I was reading an article yesterday, don’t even remember what it was about, but my mind went to when I was a kid and I became fascinated with cross-pollinating my mom’s African Violets. I was constantly trying to come up with cool color combos of white and purples – something new: Innovation, African Violet Style…
Usually when people speak about innovation and plants, the metaphor is one of seeds and planting. I like that metaphor, but one that is even more rich is the metaphor of pollination. After all, pollination is the process by which flowers reproduce. It’s how flowers survive (and have survived for millions of years!). The mixing of genetic material results in new fruit, new flowers that have the best (and/or worst) of the parent plants. It’s just like ideas. Different ideas commingle and the result is often a fantastic amalgam of the parent ideas.
Not surprisingly, the innovation/pollination metaphor can be taken much further. But, before we do, let’s do a quick primer in plant reproductive biology.
Pollen (see the diagram below), which originates on the Anthers of the Stamen, gets carried via various mechanisms, to the Stigma of the Pistil. Once Pollen lands there, a tube grows down the Style so that the sperm nuclei can be conducted to the ovules. That’s it. Fertilization occurs and a fruit is the result. 
To flesh out some more ways in which innovation is like pollination, I made a simple mindmap describing various types of flowers and the processes by which fertilization occurs. Here it is:
So, how else can we learn to innovate by looking at the pollination metaphor? Let’s walk around the above mindmap starting at the lower right and flesh this out.
- Wind. It’s effective for some plants, but not for all. Plants that use the wind usually don’t rely on much else and they usually don’t have fancy flowers. The wind does all the work and the rest is up to chance. You probably Read the rest of this entry »
