Contextual Competence

and (IT) Innovation

Hasindu Galbadage
UCSC
 INTRODUCTION

Born in 1981
Wife & Daughter
Love Travelling,Enjoy Nature and Music

BCSc
MCSc
UCSC First Batch Worked for
14 years in
IT Industry Several Companies
 CULTURE MATTERS!

As we may come from different cultures, we

are carrying different values and ideas.

Think of these as the content in an invisible

backpack.

All of us have such a backpack. We cannot take it off

and we cannot change its content.

It is good to know what we may have in our backpack

and what others may have in their backpacks.
 THE TAXI RIDE

Having ability to Drive the vehicle Finding the Way

NEW DRIVER to the Pickup Location

Knowing the Way

to the Destination

Treating the driver nicely

Understanding the Customers Requirements

e.g. take me to a nice coffee shop
• Being able to understand what is a nice
coffee shop?
• Knowing some coffee shops that would be
regarded as nice
 THE IT PROJECT

Ability to write code Meeting up with the Clients in a dialogue

(drive the car) (knowing the way to the pickup location and treating the
customer nicely)

Being able to convert the

Customer Requirements to
a relevant solution
Being able to capture the proposal
Customers Requirements (suggesting a nice coffee shop)
and coming up with a
Solution Proposal meeting
those requirements
(Understanding the customers
requirements)
 WHAT IS COMPETENCE?
Tacit knowledge (implicit competence)
Learning from imitating colleagues, apprenticeship,
experience etc.
Formal Competence + Tacit Knowledge
= Competence
UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPECTATION
AND WAYS TO MEET IT.
No point of being a
very good runner,
Need to know and Understand the Technology.
if you are running in
the wrong direction!

Need to know and Understand the Business

Purpose the technology will serve.

Both these Perspectives has to be Understood!

THE COMPETENCE LADDER

Unconscious Incompetence

Conscious Incompetence

Conscious Competence

Unconscious competence
YOUR PERCEPTION OF YOUR TASK WILL
DIFFER WITH COMPENTENCE?
You will understand the purpose of your task very differently,
depending on your competence.
- Scania: Engine Optimisation

Operator Optimizing a Operator measuring

running engine Carbon Dioxide

Operator making checking

the behaviour of a truck
 UNDERSTANDING THE PURPOSE

•What is the Customer asking?

•What is the underlying Customer

need (not necessarily explicitly
requested)?

www.crowderia.com
IT IS IMPORTANT TO ASK!

“SIX HONEST SERVING MEN I had,

they taught me all I know.”

Their names are:

IT IS IMPORTANT TO ASK!

WHY
WHAT
WHEN
HOW
WHERE
WHO
Creativity ? Innovation ?
 Some quotations on Creativity

Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework

within which the problems were created
- Albert Einstein

Creativity is connecting things

- Steve Jobs
What is Creativity?

• It is a necessity for Innovation

• In business the creative outcome can be an idea for service, product,
or process.

“The production of novel and useful ideas”

What makes people creative?
Ways of Enhancing Personal Creativity

1. Accept there’s no right answer

2. Don’t follow the rules
3. Be foolish
4. Ask ‘What if?’
5. Think outside your area
6. Go for ambiguity
7. Believe in yourself
1. No Right Answer

• The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of

ideas
• Change your question (eg IBM should have thought
in terms of solutions to problems, not computing
hardware)
• Avoid workplaces with a culture of uniformity
2. Don’t Follow The Rules

• We make rules based on reasons that make sense

• We follow these rules
• Time passes, things change
• The original reasons for the rules no longer exist,
but because the rules are still in place, we continue
to follow them
Don’t Follow The Rules : Example

•Q W E R T Y U I O P
Examples of Rule-Breaking Creativity
Who How?

