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

The cat is so totally out of the bag that it is not even funny. Open Innovation is here to stay and service providers must respond in kind and able to assist our enterprise and media customers in this process. Why? because service provides are at the intersection of all relevant forces. Take the enterprise markets as an example. As they discover the twin powers of community building around their brands and Web 2.0-type mechanisms to converse with their communities, they are increasingly seeking holistic solutions from service providers that understand these dynamics best. Bringing these two disparate worlds together is not easy and requires entities that understand the power of combining evolving communications technology with applications. Further, it must be done in a consultative manner and via an interactive dialogue . In order to most efficiently do this, service providers must be conversant with Innovation methodologies that can accelerate the process of creating, advancing and

Like it or not as we grow doing what we do we create orbits around us. If one is working in Innovation one must take tangents to learn about Innovation management and the latest thought provoking ideas on how best to design our enterprise systems and people. While in this tangential process of discovery one realizes that there is so much we don’t know that needs to be explored and in this journey one creates an orbit of like-minded people on the same mission and with the same intentions. Or, are they? At the risk of using a cliché, all is connected and there are many relevant intersections to learn from. For starters there are economic, organizational and leadership theories. Further, there is psychology and brain research. There are also human nature theories and political economic theories. In short, there is lots of fertile ground to intersect and interact with via conferences, books, exec training, research papers, one-on-one meetings, videos, etc… Engaging in this process is quite

I was asked to participate in an Innovation management survey the other day regarding the question of Transformation and how well companies handle this very important condition. I call it a “condition”, because transforming the way a company thinks (which by extension means transforming peoples mindsets) is a very difficult task that I have had some experience with. Someone once said that 80% of the World’s problems are caused by miscommunications. I believe this to be true. We humans are very imperfect when it comes to processing information. We need to synthesize and we need to have artificial constructs in order to make sense of things. Add to that cultural differences and we really are in difficult territory interpreting things. This leads to massive “lost in translation” issues. One of my deep insights in working in Innovation environments is that communications plays a massive role. How one communicates internally with colleagues differs extensively from how one communicates to

This weekend I was reading an interview in the Atlantic magazine with a Chinese money manager – Gao Xiging - who controls about $200 Billion of China’s wealth; wealth that is basically keeping our nation from collapsing and that was obtained from American’s out of control consumption. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker The interviewer was James Fallows, a fantastic journalist with immense international experience, specifically in Asia. The Chinese gentleman was educated in the USA as a lawyer and graduated from Duke University and had worked in the USA before moving back to China to take on this role. His vision therefore is a broad vision composed of US-based and Chinese perspectives. The interview was about the financial crisis that in large part was precipitated by us and our “pragmatic” American attitudes; a pragmatism that in my view is hurting us. What really caught my attention, however, was his statement about what our new President needs to tell the

I know it has been a long time… Google, as I understand, is brutal on us bloggers that do not keep up their blogging activity, so I guess search result may not be picking this up until I get going again. Time to catch up. In any case, I wanted to pick up on the theme from my last entry. That is, that nothing will forever by static and everything is becoming furiously dynamic. Witness the incredible pace of change and how fast things are happening. Witness how quickly wild capital can collapse economies and event countries. Witness how quickly the greed-based subprime mess/contagion is collapsing industries and how quickly old, stale, static leadership is being proven wrong, false, cruel and in the end- hyper-irresponsible. Exhibit one: GM. This albatross is where it is partly due to shockingly bad leadership totally devoid of foresight. It does not take a genius (or maybe it does) to figure out that GM was too big, had too many brands and had leadership unwilling to make the tough choi