind Gortex) and Google are so successful.  They not only focus and value things differently from standard companies but they think different, invest different and empower people differently.  They know failure done fast and cheap leads to more success, connecting people leads to more holistic solutions, co-creating with consumers and digging for deeper insights creates winning launches, getting diverse talent leads to better connections and final ideas and prototyping gives fast feed back for faster solutions.

Read the article to learn more.

I’m sure Dr. Seuss wasn’t thinking about the business applications of his children’s books as he wrote Horton Hears a Who but I, in my twisted addiction for ideas and innovation, cannot help but to see some wisdom in the story.

Like Horton how many of you have ever had an outlandish idea that might just revolutionize your organization?  Let’s even tone it down a notch – how many of you have simply had an idea that is a bit outside of what is normally done in your company only to have it resisted, ostracized and killed by the powers that be like management kangaroos who think that their year’s of experience make them the judge of what is, and is not, possible.  You push your idea based upon an intuition that it may have value and improve your current competitive situation but because it is new there is no way to prove it.  After all, new things are usually only proven by experimenting and taking some risk in being wrong.  Management ask for proof that they idea will produce the results which you know is simply death of an idea  by analysis.  Because they can’t understand the idea and are unwilling to think beyond the status quo they will never accept your idea.  Push it anymore and they will throw you and your idea into a boiling pot of Beezelnut Oil (or simply marginalize you and brand you the unrealistic boat rocker).

What might have Horton done and what can we learn from him?

1) Start your idea out in “skunk works” phase first.  What does this mean?  Fly under the radar until you are really ready to present it.  Protect it from the ready to kills ideas gaze of management first.  Am I encouraging you to be subversive?  Yep!  Really smart managers have also found ways to protect their innovation creation teams from the premature evaluation of senior management.  They buy them time to work on the idea, experiment with it and turn it into a concept better able to survive the harsh light of executive review.

2) Get some agreement from management on what the problem is.  Now, I’m not sure how Horton would have done this – maybe get people to agree that their is the possibility of thing existing without us being able to see them first before breaking out the idea of people living on a speck of dust.  For you it means getting a clear picture of what the challenge is and getting everyone to agree to what is causing it.  Too often people say they all know what the problem is but if you survey them they all have a different understanding of what is really driving the problem.  Digging deeper into the roots of the problem (or challenge/opportunity) better informs you and where the innovative thinking is needed and put everyone on the same page.

3)  Challenge the notion that the status quo is risk free. People assume that the status quo is the safest option.  After all change is ripe with risk.  But this is dead wrong.  Doing nothing is a choice and can often be the riskiest thing you can do.  Get people to think about what the implications of not changing or breaking free of the status quo are.  A great question I have used is “what might be the outcomes if we do nothing at all?”  Often people find that doing nothing (especially when you add that the competition may do something new) is scarier than  doing something.  But you have to lead them to the edge of the cliff first so they can see it for themselves.

4) Get people to work together from the start.  Much like the Whos needing to combine forces to be heard you too are going to need some allies.  Find some people from other departments to help you work on the idea.  The diversity of perspectives work to build your idea up and add to it’s survivability.  These people will most likely work with you to promote the idea and defend it.  Hey, why not get senior management involved in creating the idea rather than just critiquing it.  Ask them to help you solve some problems you are having with the idea.  Questions like “how would you make this idea work?” invite people to focus on finding solutions and suspending judgement long enough to allow your idea to grow.

So, if you ever find your self in the Jungle of Nool with a crazy idea surrounded by corporate kangaroos you’ll know what to do.

(to paraphrase Horton the Elephant – “an (idea) is an (idea), no matter how small.”

(If you like our little leanings from Dr. Seuss you’ll love “What M&Ms and Van Halen Can Teach us about Innovation” from our sister company Inotivity at    http://bit.ly/oPG8L2

Our last PechaKucha was in June and we have not yet formally been able to report back on its success.  It has not been the continuous sunny days that have kept us busy at the beach zipping on Coladas and away from completing this post.  For those of you not in Puerto Rico this has been a grey and greyer summer with incessant rains and more to come making us wonder why they call it a tropical paradise.

What has actually kept us from getting back to you on this has been and I am happpy to report:  a lot of Work. No complaints here!

