beltconveyors

On Sunday, my nephew, Logan, was busily working on a homework assignment with his friends Ryan and Dillon. It was amazing what these three sixth-graders were doing. They created a video about the Himalayas, complete with slides culled from the inteet, homemade cardboard mountains, a painted-foam demonstration of how the mountains were formed, an action sequence involving India moving through the ocean to join the Asian continent, detailed explanations about the earth's crust, and the grand finale - Indian music played in unison on a cello, electric guitar, and trumpet. O.k., it was an, um, unusual way to score the piece, but I had to admire their boldness in charting new musical terrain.

It was amazing how much innovative thought these three kids put into their creation and in bringing it to the market (the market in this case being their teacher, Mr. Lee).

Even more amazing was the all-out fanatical mobilization of eight adults (all of the kids' parents, plus Kirk and myself) to execute the project after it hit an enormous speed bump. After spending hours trying to get their video on to a DVD for the class, Logan asked for help. Many hours later, the various parents who had tried to figure it out threw in the towel, got a little sleep, and went to work.

Since they were unable to transfer the video to DVD, my sister gave up her computer for the day (the one she needs for her business, by the way), so Logan could take it to class to play the video.

The kids tried to get the volume high enough for Mr. Lee to hear, but he couldn't hear it, and admonished them for wasting 30 minutes of class time. Believe me, I had a few choice words to describe Mr. Lee at that point, none of which can be printed in this newsletter.

He did, however, give them one more night to fix the problem.

That evening, as the tension mounted, it was an all-out technical SWOT team attack. Luckily for my family, I married an IT guy.

Even though Kirk doesn't do much hands-on work with computers these days, he dove in and started problem-solving, eventually finding an obscure program that was out on the inteet, which he downloaded and used to transfer the video to DVD. He is now the family hero.

In all, we estimated that the kids spent 15 hours creating the video and at least four more trying to transfer it to a DVD, and the adults spent a whooping 18 hours bringing the creation to life, while also pursuing their other work responsibilities, the ones associated with our jobs, that is. We were tempted to send Mr. Lee an invoice.

Now, here's the connection with innovative companies. Doesn't this make you wonder how the naturally creative and innovative processes of children, and the rabid enthusiasm of parents to support their kids' innovation, tu into the idea-crushing, soul-smashing bureaucracy of the workplace?

The pithy answer is that companies and markets are bigger and a lot more complicated, and adults don't care about their own ideas as much as their kids' ideas, and there's some truth in all that.