Personal Innovation as Career-fit

Oliver Ding
CALL4
Published in
22 min readMay 25, 2021

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Discover Pairs of Opposite Themes of career experience and beyond

There are many ways for achieving personal innovation. One way is reflecting on your career experience. Inspired by a previous article Platform Innovation as Concept-fit, I created the above diagram for my own personal innovation.

I use Career-fit to name this new framework. The Career-fit framework has four key words: Experience > Themes > Projects > Opportunities. It roughly suggests the following five steps for personal innovation:

  • Reflect on career experience
  • Discover pairs of opposite themes
  • Fit all pairs of opposite themes
  • Join or initiate relevant projects
  • Fit career themes with career opportunity

The above diagram shows three Pairs of Opposite Themes of my career experience.

  • China v.s. America
  • Theory v.s. Practice
  • Concept v.s. Diagram

If you read my previous articles, you probably know a term called Themes of Practice. The term refers to a bridge between individual life themes and collective cultural themes. Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical “themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and…

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Oliver Ding
CALL4

Founder of CALL(Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.