Innovation as an Amoeba

Earlier this week I took part in a forum coordinated by Dr John Mitchell for the NCVER Project, “Critical Issues in Teaching, Learning and Assessment”.
Link to project page and papers

One of the issues under discussion was innovation and how to create environments to encourage innovation and also stifling factors. Recently I’ve been dipping into Stephen Johnson’s book Emergence, Dave Snowden’s ideas on social complexity and also thinking about innovation in the current VET context in Australia.

I talked about looking at the increasing complexity not as a problem, but rather as an opportunity. If innovation happens at the edges, then in a context of increasing and persistent complexity, there must surely be more edges at which innovation can occur?

Comparing the amorphous nature of our context to an amoeba works for me – If you consider productive, useful innovation, then the edges need to stay connected to the whole in some way. If you get breakaway innovation that becomes disconnected from the main section, then the usefulness for the organism of that innovation may be diluted or go in tangential directions.

Talking later with my other half, we also discussed the notion that sometimes the innovators can be out on those arms and over time, the amoeba can move out and ‘flesh out’ the arms around them, or indeed innovate off different edges. So innovation does not get mainstreamed by moving closer to the centre of the organism but rather than the amoeba moves out and re-centres around some innovations and not others. For people who are closely tied to a historical centre of the context, this reshaping can be extremely challenging. Although moving with the reshaped context means working within the contained organism, moving within it is still a challenge. New pathways need to be developed and accepted. But that’s a whole different topic…