An outgrowth of the #EventProfs Twitter group, the inaugural Event Camp Twin Cities (ECTW) was conceived of as a meetings-industry laboratory, with new ideas percolating throughout the two-day conference.

"First, we replaced two-thirds of the conference chairs with exercise balls and couches," said event-technology consultant and ECTW organizer Samuel Smith. Both new options proved popular. "Late in the day," he said, "you could see that the people in the chairs were slumping, the people on the balls were bouncing, and that the people on the couches were happy."

Second, ECTW webcast its conference sessions, using a virtual studio specially built on site, and hired a virtual emcee, Emilie Barta, to represent the voice of the virtual audience in the room. Barta also hosted three 20-minute "behind-the-sessions" programs designed especially for remote attendees, and acted as the virtual participants' group leader during group projects. "Emilie did a great job of connecting with the remote attendees - talking directly to them, responding to their comments and questions via Twitter," Smith said. "It was a real dialogue." Plus, the behind-the-sessions shows kept virtual attendees connected while face-to-face attendees were on a break.

The results were "unbelievable," Smith said. ECTW's webcast statistics showed that some attendees tuned in to the event for six hours or more. "We hoped to keep people for two hours at most," he said.

There were 75 in-person attendees in Minneapolis - plus 10 people in Dallas and 15 in Basel, Switzerland, gathered together to participate virtually, joining 135 more virtual attendees who were registered as the event began. "When we got the final statistics, we had more than 550 online participants live during the event," Smith said. "And we had more than 500 people watch the event [on ECTW's website] afterward."

- Barbara Palmer

In his just-published book, Innovation Is Everybody's Business, speaker, consultant, and bestselling author Robert B. Tucker explores four principles about innovation:
1. Innovation isn't something you do after you get your work done. It's how you do your work.
2. Innovation is about more than inventing new products. It's about figuring out how to add value where you are.
3. You can innovate in any job, any department, or any organization.
4. Innovation is about taking action.

To those who think that they don't have time to innovate, Tucker has this to say:

According to Harvard researcher Juliet Shorr, if you're employed, you're putting in 163 hours more each year (an extra month) than a similar person in the workforce 30 years ago. Clearly, "doing more with less" often means "doing more with fewer people." You and I are besieged with day-to-day, minute-to-minute demands and pressures like never before:

- The typical manager in a large organization now receives in excess of 150 e-mails a day, according to Gallup.
- According to the American Management Association, employees spend almost two hours reading and responding to these messages.
- Knowledge workers get interrupted, on average, every three minutes, according to research by the University of California, Irvine.
- Nielsen reports that, as of 2008, people sent and received an average of seven phone calls and 12 text messages each day.
- Fully 25 percent of employees at large companies say their communications - voice mail, e-mail, and meetings - are nearly completely unmanageable, according to a McKinsey survey of more than 7,800 workers around the world.

The result of all these intrusions? Employees are overconnected, overcommitted, overworked, and overwhelmed. One in three report their communications are "out of control."

Is it any wonder that one of the most common barriers to innovation that my client surveys reveal is "lack of time to innovate"? It inhibits creativity by crowding out reflection time that can produce fresh approaches. If you can't find time, how can you gather information about an idea, or catch up on your reading, or dream up your next breakthrough?

Nevertheless, "lack of time to innovate" is an assumption. The question at the heart of this assumption is this: If you and your colleagues had more time, would you produce more innovation? Would there be a greater tendency to discover and implement better processes, products, and services? Would hiring more people and cutting people's workload lead to more innovation? Or would the tendency be to simply expand the remaining workload to fill the available time?

Here's what I discovered: An abundance of time does not guarantee more creative output any more than a lack of time always means less innovation.

Innovators often point to a time crunch to meet a deadline that led them to stop ignoring a problem and come up with a novel solution. During such times, the inadequacies of present processes, methods, and procedures become obvious. In crunch times, the sales rep in the field office, when trying to process a rush order, has a "there's got to be a better way" moment and comes up with an idea to find that better method. The team preparing in haste for the industry trade show comes up with ideas that dramatically improve next year's planning. The marketing team, busy preparing a bid proposal by the promised deadline, is spurred to rethink its system so that next time doesn't require an all-nighter.

All of these are examples of how assaulting assumptions can turn the "lack of time" from a barrier to a catalyst. Capacity is a state of mind. An innovation begins where assumptions end.

To Tucker, innovation is an opportunity mindset, and he provides seven ways to activate that way of thinking:

1. Listen to consciously shift your perspective.
2. Think small.
3. Listen for "there's got to be a better way" mutterings.
4. Pay attention to happy accidents.
5. Look for problems customers have that aren't being solved.
6. Look for opportunities to eliminate non-value-adding work.
7. Think big.

About thinking small:

During the preparation phase of an assignment, my client will often say something like, "You should know that our people think of innovation as the big stuff - breakthrough products and business models and quantum-leap process innovations. What we'd really like you to get across to them is that we need them to look for the little stuff, too - opportunities in the work they do every single day."

My response: "Gladly."

Adopting the opportunity mindset is not only about discovering the big stuff. It's also about finding opportunities day to day.
University of Massachusetts professor Alan Robinson watched in amazement as a receptionist at an Ohio industrial company was awarded "Innovator of the Year." After the ceremony, he asked her how she had come up with so many ideas.

"Simple," she explained. "Customers call us all day long, and sometimes they are unhappy about something we did or failed to do. Instead of getting defensive, I look at it as an opportunity. They tell me what we did to make them unhappy, and then I ask my favorite question."

"What's that?" Professor Robinson [asked].

"I ask them what we should do to fix the problem so it never occurs again. And they're more than happy to tell me. All I did was write up their suggestions and submit them to our New Ideas Program, and that's how I got the award."
Start by identifying opportunities right where you are - the smaller, the better. Seek opportunities to improve how you get your work done. Build your reputation by producing tangible results for your boss, your department, and yourself.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons Inc. (www.wiley.com), from Innovation Is Everybody's Business: How to Make Yourself Indispensible in Today's Hypercompetitive World, by Robert B. Tucker © 2010 by Robert B. Tucker.