I firmly believe that as we move forward we will see the corporate environment liquefy. That is, we will have fewer and fewer monolithic companies that carry pretty much all the processes inside, and more and more partnerships and conglomerates of small companies that work together to accomplish certain things. The evolution of the information […]
The Mental Floss blog has an interesting post commenting a recent study by The Economist Intelligence Unit aimed at finding the most innovative countries in the world.
“The number of patents each country generated during those four years, per million people, was the primary method for determining the measure of innovation. As for the results? […]
Your wife would love receiving a diamond for her next birthday, but you are not sure if your wallet shares the same opinion? Maybe your problems are close to an end, as an article over the InnoBlog discusses.
The article, titled “Disruptive Diamonds,” illustrates how some companies are investing into a synthetic diamond manufacturing technology. Quoting […]
Inventions, Innovations, Patents, and Ideas - meet Web 2.0.
IdeaConnection.com is hoping to become a trading ground for ideas, new products, and innovation teams. No matter the industry, the age, or the experience, there is something for you to participate in.
IdeaConnection facilitates individual and corporate innovation, ideas, and solutions by offering access to an international pool […]
For a company the size if IBM, innovation is everything. Dell recognized the need to be more transparent in its product offerings, and IBM is following suit.
Thinkplace, ‘a web application for facilitating innovation through idea generation, collaboration, and refinement,’ appears to be on the right track. What Thinkplace does is provide a place for sharing, […]
Joseph Schumpeter started analyzing innovation management more than seventy years ago, and his theories and ideas are still influential among academics and business men. Recently, in fact, Harvard Business School’s professor Thomas McCraw released a book titled “Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.”
In the HBS Working Knowledge website there is an interesting […]
As we approach Enterprise 2.0, it is becoming more and more transparent what exact role corporate intranets have in the ‘innovational’ sector. There is quite a bit of discussion about intranets being able to innovate, but I would argue the opposite.
Programming and development is nothing more than a series of inputs and outputs. […]
According to a BusinessWeek article titled “Service Innovation: The Next Big Thing” the attention of managers and academics around the world are increasingly turning to this type of innovation. The latest demonstration was the creation of the Service Research & Innovation Initiative, which is backed by some tech giants like IBM and Oracle.
What strategy should companies use to develop their products and services on emerging markets? Innovation, obviously, or so say the majority of executive across corporate boards. BusinessWeek published an article with a preview of a study by Delloit titled “Innovation in Emerging Markets”.
Some authors, like Tom Peters, affirm that innovation peaked in popularity on the early nineties. Others argue that innovation is still widely discussed around the corporate boards, and that its importance will only grow as we move forward. Do you think the popularity of innovation is declining, stable or growing?
Sometime ago I already wrote about Starbucks, outlining my theory about why the giant coffee house is not present in Italy (click here to read). Looks like Starbucks it not passing a good moment after an internal memo leaked into the blogosphere (click here to read the memo). Basically the memo outlines Howard Schultz’ fears […]
Does geographical locations play an important role upon innovation? Certainly, and the New York Times recently published an article outlining why phenomena like the iPod, Google or eBay could only happen in Silicon Valley.
There is a very interesting article over BusinessWeek outlining the hype that the innovation term has gained lately. Most of the companies around the world are declaring that innovation is a building block of their strategy, but few of those companies actually grasp the true dynamics of innovation.
Mass collaboration and open innovation models are widely employed on “new economy” segments. Just think about Linux and the open source phenomenon or companies like Amazon.com and IBM that created products with the inputs of large third-party developer communities.
Last December the UK Design Council held in London the Competitiveness Summit 2006, with the main purpose of evaluating the implementation of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business. The CoxReview, published in November 2005, had a series of guidelines to foster creativity and innovation in UK.
All those factors certainly helped JVC, but there is arguably another one, more obscure, that influenced the final result: the porn industry went with the VHS format. The early home video rental stores were responsible for part of Betamax’s decline, and those stores carried a lot of pornographic content.
The Forbes magazine published an interesting list called “Top 10 Disrupters of 2006”. Bear in mind that the entries on the list can not necessarily be classified as disruptive innovations according to Clayton Christense’s traditional term (despite the fact that Christensen was among the panelists who voted for the list). They are rather breakthrough ideas and initiatives that had an impact upon the economic or social landscape in 2006. According to the article “our disrupters aren’t just companies who played the game and won; they are people or technologies that changed the game completely.”