Columbus Broke the rule that to travel East you cannot go West

Copernicus Broke the rule that the universe is anthropocentric

Einstein Broke the rules of Newtonian physics by equating mass and

energy as different forms of the same phenomenon

General Motors Broke Ford’s rule of any colour, as long as it’s black

Butterfly Stroke Broke the rules of ‘arm recovery’ in breaststroke

Henry VIII Broke the rule that the Pope should hold sway in England

Bell Labs Broke the rule that electrons need to travel in a vacuum for signal
processing
3. Be Fool-ish: Examples
Think against the conventional flow, like the fool in
Shakespearean times

Case Area

19th century physician Edward Jenner in Small pox vaccinations

looking for a small pox cure, looked not at
those with small pox, but those without

Alfred Sloan and his disapproval of Car industry

“groupthink”, retabled motions where
everyone agreed

1334 siege of Hocharterwitz castle in Austria Survival

4. Ask “What If?”
• Ask “what if” someone else were solving your problem for you,
eg
• Churchill
• Machiavelli
• Freud
• Ghandi
• Mozart

• 5 minute exercise : ‘What if’ someone else were

running this session on creativity. How would they
organise/structure it?
5. Think outside your area: Examples

• 1. Read fiction and stimulate your imagination

• 2. Go to places you wouldn’t normally go (eg a junk
yard, a fairground)
• 3. Develop the explorer’s attitude : the outlook
that wherever you go, there are ideas out there
• (4. When you hit on an idea, write it down)
6. Go For Ambiguity

“If you tell people where to go, but not how to get
there, you’ll be amazed at the results”

George S Patton (American General)

Ambiguity As Found In The Workplace

• Non hierarchical organisation

• Tolerance (or even encouragement) of different approaches
• Broad goals defined, but little else
Believe in Yourself

Lack of creativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy (as

substantiated by research!)
Can you solve this puzzle?
Can you solve this puzzle?
What is Innovation?
• Innovation is the process and outcome of creating
something new, which is also of value.

• Innovation involves the whole process from opportunity

identification, ideation or invention to development,
prototyping, production marketing and sales, while
entrepreneurship only needs to involve commercialization
(Schumpeter).

Innovation = Creativity + Commercialization

What is innovation?

• Schumpeter argued that innovation comes about

through new combinations made by an
entrepreneur, resulting in
• a new product,
• a new process,
• opening of new market,
• new way of organizing the business
• new sources of supply
What Counts as Innovation?

• It depends on how the world sees you

• Is there ‘demand’ for the new thing (eg., a market,
buyers, users)
• Is there a ‘business case’ for it? (Cost/value
model)
• Is there a ‘benefit’ for the customer (greater
income, lower cost, amusement)?
• What happens when these change?
What is the most important shortcoming
of the following description of
innovation?
“Innovation concerns the generation of ideas for new device, method,
or material for application to commercial or practical objectives.”

a) The definition disregards that innovation concerns the act of

introducing something
b) The definition wrongly stated that innovation should always
concern something new.
c) The definition disregards that innovation also concerns
commercial success
d) The definition wrongly states that innovation serves commercial
or practical objectives
The corresponding Classic Bell-Shaped
Adopters Curve

Many studies have looked at how these groups differ:

Innovators are highly cosmopolite and open to new things.
Early adopters tend to be opinion leaders.
Early majority provide “legitimization” of the innovation.
Late majority are skeptical.
Laggards put trust in the status quo.
Big Technology Innovations Of 2018

AI-powered robot microscopes will help clean up the world’s water

supplies
• Water shortage is a problem that could affect up to
a quarter of the world’s population by 2025. The
behavior of microscopic plankton can give vital
clues on everything from chemical pollution levels
to temperature change.
Innovation/creativity: conclusions

• Creativity CAN be learned . If your

organisation/group doesn’t make use of specific
creative techniques, why not introduce them?
• Be willing to think ‘whacky’ thoughts - collectively
these can spark excellent ideas.
• Be constantly receptive – creativity comes from the
most unlikely sources!
THANK
YOU!