Congratulations to the BIF-5 Contest Winner
Voting is now closed, and we have a winner for my ticket to the Business Innovation Factory (BIF-5) conference October 7-8, 2009 in Providence, RI. Here again were the Three Finalists:
- Creating a Bachelor of Innovation by Dr. Terrance E. Boult, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
- Breaking Innovation Barriers by Looking Beyond by Vyoma Kapur, Colspark LLC
- A Nightmare on Innovation Street by Brad Barbera, KAB Business Research
And the winner is...
Vyoma Kapur of Colspark LLC!- Colspark seeks to foster greater collaboration between academia and businesses. They believe in creating a dynamic knowledge and information flow between colleges and companies. They do this by giving college students a platform to solve companies' sales, marketing and business problems. By bringing students and companies closer together, they create an environment where the best and the brightest are rewarded. Using the principles of open innovation, effective ideas and solutions are generated for companies. Colspark endorses open communication and open innovation while operating in a secure environment. Companies have rights to confidentiality, while participating students can be rest assured that their intellectual property is protected.
Vyoma wins my ticket to the Business Innovation Factory conference after her article "Break Innovation Barriers by Looking Beyond" received the most comment votes and @reply votes on Twitter.
(NOTE: Travel expenses are NOT included and are the responsibility of the winner)
For those who would still like to go to the conference before it sells out, as a special bonus for my loyal readers I've negotiated a special $50 discount when you enter "BK110" in the payment code field on the payment options page during registration - this will get you in for $1,150. Groups of five or more can get extra discounts.
New storytellers are added each week, but so far they include:
- Don Tapscott, "Wikinomics"
- Jeff Jarvis, "What Would Google Do?", buzzmachine.com
- John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design
- Jonah Lehrer, "How We Decide"
- Keith Wilmot, Global Director Insights, Ideas & Creativity, Coca Cola
If you'd like to explore and discuss innovation issues further, please join our Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn.
Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.Labels: Business Innovation Factory (BiF-5), Colspark, Contest, Innovation, Vyoma Kapur
posted by Blogging Innovation at 5:00 PM
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The 
Joy Bergmann is Communications Director at innovation consultancy 
Ever since innovation became the buzzword du Jour, a lot of people seem to have lost their ability to tell smart ideas from stupid ones. Case in point: the financial "innovations" (read: stunningly stupid loan products) that kicked off the trillion-dollar economic meltdown mess we're currently in. The simplistic notion that "new equals good" has often been a recipe for grand-scale disaster, just as it was in the dotcom debacle at the turn of the millennium. And when the doo-doo inevitably hits the fan, it's all too easy to level the blame at innovation per se rather than admit to being a bonehead. Here's why many ideas that are labeled "innovations" are just plain stupidity.
It's precisely big boondoggles like this one that give innovation a bad name. In fact, columnist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that "financial innovation" is a phase that "should, from now on, strike fear into investors' hearts." Yet should the financial services industry - or any industry for that matter - now decide to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when it comes to innovation?
Take Iridium, Motorola's failed satellite telephone venture, which was built on a fundamentally flawed assumption about the size of the target market. Basically, Motorola totally underestimated the speed at which cellular coverage would spread. Their premise was that there would be huge regional gaps in the global network - parts of the world that would have no mobile phone coverage for a long time to come. That would have made Iridium the perfect answer. It turned out quite quickly that those regions would be very few and far between (you would practically have to be an Arctic explorer to need an Iridium phone!), so the target market soon shrank to insignificance. This is something Motorola should have known better.
Business history is full of such examples: from Coca-cola's infamous "New Coke", to GM's all-electric EV-1 project (which cost a billion dollars and sold only 700 vehicles), to all those other empty dot-com business models in the late 1990s - like Pets.com - that quickly disappeared. The lesson from all these disasters is to look before you leap. A company should first reduce the uncertainty surrounding critical project assumptions before committing irreversible and non-recoverable resources to an idea. The greater the uncertainty surrounding these assumptions, the greater the risk associated with any new opportunity. Therefore, the focus of an innovation project should initially be on learning rather than earning. It should be on launching experiments to test whether a business model makes sense or not, or whether a new technology will work or not, or whether customers would value the new service, or what they would be willing to pay for it, or which product configuration would work best, or which distribution channels would be most effective, and so on.
