As many of the entries here will attest, improvisation is a fresh way of looking at familiar business scenarios like the Writers Guild Strike, at Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal taking the package, or at how Southwest Airlines employees are good ambassadors for their brand.

It is also a way of understanding scenarios that might not otherwise make traditional business sense, a way of resolving what seems to be a paradox. (Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said that the ability to resolve paradox is a major factor in the organization’s success.) Here is an example of a paradox that’s easily resolved when seen through the lens of improvisation.

My partner in GameChangers, LLC, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, the Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, pointed me to a recent post on eSchoolNews that contained this information: former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which builds and sells a low-cost ($200) computer called the OX that runs on a proprietary system, competes for customers in developing countries with Intel and Microsoft and their their bare-bones Classmate PC, which can run on Windows or Linux. At the same time, all three companies are collaborating. Intel has a seat on OLPC’s board and has invested money and given technical help to the organization. Microsoft is working to make a version of Windows that can run on the OX box.

What gives? (more…)