What We Can Learn About Innovation From Crows
Crows are everywhere – even in the field of innovation.
With this article we would like to share with you fascinating insights coming from an interesting Ted video with hacker and writer Joshua Klein about his fascination with crows. The video is about ten minutes long and documents examples of a variety of academic research and observations highlighting the intelligence of crows, including Joshua’s own experiments with a crow vending machine. The insights have been taken from an article published on Innovation Excellence. Pleas read below our favourite parts of the article or click through the full article at the bottom.
So, what can we learn about innovation from the crows in the video (or in real life)?
Well, two things for sure:
1. Goals help.
Crows are inspired to use their creativity in the pursuit of food. Rewards are not a panacea for humans, but can be useful from time to time, when properly framed and reinforced with the right inspiration – as long as you remember that the greatest reward for us humans is often to be acknowledged, to be seen and heard, and not a cheque in the post…
2. We must encourage people to be persistent.
If we let people be like squirrels, people won’t push through the difficulties that wicked problems present, and won’t get to the other side where wicked solutions are achieved. Look at how the crows in the video were led step by step to overcome smaller challenges that accumulated into a complex solution that people wouldn’t normally think the crows would have been capable of. How do you approach wicked problems?
These are just two links between the crows and innovation that we identified from the video.
What did you see?