Читать книгу Driving Eureka! - Doug Hall - Страница 49

The quantitative research improved the effectiveness of Eureka! Ranch client projects. It also opened up new opportunities.

In May 2001, Graeme Crombie, from the consultancy group Matrix in Glasgow, engaged Maggie Nichols and myself to teach our system approach to innovation in Scotland. Today, Graeme and his team use Innovation Engineering to help companies across Scotland and Ireland.

On a less significant note, it opened up opportunities for me to serve as a judge on the first season of ABC TV’s reality program American Inventor. And, in Canada, I hosted another reality TV program with Maggie Nichols and Maggie Pfeifer of the Eureka! Ranch called Backyard Inventor.

The rigor and originality of the research also caught the eyes of the leadership of the University of Maine and the University of Prince Edward Island, each of whom presented me with honorary doctorate degrees.

The University of Maine was so excited that President Bob Kennedy, with the support of Hemant Pendse, Jake Ward, and Renee Kelly, committed to an experimental course in Innovation. During the fall of 2005, the first Innovation Engineering course was taught at the University of Maine with Margo Lukens, Darrell Donahue, and Liz Downing teaching nine pioneering students.

In 2009 I took a sabbatical from the Eureka! Ranch and lived on campus to help build version 1.0 of the Innovation Engineering courses. On December 10, 2009, following an event in Freeport, Maine, with business owners, it became clear that Innovation Engineering had to move from the campus to the business world. On a conference call with Renee Kelly of the University of Maine and Maggie Nichols and Scott Dunkle of the Eureka! Ranch, the Innovation Engineering movement as a commercial leadership science was born. During January of 2010, at the Sugarloaf Ski Resort, we ran the first three-day Innovation Engineering Leadership Institute. The program was raw and rough. Despite that, the reaction from CEOs of large and small companies in attendance was overwhelmingly positive.

The response we received at Sugarloaf indicated that the world was ready for system-driven innovation. To be honest, I also think we got lucky, as the recession of 2008 had opened up leadership to the need to do something different. They knew they needed to innovate, and, frankly, the “guru” approach wasn’t working for them with its 5% to 15% success rate.