This research article, Laggards as Innovators? Old Users as Designers of New Services & Service Systems, challenges the notion that elderly users of the social web are generally laggards in this medium and, thus, not viable sources of relevant input when using service design methodologies to design products and services that meet their needs. Service design [I]s [...]
What constitutes creative leadership? What constitutes innovative leadership? How do these factors–creativity and innovation–influence a firm’s competitive advantage? These two articles, IBM’s Capitalizing on Complexity and Organizational Creativity: Building a Business Ba-Haus?, provide interesting insights. In a previous post I discussed how firms can foster a culture of creativity and innovation. Innovative firms nurture the following: [...]
I have the pleasure of speaking at the GIL Silicon Valley innovation and leadership summit, hosted by Frost & Sullivan. My session focuses on developing an integrated IP focused organization, which relates to fostering a culture of creativity and innovation. Here is a list of core research I’ll discuss during my session: Democratizing Innovation (Eric Von [...]
This Vanity Fair and Forbes article details how Microsoft stifled innovation in product design and development by using a rigid and hierarchical performance review process. Microsoft used a review process known as “stack ranking”, which forces each business unit designate a percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average performers, and poor performers. Here’s what a [...]
This video, The World Park Campaign, illustrates an excellent use of QR to not only drive a marketing result but reward users’ participation with something delightful. The focus of the campaign was an immersive marketing experience to drive wider participation and learning within a NYC park. Similarly, read about what Bjork is doing to take participation [...]
The research article Demystifying Disruption: A New Model for Understanding and Predicting Disruptive Technologies (.pdf) delves into several topics related to understanding and predicting disruptive technologies. An interesting facet of the article is how it outlined three domains of disruption: technology disruption (when a new techology outperforms a dominant technology), firm disruption (when the market share of [...]
This morning I envisioned a headline on Mashable that could, someday, read: “Finally…Google+ Integrated into Google Apps”. The Enterprise Google Apps community has been waiting months for this to happen. And still…we…wait. Once this happens, though, here are some ways Google+ will rock my business world: Allow me to use one network (rather than several [...]
Previously I wrote about creating a culture of creativity and innovation. The salient points to remember in such an initiative are: foster a high level interaction, discussion, debate and have a leadership team that nurtures such an idea generating ecosystem. Related to this topic is a fascinating research article I found that focuses on creating [...]
Below are three articles discussing emerging analytical theories on the nexus between Web+Social+Mobile: Executive Primer: CISCO CIO Summit (.pdf): Excellent primer on how The Cloud, generally, is affecting enterprise IT strategic direction. Two gems: Chapter 6 “Together, the Customer Is Everywhere and Everyone” and Chapter 10 “Scenario Planning: Are You Ready?”. Business Intelligence 2.0: Are we [...]
As you head into 2011, here are three sources to get your innovation game plan together: In the research paper, Collective Intelligence for Competitive Advantage: Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation, the author–a global transition manager at Nike Inc–conducts an exhaustive analysis of current research on the topic of leveraging crowdsourcing concepts and open innovation principles to [...]
Recently, at the Web 2.0 summit, Palm’s CEO said (as reported in All Things Digital): Palm created the PDA space with the Pilot and the smartphone space after it with the Treo…So by birthright, Palm should have owned the smartphone market, but it just lost its way. I’ve been intrigued by this facet of the [...]
This article in the Atlantichttp://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/the-undesigned-web/65458/ by Dylan Tweney (@dylan20http://twitter.com/#!/dylan20) essentially argues that as consumers adopt a minimalist approach towards reading, sharing (i.e., reformatting content to meet their needs and the needs of their social sphere), and generally consuming content (information), devices like the iPad will engender even more pressure on publishers align usabilty concepts with [...]
Thank you to @sherrychris for finding this article on Steve Jobs. What I like about this article is that it delves—slightly–into Jobs’ mindset via an interview with his “last” boss. It’s a fascinating romp. Here’s one key take-aways that were meaningful to me: “What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always [...]
According to this Harvard Business Review podcast on collaborative innovation, the Internet dramatically drops collaboration and transaction costs thus enabling corporations to orchestrate capabilities more efficiently. Collaborative innovation can yield dramatic results in meaningful new product designs, service delivery models, and customer satisfaction; potentially yielding an endless supply of “good ideas”. But where do good [...]
