Innovation Culture Eats R&D for Breakfast
Research and development is a mainstay of the innovation strategy for companies. And with good reason. R&D can invent new products and technologies that redefine markets. Think electricity, telephones, airplanes, semiconductors, the Internet. R&D can pave the way for whole new industries. Exciting, for sure! But there’s a problem. Too many companies treat R&D as [...]
Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011: Idea Management Enlightenment
We’re movin’ on up…. Last year, Gartner released its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2010. Idea Management, included in the analysis, was placed at the latter part of the Trough of Disillusionment. Tough name, although not as dire as it sounds. Rather, a transitional stage in the market evolution of a technology. Still, that part [...]
Getting Innovation Results from Our Cognitive Surplus
What is an organization’s most underused, most under-appreciated asset? Its brand? No, that’s well-utilized and appreciated. Its customers’ loyalty. Some would argue for that one, but it’s not a pervasive issue. Its distribution network? Not really. Its cash? No, CFOs take care of that. It’s their employees’ cognitive surplus. The stuff between their ears that [...]
The Death of the Feed
I remember in 2001 when I first heard about RSS. Back then, we still called them weblogs, and there were so few blogs that it was news when a new one started. For example, I distinctly remember reading excitedly about a promising new VC blogger named Jeff Nolan from SAP Ventures. At first, I just [...]
Innovation Thrives between the Lines of Chaos and Control
Innovation killer #4: Create an obstacle course for ideas. Guaranteed way to kill the innovative spirit? Model your processes on Kafka’s The Trial or your typical parking clerk’s office. CIO Magazine, July 24, 2007 On the heels of the SpigitFusion release, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from a number of people on the topic [...]
Have any companies successfully deployed game mechanics in enterprise situations?
Game mechanics are a popular subject these days. With good reason, as they have an important role in the future of participation and work. Which was covered here previously in Reputation and Game Mechanics Are the Future of Social Software. Seeing the uptick of game mechanics in leading edge consumer apps, curiosity not surprisingly turns [...]
Model for Employee Innovation: Amazon Prime Case Study
As more organizations expand the innovation mandate throughout their workforce, creating and maintaining an ongoing employee innovation program is critical. Sustainable innovation requires a process, not a haphazard, random luck approach. To that end, a useful model to follow is: The different activities address important aspects of innovation, from eliciting tacit ideas inside people’s heads… Read More
Innovation Mullet: Simple in the Front, Complex in the Back
On a LinkedIn discussion, someone asked: “Structured or un-structured innovation. Which works better?” There are a number of ways that could be answered. I look at it this way: What’s the simplest structure you can live with? I’m focusing on the application of simplicity as much possible in the innovation process. But I’m also a [...]
Central Desktop Rolls Out Big Changes to their UI
Central Desktop (more on them here) is today unveiling version 2.0 of its offering that is delivering an entire new user interface for it’s customers. A quick update on the past year for Central Desktop: 44% year-over-year growth in revenue (gross bookings) Employee growth from 20 to 30 employees Hundreds of new Enterprise Edition customers [...]
Would You Manage CRM with a Wiki?
Or human resources with a blog? How about project management with forums? Funny questions to ask, no doubt. Of course it’s not possible to effectively address many of the critical business functions using basic Enterprise 2.0 tools. Yet when it comes to social software, it often seems that the only game in town is to [...]
Sneaky Way to Use Your Blogroll: Call People Contributors
Bloggers and many readers are familiar with the idea of the blogroll, where we share some link love with the people we follow or read on a regular basis. The sneaky part comes in when someone renames their blogroll to “contributors”, making it seem like people are contributing to a blog when they are not. [...]
Use Your Company Blog to Catch Search Term Typos
If your company or product name can be misspelled, this is for you. At Spigit, a prospective customer related this to us recently. A few months ago, they had heard of Spigit in one of the usual ways – reading, word of mouth, etc. At some point, they decided to learn more. It probably went [...]
Gist Opens to Public Beta Today
Gist is one of the most valuable tools that I use to manage my day to day information, along with a few other systems, Gist provides the backbone support for many of the things I do. Gist helps me keep track of what is important and what is not important and can be deferred to [...]
Fear and Censorship Drives Military Bloggers Underground
This should be of interesting to almost every blogger out there. We all know that there are some bloggers who maintain their anonymity like Mini-Microsoft; we also know that there are bloggers who have had their identity revealed under court order, or voluntarily before legal action was taken. An article in the NY Times talks [...]
Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere is on sale at Amazon
Whoever said that writing a book would be easy was mistaken, but the good news is that after a 6 month journey of preprint and test readers, through editing and more editing, adding and subtracting content, the book “Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere” has finally showed up for sale. You can purchase the book [...]
