By: Deborah Johnson Wood
On May 7, the great grandniece of Thomas Edison will bring her unique style of teaching innovative thought methods to Frederik Meijer Gardens for a one-day workshop.
Sarah Miller Caldicott, author of Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor, says that for America’s workforce to become globally competitive, employers and employees need to take risks, engage in whole-brain thinking and work collaboratively or they will never move from the industrial mindset to the information-age mindset.
“Most of us think of Edison as the lone guy in the lab and it’s not true; he created teams,” says Miller Caldicott, who also founded the consulting firm Power Patterns. “He started over 150 companies and had thousands of employees in his organizations. In the information age, information and authority needs to flow horizontally in a flat organization. Edison’s organizations were set up as flat organizations.”
She goes on to say that Edison taught his teams how to think innovatively.
“Using his methods, we can teach employers and employees how to shift their patterns to more innovation oriented patterns,” Miller Caldicott says.
Workshop participants will learn about Edison’s Five Competencies of Innovation through a series of hands-on exercises. The afternoon session focuses on the fifth competency: how to generate volume.
“Edison was a master at commercializing his ideas. We’ll demonstrate how to bring innovation into the business plan and how to look at markets and customers from new perspectives.”
Hosts of the workshop are The Right Place, Inc. and its InnovationWorks team. For more information, click here.
Source: Sarah Miller Caldicott, Power Patterns
Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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