Monthly Archives: April 2011
Stop me if you’ve heard this joke before, but I think it is exceptionally relevant to measuring innovation. A guy walks out of a bar one evening and sees a drunk searching for something on the sidewalk. He stops the drunk and asks him what he is doing. “Looking for my keys” the drunk responds. The guy decides to help the drunk and they explore the entire sidewalk under the streetlight. Finally, the guy turns to the drunk. “Are you sure you lost your keys here?” he asks. “No” the drunk replies “I lost them in the alley but there’s no light back there.” In my way of thinking, measuring innovation, at the corporate level or at the national level is often like a drunk looking for his keys. Both are important missions, undertaken in earnest, but in the wrong places. Innovation is often reported on using …
The fuzzy front end of innovation confronts you with a lot of questions. In my new book ‘Creating innovative Products and Services’ I try to solve them. My last blog discussed X-factor ideas. But, how will you get ideas with the X-factor? There are at least five choices you have to make: When: now or later? Who: experts or internal team? What: revolutionary or evolutionary ideas? Which criteria to use? How: the creative or structured way? 1. When: now or later? It is a fairy tale that companies innovate continuously. Of course there is a R&D or innovation department continuously working on new concepts. And a phase gate funnel full of new initiatives is monitored on a permanent basis. But the board will only approve real innovations and accept the necessary risks when they have to because all less risky instruments failed to grow the business. The completion of the … Continue reading
Groupon is hoping for a $20 billion valuation in its coming IPO. Yes, the company is growing fast, but as I wrote last month that its business model is suspect. And now, in addition to Amazon-backed Living Social, a host of niche competitors are nibbling at Groupon’s heels. More significantly, both Google and Facebook are getting into the online couponing game. Analysts still give Groupon the edge because it has a head start in developing a big national sales force, but that’s also suspect. With their immense daily traffic, Google and Facebook don’t need a distributed sales force. They’ve both managed to build pretty good ad businesses without one, and there’s no reason why getting small businesses to offer coupons would be any different from getting them to buy pay-per-click ads. It may be even easier, as there are few things retailers tend to be tempted by more by than … Continue reading
EMC’s Cairo Center of Excellence (COE) recently celebrated its one year anniversary. During that time the employees have established a strong base for selling and supporting EMC’s portfolio of cloud products. As the nation of Egypt builds a framework for their new form of government, their national technologists are engaged in a related exercise. Egypt is in the requirements and planning phase for specifying a national cloud computing framework. The engineers involved in this exercise are a combination of university professors, industry professionals, and government IT specialists. I will be visiting many of these teams on behalf of EMC’s Global Innovation Network. Over the next few weeks I’ll document the use cases that are driving their technology choices, and look to establish research partnerships where appropriate. As a basis for engagement I’ll be using an innovation engagement strategy that’s been fairly successful at my corporation: Innovation by Adjacency. From EMC’s … Continue reading
When attempting to improve creativity in business, there are two approaches which may be taken, either individually or together: INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY and ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY. Individual creativity is, of course, the creativity of the individual. Everyone has what I call a creative comfort level which is based on their natural creativity quotient, their willingness to risk new ideas and their personality. People can be trained to think more creatively and to apply creative thinking strategies to various activities. However, you cannot push someone far beyond her creative comfort level without causing stress. And stress is likely to lead to reduced creativity, unhappiness with the company and other problems. Likewise, naturally creative people forced to work in an organization that inhibits creativity will also become stressed. Naturally creative people have ideas all the time and like to share those ideas. Moreover, they appreciate the recognition that is showered upon a good idea. … Continue reading
I had the opportunity to interview Gerard Cox, organizer of the the inaugural Second Line conference. The event is an interactive conference celebrating the New Economy successes and strategies with disruptive innovation, value creation, and sustainable social impact. Set in New Orleans, they are bringing some of the world’s leading innovators to demonstrate how design, experience, strategy, and technology can be applied to create new markets, exponential growth, and sustainable social impacts. Here is text of the interview: 1. Why is innovation so important to organizations in New Orleans? Most recently the city had innovate to address the social needs required as a product of Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans was swarmed by an extremely generous group of volunteers who really inspired locals to take control of our community and develop new social ventures to address our citizen’s needs. It is well known in social innovation … Continue reading
