Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

I get a kick out of people talking about hard vs. soft skills and the preeminence of the former over the latter. In a World of evolving globalization and all the derivations therein such as Glocal ; Global Village, Primitive Global, World Citizen, etc...the abilities to relate, build consensus , persuade across differing cultures and personal and business practices/nuances are more important than ever -the subject of multiple posts in this blog. I would say now that the preeminence is flipping to soft vs hard. Why? From my vantage point technology (hard) is nothing without creativity (soft) and value building/generation skills (soft). It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with the Founder of a startup right after the tech bubble had exploded and I was looking for a gig. It was circa 2002 and I was trying to secure a business development consultancy. The conversation went something like this: "I would love to use you right now but now I need to focus on hard skills...

I hear in NPR this am about the transition that you, the movie industry, will have to go through with the digital revolution. As one that has been imbedded into your space over the last few years and living in your world; I can only say that it will be painful. I know this because we Telecom people have experienced the disruption that digital has caused on us over the last 10 years and we see many parallels with your industry. But, don’t despair fellow movie executives. We are here to help you if you will listen. We have been through this and we can give you a lot of advice and here is but one piece: Think of your industry not just as a provider of entertainment and look for other ways to categorize what you do. Play what/if scenarios and and/yes scenarios. For example, one of the big discoveries of what Telecom does (sadly retrospectively) is that we “enable creativity.” If we had known this at the beginning of the digital attack on our industry, who knows, perhaps we would be Google....

So, this is where this thought originated. I was talking to a colleague about how stupidly we have have organized ourselves inside companies. We " comparmentalized " our thinking and have created these static and vertical buckets: "product development", "product management", "public relations", "marketing"etc... What we have not created and need to create are "passion" and "creative" management theories that aggregate these skills/abilities into tiger/virtual teams with members that are passionate about the tasks at hand. In my experience, the first step in selecting a tiger team member is to find those that have the passion. How do you do this? You "shop" it around and those interested will raise their proverbial hands and will want to participate. Moreover, however, Innovation managers need to be very cognizant of the effects management policies will have on people's creative drives; the management et...

Last Friday I attended an early venture breakfast where young companies go on stage and present their business plans in an effort to secure funding. The audience was mostly venture capitalists, all with different investment stage philosophies. Some like to come into the early stages, some mid and some when companies are fully matured and are looking to scale after achieving cash flow positive status. I have gone to many of these over the years and it is a fascinating process that everyone in Innovation management should be exposed to; it presents us with a unique opportunity to experience a drastically different perspective and energy. It is, in short, a new ecosystem that needs to be understood well, specially if one works with young companies as I do. I found that these entrepreneurs could also learn a thing or two from other – more corporately focused "intrepreneurs." One is that they need to be much better at evangelizing their ideas and in the process of doing so words a...