About

And about us? Why are we promoting 3 steps, innovation, insight matrix, and Creative Strategy? What's in it for us?

We want to make a positive impact on Airdrie, to do our part to help make this a special place, our-kind-of-city.. But what? And how? Then after reading Canada has a 20% productivity gap with the USA --as explained at www.competeprosper.ca and in the book Canada, What It Is, What it Can Be, Martin and Milway-- we realized if we can solve it Canada can benefit by billions - more than the tar sands. And likely the people of Airdrie can benefit proportionately - a 20% jump in productivity might mean 20% higher earnings. They mentioned innovation -an element of productivity- as a possible source of productivity improvement. So we poured over dozens of books on innovation. What we found was a mish-mash of ideas with little coherence.

Then continuing our search through the literature turned up a link to a Duggan book on a business bloggers page. As we got into Duggan's work, it seemed to make sense, and seemed to fill a hole. We tested it ourselves to see if it's how we actually innovate -how we have done our product R&D- and it was. And his research seemed credible: he had found research on figures like Napoleon, Edison, Ford, that when seen together had the same pattern. And then the Insight Matrix looked teachable / explainable / graspable for everyone -not just businesses, manufacturing and inventors- it could be used by Non-Profit-Organizations (NPOs), governments, groups, and individuals for their own day-to-day hard-to-solve problems and opportunity searches too. That was an Aha moment: strategy = {goal + method}: explain the Insight Matrix / 3 step creative strategy method to as many people in Airdrie as we can, and see if it makes an impact on productivity and GDP/capita -as measured from CRA income-by-postal-code tables adjusted for general economic trends. From that measure we might get an idea of how much of the 20% gap we can fill with more/better innovation. Airdrie Innovation Institute was born to promote the methods to people living and working in Airdrie.

We debated whether to name it the Airdrie Prosperity Institute. 20% Greater Prosperity is our goal. However our method is specific: innovation. (versus just working longer hours, or sweating harder as you work faster). So we could have used a longer name such Airdrie Prosperity Through Innovation Institute. It's not all business profits we seek to enhance: non-profits, public sector, hobbyists, homemakers and other categories of roles and existence also can benefit their stakeholders and customers from innovating in value creation. Not all value is priced in the marketplace. And -as business think tank Conference Board of Canada commented recently about our Innovation Doldrums- we could benefit from better over-all innovation climate and culture. So if our young learners, home-makers and non-profits are all boosting their innovation, that helps with the overall climate and culture of innovation, which feeds back into a virtuous cycle of value creation and prosperity.

'Institute' might not be the best word for us. We aren't experts here. Rather we search for and read books written by experts, and we try and imagine their advice applied to your situation in Airdrie, and pick a few of the best ones. Promoting more and better ways to innovate: "Helping you achieve more Prosperity from More and Better Methods and Culture of Innovation in Airdrie" might be a good subtitle.

But we were thinking of fixing Canada's productivity gap too. So Airdrie has become our test city for figuring out ways to close the gap. If we can fix it in Airdrie, then we can roll it across Canada. Boosting Canada's GDP by 20%. Not impossible if culture is really a factor. 'Just' change the culture.

But there may be very good reasons why Canadians would have a different level of risk tolerance: it just might be harder to recover from mistakes on a tight budget. And Canadians might be on a tighter budget. In that case if we want to hold our risk exposure constant while doing more innovating, we need new ways to reduce risks associated with innovating. And one way to do that is to shop for and adopt or create innovation methods or processes that reduce risk. And to 'just' change the culture everyone needs to know how to use them.

That's what we're trying to do at AII: find risk-reducing innovation processes and make it easy for everyone to understand and use them.

So there's a chain of efforts and impacts:

Disseminated risk-reducing insights and processes -> culture -> innovation -> productivity -> prosperity.

"Prosperity through productivity, productivity through innovation, innovation through culture, culture through disseminated insights and processes, in Airdrie Alberta Canada" How's that for a by-line?

Airdrie Innovation Institute 2013