New Ideas for the New Year | From the Bell Tower

We'd do well, says Steven Bell, to explore beyond libraries for the ideas that will sustain us.

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 01/14/2010

It’s one thing to talk about finding new ideas and quite another to actually discover them. Even when individuals or organizations have great ideas and can implement them, sustaining even one over time is incredibly difficult. That’s why so many businesses fail after prolonged periods of success, a challenge explored by Roger Martin in his latest book, The Design of Business. In it he explains the fundamental path traveled by businesses as they proceed from origination to success and then on to new success or ultimate obsolescence.

According to Martin, new ideas evolve from mysteries. How could you serve a truly inexpensive yet tasty meal and do it again and again with accuracy so that you could serve it in one minute or less? How could you allow people to get their email on tiny devices in a way so simple and fast they would actually find this new technology indispensible? How could higher education be systematically delivered online at convenient times and at low cost to the learner? The world is full of mysteries waiting for solutions.

Exploration and exploitation
Call this the exploration stage when ideas emerge from mysteries. But once they solve the mystery and exit the exploration stage, most companies move on to the exploitation stage. That is, they mine the same idea again and again until people tire of it or, in many cases, a competitor observes and understands that a new mystery is evolving and derives a superior solution.

American higher education has shown little fundamental change since the 19th century when the predecessor of the modern university first emerged. Curricular structures, credit systems, and grading scales are fundamental ideas exploited endlessly. The longevity of the modern college or university, and their libraries, is amazing. To have fundamentally stayed the same over centuries and survive is admirable, but now a host of e-competitors exploring a new mystery are grabbing a growing share of higher education’s traditional learners. Are the cracks in the foundation finally starting to show?

What is our new mystery?
You’ve probably heard library pundits say things like, “we should have come up with that idea” or “librarians should have figured that out first” in response to disruptive innovations such as Google and Amazon. The more likely truth is that this profession had a zero probability of forging any great new ideas for harnessing the information on the Internet or mass distribution of digital content.

Like those obsolete businesses Martin discusses, we have been content to exploit the same basic idea (acquire, store, organize, provide access to information) again and again—for centuries now. We fail to see the new mysteries that others see, and while they explore and exploit the new ideas, we trundle along on our merry way to impending irrelevance. Like higher education, academic librarianship is good at leveraging the latest technology for innovation, such as SMS reference, but it’s the same basic idea that’s being exploited. Why are we so challenged to identify and explore new mysteries?

New sources for new ideas
That question has no easy answers. One strategy for change could involve inviting new professionals from non-traditional backgrounds with a non-library education to help shake things up by seeing our essential mission from a uniquely different perspective. It would also help if academic librarians were open to exploring new possibilities and listening when those ideas come from new members of the profession.

We might also employ strategies to encourage ourselves to discover new mysteries or identify new ways to explore existing ones. One way to do that is to begin looking outside academic librarianship and higher education for new mysteries and ideas. This can be as simple as reading publications from other fields or connecting with professionals who work in them.

All too often we look for solutions internally when it may be that a solution is already available externally, just waiting to be adapted to our profession. That’s the point of Chip and Dan Heath’s (authors of Made To Stick) article on “A Problem Solver’s Guide to Copycatting” in which they share ideas for copying ideas from unexpected sources (e.g., animal species). If this is such a good idea, why do we see so much exploitation and so little exploration? According to the Heaths, “the biggest barrier to the idea hunt, in fact, may be you. It may never occur to you to start searching because we all commonly keep our thinking penned up within our company or industry.”

Learn from the users
Another idea that was embraced by designers long ago and is currently getting some promotion in the popular press is one of the simplest for identifying and solving new mysteries: listen to and observe the people who use, and even those who don’t use, your services and resources. After coming up with a good initial idea, Twitter outsourced its idea generation to its users. The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features. Twitter recently introduced two new features, Lists and Retweets, that began as user-generated ideas.

In a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, stated that “We start with the customer and we work backward. We learn whatever skills we need to service the customer. We build whatever technology we need to service the customer.” As you read the interview you sense Amazon is a company with little desire to simply exploit the same idea until it’s completely exhausted.

One of the world’s most inventive companies, 3M, is at the forefront of a new movement creating “customer innovation centers.” Companies invite their customers to these centers to have them share the innovation process, and it allows company employees to gain a deep understanding of how the customers use the products. These firms are not content to just ask users what they want. Seeing customers in action allows them to identify and explore new mysteries.

In search of a few good ideas
See a trend here? The organizations that constantly look for and discover new mysteries and then re-invent themselves by emphasizing the importance of listening to and observing their users are all businesses. Those in higher education, and by extension, academic librarians, are slow to accept and are often mistrustful of adopting business practices. But to discover new ideas that keep us continually relevant to our user community members, we need to explore for new mysteries, and business may lead us in the right direction.

As I’ve written previously, librarians need not become obsessed business managers in order to adopt a few good ideas from the world of business. That’s exactly what the Heaths are encouraging us to do, and that idea is also a core point of a new research set titled The Business of Higher Education. Those working in higher education need not become commercialized in order to selectively identify and use business ideas. This set of books practices what it preaches by inviting business executives to contribute essays about lessons higher education can learn from private industry.

I hope that in this new year my academic librarian colleagues will keep an open mind about business as a source of new ideas, but also entertain the general idea that even though our profession and our libraries have existed for a rather long time, our sustainability over the long haul is not guaranteed. Now is the right time to once again explore the mysteries of why and how our faculty and students search for information, and how they acquire and organize information in a digital world. Like the explorers of old we must be adventurous in seeking out new territory to find new ideas to better serve our user community.

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