Why would anyone give their intellectual capital to a company for open innovation?
Jack Dahlgren wrote a good post, Cisco I-Prize and Spigit – Innovation Competition. In it, he examines some of the dynamics surrounding the recent Cisco I-Prize, and open innovation contests in general. He raises a good question in this part of his post: If your organization is filled with people so steeped in the company [...]
How Much of a Relationship Do Your Customers Actually Want?
On the Harvard Business Review, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff wrote a piece that caught my eye, Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You. Consumers increasingly prefer self-service, and the authors speculate: Maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be [...]
X PRIZE Takes on Oil Spills with $1.4 Million Open Innovation Challenge
The BP Gulf Oil spill has unleashed somewhere on the order 150 to 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Thankfully, much of this oil has been eaten by bacteria, reducing its damage. But much of it is hitting the Gulf coastlines, and scientists know that a disaster of that magnitude will [...]
New Augmented Corporate Reality BI Prototype
Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype. The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the [...]
Video: Simon Wardley On Innovation, Change And Commoditization
Simon Wardley, a researcher at the Leading Edge Forum at CSC, gave a phenomenal talk at OSCON 10 this week. Irrespective of whether you are associated with Open Source or Cloud Computing, you may find this talk extremely useful. Anyone interested in understanding the lifecycle of an organization and how they can surf the winds [...]
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Intuit, Part One: Business Drivers
Next up in out series of companies that are implementing Enterprise 2.0 is Intuit. So far we covered Oce and Vistaprint. Intuit is a software company with 8,000 employee’s worldwide that develops tax and financial solutions for consumers, small businesses, financial institutions, and health-care organizations. I spoke with three members of the Intuit team that [...]
Definition of Innovation
At the recent E2.0 Forum, I described a particular dynamic I’ve found: there is no set definition of innovation. It’s a concept where everyone has an intuitive sense of what innovation is, but would have a hard time formalizing a definition. Much like the way U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described pornography: I shall [...]
Evolutionary v. Intelligent Design Marketers: Which one are you?
To set the stage… I’m a scientist at heart. Before I got into tech I was working on my PhD in neuroscience. So its with healthy skepticism (a valuable trait in a scientist) that I looked at Intelligent Design – a reformulation of Creationism as the explanation for how we got here and where we [...]
3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, Collaboration
At the E2.0 Forum in Milan (June 9-10, 2010), I had a chance speak about innovation. Specifically, on the latest advances in leveraging communities to advance innovation. The title of my keynote was: “3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, Collaboration”. The presentation is provided below: 3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, [...]
Fat and Bloated is no way to go through life
Google officially announces Chrome OS’s arrival date as this fall, HP purchases Palm and promptly kills off an Ipad like device with Windows as an operating system, and Apple announces that 2 million IPads have sold in 60 days with rumors that the Ipad is killing Netbooks. Fat and Bloated operating systems (regardless of the [...]
Diversity and Innovation – Improve the Person, Improve the Idea
A key aspect of the next generation of innovation is the ability to tap a much larger set of minds in pursuit of valuable ideas. This draws quite heavily from the realms of Enterprise 2.0 and crowdsourcing. The historic method of innovation relied exclusively on a designated few. Now we’re seeing companies recognizing a missing [...]
It’s Not Idea Overload. It’s Filter Failure
At the recent Front End of Innovation conference, Wells Fargo’s Michael Duke presented in a session devoted to innovation metrics. He opened with a slide that asked attendees: Which would you rather have? – 1,000 ideas; or – 20 working prototypes With a setup like that, what do you think the general response was? Of [...]
Courier & Foldable Tablets are Neither Innovative Nor “Different”
This is a sad “I’ve told you” moment, as I predicted the death of dual-screen tablets, be it the one by MSI or Microsoft’s Courier, which has just been canceled. Says Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s VP of corporate communications: At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, [...]
FUD in the House of SaaS – More on Suites
Recently I wrote about the evergreen Best-of-breed vs. Integrated All-in-One Suite debate again, arguing: Call me “old school”, but I also believe in the value of having one tightly integrated system for most business needs, and I believe it’s true not only for large corporations but much smaller businesses. I don’t have CIO’s to back [...]
Disruptive Cloud Computing Startups At Under The Radar – NoSQL – Aspirin, Vicodin, and Vitamin
It was great to be back at Under The Radar this year. I wrote about disruptive cloud computing start-ups that I saw at Under The Radar last year. Since then the cloud computing has gained significant momentum. This was evident from talking to the entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups this year. At the conference there [...]
