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<\/p>\nTools for the Era of Open Innovation<\/b><\/p>\n
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A shift in the knowledge landscape has introduced a new era – the era of open innovation. Long gone are the days of Edison and Tesla battling one another in their private laboratories. A new era dawns: one of purposeful sharing of insights and discoveries internally and externally, embracing the mindset of the collective genius and the reality that not all of the good ideas will come from any one lab or tribe. Take our Leadership and Global Perspectives Doctor of Ministry program for example. Dr. Loren Kerns has embodied this principle by making public much of the inner-workings of the track: the flow of the project, the courses, the reading list, and even the minute by minute of our recent advance. He knows two things: others programs will be sharpened by this openness, and it\u2019s not simply altruism – he also knows that his own program will improve by others\u2019 interaction with this disclosure.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This era of Open Innovation produces an overwhelming amount of writing, thoughts, and data. How does one decide what information to consume? And at what depth? In other words, how can others effectively navigate, learn, glean and apply this massive amount of information? Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren provide some helpful tools for the era of open innovation in their classic work, <\/span>How to Read a Book. <\/span><\/i>Perhaps most helpful is their help discerning what to read, how fast to read, and what to be reading for.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What to Read<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A quick Amazon search in their book store delivers over 40,000 results. Adler frees the completionist by asserting, \u201cMany books are hardly worth even skimming\u201d (p.38). The vast majority of these books are drivel, containing one basic idea (at most), and aimed at making a quick buck. A supplement to Adler\u2019s book for the Internet Age would be most welcomed. The world wide web is immensely helpful in helping determine if a book is even worth the time to skim, let alone read slowly. Reviews, star-ratings, endorsements, paragraph-long summaries, and frequency of purchase are all helpful in discerning what to read. I offer one pithy piece of advice: If in the short summary, a different book, author, or work is mentioned, drop the book summarized, and go directly to the source of that quote.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How Fast to Read<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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<\/a>In the innovation ecosystem, words like \u201cagile,\u201d \u201crapid,\u201d and just about every other synonym for \u201cquick\u201d reign supreme. One would easily think that these adjectives should also apply to reading. Adler gives a sense of pause to that thought by stating, \u201cWith regard to rates of reading, then, the ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read <\/span>