Category: Interviews
I had the opportunity to interview InnoCentive founder Dr. Alpheus Bingham, PdD and InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin at the incentive2innovate conference this week at the United Nations in New York City. You can see the video interview here:Here are the questions I asked them:In your view – What are the greatest strengths of the open innovation movement?Do you feel that open innovation will face its own s-curve of declining interest and decreasing submission quality over time?Where do you think the greatest opportunities lie for open innovation in the future?Open innovation is a fascinating topic, and it will be interesting to see whether or not companies are able to adapt to expanding innovation beyond their own payroll. Doing so will require companies to master a new competency, and potentially organizations that do not adapt to the new potential of partnering to innovate will be disrupted by new entrants who do. What … Continue reading
I had the opportunity to interview Ric Merrifield on camera about his new book “Rethink” and here are the questions I asked him:What inspired you to write Rethink?What is the key insight you want to share with this book? What is the most common mistakes people are making in cost cutting mode right now in this recession?What is the most common barrier to innovation that you encounter in your work?In your opinion, what recent innovation (or area of innovation) has the most intriguing potential?”Rethink” arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago and after completing it, overall, I would give it a thumbs up. For me, the second half of the book was the most interesting part. The case studies were good, and I felt they brought the book’s thesis to life. While I found myself thinking about core competencies and value curves when I was reading the book, I … Continue reading
I had the opportunity to meet with BrightIdea co-founder and COO Vincent Carbone on May 7, 2009. We had a fascinating conversation about the last ten years of innovation, and the history and future vision of Brightidea.Brightidea was founded by Matthew Greeley and Vincent Carbone in 1999. Matt was interested in evolution and the shift from physical to mental evolution and he was very interested in exploring how mental evolution could be accelerated. There was a belief that by getting people to more openly share ideas, groups of people could create better ideas.Brightidea started as an openidea exchange at brightidea.com with a broad set of topics that people could contribute ideas to – the structure being modeled loosely on the DMOZ project. The original model was advertising-supported. Individuals from all around the world submitted ideas on any topic of their choice, and then other members of the brightidea.com community voted … Continue reading
Charlie Rose interviews Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter about the service and its effect on Internet usage, and the future of the company.The most interesting point he makes is about how strong the developer community is, with at least 2,000 applications and growing, and how they plan to develop the service from a usefulness perspective.Will Twitter survive as an independent company?What do you think?@innovate
Charlie Rose interviews Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn about the future of technology and social networking, and discusses with him the differences between LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace.The most interesting point he makes is that while tolerance for risk and the ability to manage it are key skills for entrepreneurs, we are all entrepreneurs now. By that he means that each of us is now responsible for managing our careers and keeping an eye towards finding that next job opportunity to further develop our career.What do you think?@innovate
I had the privilege yesterday to interview Shawn Frayne, a founder of Humdinger Wind Energy. This being the Internet Age, we didn’t have to wait until we could sit down in person to chat. Instead it was an almost commonplace phone to Skype, to mobile (Skype Forward) call from Seattle to Hong Kong.To my parents, I would say “I interviewed him by phone.”BackgroundHumdinger Wind Energy was inspired by Shawn’s discovery of the story of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940. From seeing video of this historic collapse, Shawn became inspired to try an alternative approach to generating electricity from wind energy. The genesis of the wind belt and subsequent founding of Humdinger Wind Energy Was the result of an initial goal 4 or 5 years ago to create an inexpensive wind generating device to power simple LEDs for lighting, or to recharge cell phones in Haiti. This original …