Finally, we caught a little break these days… and here it is: the round-up for PechaKucha #6!

So let’s get to the PechaKuchin’ right away.

On June 16, we celebrated our 6th PechaKucha @SeriouslyCreative (click to see a video on what the night looks and feels like).

If you are familiar with the concept, skip this parragraph!  If you are not familiar with the concept - READ ON!

Long story short, we hold PK’s every other month.  It is an evening of food; drinks and ideas where we have three speakers share ideas that might better Puerto Rico. We do this in a format the restricts them to 20 slides, each up for only 20 seconds giving them a grand total of 6 minutes 40 seconds to tell there story (format is called PechaKucha 20×20 and means “the sound of small talk” in Japanese).  Invited are some 40 to 50 people from a cross-section of Puerto Rico’s different sectors, from business, to academia, non-profit and even students – that we think are potential shares of ideas and agents of change. In other words, we invite people like us who think a better Puerto Rico is possible if we can just find and implement new ideas.

Our recurring partner; B.Fernandez & Hnos shared with us some fabulous food paired with their featured product of the night:  Absolut Berri Acai .  Excellent by itself on the rocks, if I may say so…

As an added bonus, our friends Jenny and Joche of Sweet Oven treated us to their spectacular cupcakes.  When we say spectacular we mean it.  Gorgeous presentation, melt in your mouth spectacular, YES.  Go, check them out on FB, and consider for your next event.

To break the ice for our speaking guests, SeriouslyCreative started rounds of presentations with Dana Montenegro and his Isla de Ideas.  The talk goes over several case studies of, Islands of 4 Million people… (sound familiar?), and how they came to be leaders in Innovation.  Were they always leaders in innovation? How did they get to the point they are today? Is there anything we could learn from them?

Click on the image to go see the presentation.

The second turn came to our friend, Marcos Polanco of Clearshore who’s talk was titled:  Startup Nation.  Did your know that 2/3’s of jobs today are created by NEW companies? Globalization of talent via technology is the new reality. Should our government model evolve to foster and nurture this new reality?, Marcos explains.

Click on the image to go see the presentation.

Finally, we had Architect Pablo Figueroa, then candidate for President Elect of the PR Chamber of Commerce – Today: Mr. President Elect who faced the challenge to a PechaKucha with this talk: The Future of Cities.  It goes over how cities today are being planned around real time data technology that tells them about it’s people and how they behave or what they need.  Although due to technical difficulties we were unable to capture the whole thing, we hope the partial still conveys the passion and message successfully.

Another hint:  to miss the intro, start from minute: 2:45…

Click on the image to go see the presentation.

Hope you enjoyed this summary report of our PechaKucha #6 @SeriouslyCreative.

If you are interested in attending one of our PechaKucha@SeriouslyCreative nights or if you think you have a 20 slides by 20 seconds story to tell let us know!

Follow us! Join our FB fan page! SeriouslyCreative

Write us: angie@seriouslycreative.com
Call us: 787-283-6077

Learn about us: www.SeriouslyCreative.com

Keep Innovating for a Better Puerto Rico. Cheers to all!

Idea-lly,

Angiemille

Things get a bit more complicated when you get big and established. The shared vision becomes competing visions, the collective passion is unevenly distributed and the evil B word creeps in – bureaucracy: the dark force the keeps people wed to the status quo and secretly kills new initiatives like white blood cells seeking out the new virus (idea) it finds. This is what eBay has gone through – from start up to bureaucratic and big. And it describes many of our clients who inherently know that their salvation lies in doing new things but find themselves constantly pulled in by the gravity of “this is how we have always done it.”

But eBay has been pushing to break this gravity and Fast Company shares their 6 bit sized tips on how to innovate when you are a big company. All the tips apply to any sized company or even a team so go ahead and read them and see how they apply to you and your situation. These are the things we help implement with our clients in order to turn their slow moving ships into innovation hungry and fast moving change agents. One thing that is not used as a tip but that we like a lot is that to start this process they created an internal team – a skunk works team if you will – to work independently of the rest of the organization and offer their “services” as if they were a consultancy. By doing this you free people to think beyond the next report and allow room to think towards the future.

Kudos to eBay. You can read the Fast Company (our favorite magazine by far) article here. http://bit.ly/oh6NDF