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This week\u2019s guest is also an innovation guru, and has been around for years. Jeff DeGraff, known as the \u201cDean of Innovation,\u201d is a business professor at the University of Michigan, He is an author and a respected thought leader on innovation. We will discuss social responsibility and his new book, \u201cThe Creative Mindset.\u201d
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\nJeff\u2019s Background
\nAfter graduating from grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jeff met a man who worked for someone who owned a twenty-million-dollar pizza company\u2014 Domino\u2019s. He turned down a job offer from an Ivy League school to join the team. Five years later, they sold the company for five-billion-dollars to Mitt Romney.
\nNot long after, Jeff was recruited to teach at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. He didn\u2019t want to teach MBAs because he thought they were dull and drab, but that is why they wanted him there.
\nTwo Faces of Innovation
\nInnovation creates concave value or things that are presently manifesting and convex value\u2014long-term issues. These types have to be measured entirely differently. People tend to think about innovation from the tangible side of it. In places like Iowa State, they have substantial innovation impacts, but no one sees them because they are research influence-based and not tangible products. Consumers tend to see only the result.
\nWhen it comes to a\xa0COVID-19\xa0vaccine in the U.S, many different startups and big pharmaceutical companies have been working and building off of old research to create one. They have to figure out how to make billions of doses of the vaccine once completed. It\u2019s a lot more complicated than people think it is. Big innovation is composed of a lot of moving parts.
\nThe Creative Mindset
\nJeff grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood and in an age of innovation viewed as a social responsibility. There are many creativity books out there nowadays. They are what Jeff calls \u201cnew age-y.\u201d In his book, he took what he thought was the real research on\xa0creativity\xa0and put it in layman\u2019s terms for everyone to use. The Creative Mindset focuses on taking ordinary things and making them extraordinary.
\nJeff wants to re-install the old way of building things through developing learning and trying new things. He uses what he calls the six skills through the mnemonic device CREATE (Clarify, Replicate, Elaborate, Associate, Translate, and Evaluate). The book gives tools in a simplified form to somebody trying to grow and make something better.
\nI got invited to do a keynote speech for Vail Resorts several years ago. With a raise of hands, I asked how many people think of themselves as creative. It was quite a shock to see that many people didn\u2019t raise their hands. People think it takes a select type of person to be creative, which is not true. We all have natural strengths that vary from person to person. The object is to recognize your strength, build on it, and find other people with different strengths.
\nAdvice for the Listeners
\nPeople refer to Jeff as the \u201cDean of Innovation.\u201d When he went to work at Domino\u2019s, people often threw challenging problems at him. When he got to the University of Michigan, some of his students went on to be famous. The name stuck.
\nAs far as advice goes, Jeff says that\xa0innovation happens from the outside-in, like a bell curve. Its easier to change 20% of the company\u2019s 80% than changing 80% of its 20%. Secondly, diversity your gene pool. All the people in Jeff\u2019s labs are different than him. Thirdly,