Influence on Twitter is not necessarily tied to the number of followers one has, at least this is one of the conclusions in this report on Twitter influence which came to my notice by a @papadimitriou recent tweet. The core finding: it’s more influential to have an engaged audience that actively retweets and mentions the [...]
According to this MIT Technology Review article, agile groups with fluid ideation and development team dynamics routinely create more innovative products. Yet commercialization of an innovative product is another matter. Successful monetization of a product requires a disciplined approach towards continuous systems and process improvements. But herein resides a trap: once an innovative product becomes [...]
This research paper, Power, media culture and new media, delves into social justice issues surrounding the democratizing effects of new media. The paper points out that new media benefits (e.g., easier access to information through widespread platforms like mobile devices) are not equally shared or distributed across class, race, or national origin. The paper also [...]
Writing a “playscript” is an incredibly powerful way to conduct a competitive business review, according to this Harvard Business Review article (subscription required). The article advocates writing a “playscript” using characters and character analysis to define your company and competitive landscape for use as a foundational element in corporate strategy development. The article argues that [...]
What factors influence effective cross-functional team environments that spur the greatest innovations and competitive advantage? The authors of this study (.pdf) (focusing on manufacturing) determined that baldly implementing a cross-functional team approach is not a universal good. Notably, the authors found that cross-functional teamwork involving marketing may have a negative effect (the authors noted too, [...]
The Wall Street Journal recently profiled calculator hobbyists who hack calculators to do weird (but ostensibly fun) things like making an Etch A Sketch, or a Tetris game, or synthesized music. The WSJ article also relates how a calculator company that was the target of some of these hacks sent cease and desist emails and [...]
In this MIT Sloan School of Management lecture on sustaining innovation, the CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, Terri Kelly, has some great insights on how creative knowledge environments drive profitability. W.L. Gore is a diverse and innovative company, creating products ranging from GORETEX to surgical devices. Kelly stresses to give your team the right [...]
The label “social media” has lost its resonance in so far as the concept of “social media” has been reduced to a series of marketing tactics. As David Armano says in a Harvard Business Review blog article: Let’s start with the challenges — the term “social media” itself is indicative of the state of affairs. [...]
Perfectly Competitive Innovation is a fascinating article on what drives innovation. The authors argue against the notion that patents and copyrights promote innovation. Rather, its a rich competitive environment that drives innovation. In other words, regardless of copyright law, movies will continue to be produced as long as first run theatrical profits are sufficient to [...]
According to MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s lecture, Democratizing Innovation, manufacturers traditionally look to the center of the market to drive innovation; that is, with their penetrative questions to and analysis of this market, manufacturers think they can discern what to do in terms of innovative product development initiatives that meet consumers’ needs. What Professor [...]
Empathy, collaboration, human centered feature/functionality, storytelling, and culture are themes that drive innovation through design thinking. Core phases of design thinking: inspiration, ideation, implementation. On inspiration of ideas: use the world as a source for new ideas; focus on research that is ethnographic, anthropological, and qualitative versus just quantitative; focus on extreme users and strive [...]
This New York Times article on how corporations can foster innovation within their R&D departments by adopting decentralized (i.e., “federated”) approaches to funding and team structure, spurred me to conduct some research regarding this topic; here are two great finds: TED conference speech by Charles Leadbeater on outside-in innovation and how this type of “innovation-in-use” [...]
Deux Gros Nez, an eclectic, wonderful restaurant in Reno, Nevada, closed its doors a couple of years ago. It’s where I, as a dedicated employee of Tim Healion and Jon Jesse (then owners of Deux Gros Nez), learned about community, service, and the power of passionate brand ambassadors: Flickr tribute YouTube interview A person’s thoughts [...]
Data Visualization (32 minutes): Eric Rodenbeck, founder of Stamen, discusses how data visualization allows one to tease-out non-obvious yet meaningful observations from arcane data sets. The interview also includes a short discussion on how data visualization can enhance real estate search (around 16 minutes into the interview). Jon Udell’s series is awesome, which is where [...]