A couple of weeks ago I announced that Chuck Frey was collecting “innovation lessons learned in 2006”. The Innovation Tools website already published the result, with almost 60 answers. Below you will find the most interesting ones (in my opinion):
If necessity is the mother of invention can we say that ambition is the mother of innovation? The most famous inventions that our society witnessed appeared as solutions for specific problems. The train appeared when the chariots were no longer suitable for covering long distance travels. The telephone was developed as soon as people started living scattered across the country. When the steam engine was no longer able to sustain the growing necessity for energy man came up the explosion engine based on fossil fuels.
Clayton Christensen just published an interesting article over Forbes magazine titled “An Innovation Home Run”. According to Christensen the major innovation is coming from the deeper connection that clubs are building with their core baseball consumers.
Wal-Mart recently started selling generic prescription drugs over its stores for $4. It is already covering 38 states throughout the United States and its portfolio includes more than 300 prescription drugs. The question that arises is: does this move from the giant retailer represent a disruptive innovation to traditional pharmacies?
New ideas are certainly the currency of the new economy, and they are also the fuel for most innovations. Despite that importance, though, many people still associate the generation of ideas with a lone genius, sitting on his desk and coming up with new things from scratch.
The open innovation approach, that is going beyond the corporate internal R&D for new ideas or products, seems to be gaining traction lately.
Some time ago on the article “7 Ways to Unlock Innovation” I had already defended the idea that companies must go beyond simple product innovations. BusinessWeek just published an article covering that topic.
Probably there are as many definitions of innovation as the number of supposed experts on the field around the world. Reading through my books and papers, though, I realized that I had no comprehensive list of the many definitions I have ever being in contact with, therefore I decided to create one.
There is a very interesting report from the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton analysing the figures and trends of innovation spending around the world.
What is Outside Innovation? According to Patricia Seybold, who wrote a very good book on the subject, “it’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services”.
Have you ever wondered why most companies, despite being very innovative, struggle to develop new valuable products or services for their customers? I mean, just enter the website of some large organization and you will probably see some “innovation bla bla” like “innovation is one of our core values” or “our innovative solutions will help you…”. In reality the vast of majority of the companies out there are not innovative, they just claim to be.
What about newspapers? The appearance of online news services, web portals and other media platforms such as blogs and wikis clearly represent a disruptive innovation for the traditional newspaper industry. Will the likes of NY Times and WSJ be able to survive such disruption?
User-driven innovation is a hot topic. Many companies are starting to realize that innovation can come not only from the Research & Development department but also from the interaction with partners, suppliers and customers.
Most organizations fail to sustain growth over the long term because they are not able to innovate on a systematic basis. Even when we talk about large, presumably successful companies there is a clear pattern where they create radical innovations once or twice, and after that they rely on “incrementalism”.
If we take a look at biological sciences, particularly at the evolutionary theory, we can see that species go through periods of gradual change where the natural process of variation, selection and retention will promote the “survival of the fittest”.
Now, I am talking not only about people who work in research centers but people who will come up with innovations in their house, in their relationship, in their work routine and so on; meaning we need a better definition.
It is not a novelty the fact that radical innovations generate more returns than incremental ones. Just to have an idea of the numbers there is a study from the INSEAD finding that 86% of all innovations are incremental, but they are responsible for generating only 30% of profits on the market. The large pie, over 60% of the profits, comes from the radical innovations, which account for only 14% of the total innovations.
It is important to differentiate between strategic planning and strategy innovation. Most corporations indeed have defined processes only for carrying out the former, basically studying historical data and making extrapolations for the future.
What do daycare teachers and managers have in common? Both should learn storytelling. Stories represent a powerful tool to illustrate ideas, convince people and generate commitment. Below you will find the story of the cash register machine and NCR, the undiscussed leader in the manufacturing of mechanical cash registers during the 1960s.
I do agree with the author to a certain extent, mainly with the idea that under some circumstances only companies are able to develop radical innovations. But that has to do with the fact that consumers often times are not able to articulate their needs, and they are not necessarily aware of what one could possibly do with current technologies.
This is the second part of my collection of quotes (click here to see the first part). I find particularly interesting the companies that turned down multi-billion dollar opportunities like IBM refusing to invest in the photocopier or Atari rejecting Steve Job’s proposal to develop the personal computer. Those companies were nonetheless being managed by very smart people, understanding what influenced such decisions is the complex matter.
The first confusion to dismiss is the difference between invention and innovation. The former refers to new concepts or products that derive from individual’s ideas or from scientific research. The latter, on the other hand, represents the commercialization of the invention itself.
The collection of quotes I present below illustrate how managers, scientists and academics often fail to free themselves from paradigms. As Peter Ustinov said “If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done”.
The list was too big therefore I decided to break it up in 2 parts. Have fun.
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