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Five (Easy) Steps to Innovation?
Tags:NCTI Conference '07, NewsConference day approaches, and with it office talk about the nuts and bolts of innovation. Putting together some materials for the big day, the NCTI team worked through the process of creating new technologies and tools for students with special needs. With five main steps, five disciplines, five sets of skills to bring the next generation of innovations to the classroom, homework table and the world outside the school, bringing about innovation is a pretty complex job:
- Education researchers investigate new theories and approaches, even product ideas to feed the innovation engine.
- Product Developers make concrete tools — devices, software and other products — based upon research, their own observations or even intuition.
- Entrepreneurs & Funders provide the money and skills to monetize newly created tools.
- Marketers and Salespeople spread the word about developed products.
- Schools, teachers and parents buy the tools, apply them and hope they work.
Setting new ideas into motion does not necessarily follow the same path, in the same order, each time. The process may be straight as an arrow starting with researchers and ending in the schools. Other times, it may look like a cycle, punctuated with extra feedback loops and reviews to improve effectiveness, address technical challenges, incorporate suggestions from the field or respond to newly identified needs in the marketplace. Putting together the pieces of innovation is not a solitary or necessarily quick activity.
Without being an expert in every stage of the innovation process most participants might have a question or two about transforming ideas into products, montetizing (making money) from AT oriented innovations, and validating their research basis. Others surely have some great advice to share.
So here’s a question (and please share your answer by leaving a comment below):
As a researcher, product developer, funder, marketer, or AT product purchaser, what is one suggestion you could make to others for creating real solutions or generating bright ideas?
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