Principled Innovation LLC

A fantastic song about innovation

April 22nd, 2007

Stanford student Gus Bitdinger has written and recorded a fantastic song about innovation as a final project for an innovation course led by Professor Robert Sutton. The complete background on the song and how it came to be is available on Professor Sutton’s The Working Life blog.What I love about the song is how Gus incorporates ideas from the outstanding book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by the late Gordon MacKenzie. Readers of this blog know that Orbiting is one of my favorite books on creativity and innovation, and I have given away many copies as gifts over the last several years. Gordon’s advice to sustain creativity by orbiting the hairball of accepted organizational policies and practices is as relevant and important for associations as it is for the large companies about which Gus sings.

As the video points out, some names have been changed to protect the work of certain virtuous innovators who visited with the class. My suggestion is that when you reach a point in the video when someone’s name is bleeped, insert your own name or the name of your association.

You can find this video on YouTube if you would like to comment on it directly.

UPDATE: When the feed for this post showed up in my Google Reader, the video was not a part of it. I don’t know why that happened, but I can assure all of you who received that feed that I did post the video to my blog directly.

Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, We Have Always Done It That Way, Videos

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