“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain” is a saying that I’m sure you’ve heard. And in many cases (to use another mountain metaphor) when organizations are talking about innovation I’m sure it can sometimes feel like you’re in the Greek myth of Sisyphus — spending an eternity rolling a boulder uphill only to watch it come back down again.
Some corporate entities are tired of trying to build innovation in isolation, and are instead going to the innovation that already exists.
One example is at the Columbus Idea Foundry, the subject of this month’s Uniquely Columbus.
Capture the vibe
With the innovative-oriented thinking in makerspaces, CIF COO Casey McCarty says they’ve attracted interest from a number of corporate entities like Fuse by Cardinal Heath, which will actually have space at the facility, or VSP, one of the nation’s largest vision insurance providers that has a regional office in the area.
McCarty says the CIF already has the impromptu creative collaborations that look at how to solve a problem from a number of different skill sets because everybody has widely different experiences.
And this is what so many companies are searching for.
“They say, ‘Can we get some people, boots on the ground, in this collaborative space where people are making and doing and hacking and prototyping and experimenting?’” she says.
Answering the ‘now what?’
One of the CIF’s greatest assets is its community and network, McCarty says.
Any company can get a 3-D printer or laser, but the biggest piece of the puzzle can be the institutional knowledge of how to use those things or more specifically what those things mean in context.
“If you just arbitrarily place things that you would find in makerspaces in ordinary day-job environments, there’s a big ‘Now what?’” she says. “Nobody uses those things or they can’t see what you would do with them.”
The beauty of a place like the CIF or other makerspaces, McCarty says, is that you have examples of different people doing wildly different things all over the place.
They can use that to spark their own creativity, saying things like, “Oh, I never would have thought to use this laser for that.”
The community around you can inspire you, versus tools or people just sitting in isolation, McCarty says.
