It’s the product, not the process… but what if the product is a process

C|Net has an interesting interview with Chris Heatherly from Disney. At one point he refers to innovation:

I think too many people confuse innovation and technology. I have seen a lot of designers try to make a mediocre concept innovative by putting Bluetooth or some other whiz bang technology du jour in it. That’s not innovation. It’s cheating. Innovation is about solving problems for people.

Before that he talks about the innovation process:

Steve Jobs was asked how they systematize innovation at Apple and he said “We don’t. We hire good people.” I think a lot of talk about innovation amounts to a lot of dancing about architecture. People get caught up in trying to have an innovative “process” instead of having their values where they should be – making great product.

Well this is all fine and good for a technology company that puts out something physical, but what about teachers – the product is a learning process… isn’t it?

I’m thinking that it is and isn’t at the same time. If you are trying to be innovative in teaching, you should not be reaching out for the latest technology tool to drop into your course (product). You should be trying to solve the problem by looking around the problem. So, if you have low test scores, are they because the students are not getting the 4D quantum equations, or is it something else?

If this is all process, maybe the students are missing some of the basic math. It is likely that there are “drill and kill” tools available to help with the basics. The best place for technology might be to put in a quiz there and then use discussions to take and apply those basics later on.

But if you think about the end point of each learning stage as a product, then you might allow students a raft of ways to get to each one of those check points. What to integrate? I don’t know know, but I’ll bet you the students will – they might need discussions for one part and exercises for another and stories for yet another. The trick? Identifying  those checkpoints.

So for teaching, you can innovate in both the process and the product… I think…

FF3b4 note – OSX spell checking is not supported 🙁