I had the opportunity to attend Brightidea's Birds of a Feather (BOF 3.0) event at Chevron's headquarters the other day. For those of you not familiar with Bright Idea Birds of a Feather events, they are periodic events for innovation practioners from Brightidea customers (e.g. HP) and non-customers (e.g. Chevron) to get together to discuss innovation challenges and share practical experiences peer-to-peer. The third incarnation of BOF was hosted in Chevron's 'Innovation Zone' - a flexible space used to inspire creativity where:
Peter Breunig and Jack Anderson of Chevron shared their thoughts on innovation and ingenuity (a Chevron value). These included:
Art Beckman of HP spoke about HP's innovation management system that they have named "The Garage." In the words of HP, innovation management ultimately strives to systematically gather, organize, and collaborate on ideas. The innovation management push at HP is not just a way to improve management of innovation ideas but is also a push to bring together software and solutions people together to be a stronger team. The effort is helping to break down silos and encourage collaboration across geographies and functions.
Open submissions are the trickiest part (ideas not submitted to specific innovation challenges) because they often end up generating answers to questions that nobody is asking. It is also a lot more work to get the business involved on these kind of open submissions, where innovation challenges generate ideas focused on a guiding question/problem.
Dr. Terrance E. Boult is the El Pomar Professor of Innovation and Security at the 
A marketing professional turned entrepreneur, Vyoma avidly supports and practices open innovation. Earlier this year, she founded Colspark LLC (
Brad Barbera is the founder of KAB Business Research, a consultancy focusing on Innovation Training, Ideation Facilitation and Management, and Business Intelligence.
All companies have challenges. They can be technical challenges on how to create a particular chemical compound. They can be marketing challenges on how to best describe your product to increase market share. They can be HR challenges around improving employee engagement.
Every challenge has multiple potential solutions. And there are multiple ways in which to find these solutions.
The final attribute of a culture of innovation is the ability to take all of the selected solutions and turn them into programs/projects so that they can be converted from ideas into reality.
When innovation is brought up in a business context, we mostly think about, well, the business. We think of innovations related to products, business models, go-to-market strategies and the like. This blog does a great job of identifying and promoting specific strategies and tactics for accelerating and maximizing innovation through those and other business-specific contexts.
Are you actively mentoring future leaders inside your company? How about outside? When you get requests for your time to help someone learn - whether or not they work directly for you - do you take the time to do it?
Think about the people most important to you - your family, your spouse, your close friends. Do you spend as much time with them as you want? Do you do the things with them you want to be doing?
Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at 
How disruptive is your business model? While much has been written about corporate vision, mission, process, leadership, strategy, branding and a variety of other business practices, it is the engineering of these practices to be disruptive that maximizes opportunities. Without a disruptive focus you are merely building your business model on a "me too" platform of mediocrity. As we move into the second half of 2009, nothing will be more critical to your efforts in increasing your revenue growth and corporate sustainability than understanding the value of disruptive innovation. So, in today's post I'll examine the power of disruption as a key business driver...
Let's just take a moment and look at what happens to companies that become complacent and fail to embrace disruptive innovation... Why didn't the railroads innovate? Why didn't Folgers recognize the retail consumer demand for coffee and develop a Starbucks-type business model? Why didn't IBM see Dell and Gateway coming? Why wasn't Microsoft able to keep Google at bay? Why have American auto-makers been relegated to inferior brands when contrasted to their European and Asian counterparts? How did the brick and mortar book stores let Amazon get the jump on them? I could go on-and-on with more examples, but the answer to these questions are quite simple... The established companies become focused on making incremental gains through process improvements and were satisfied with their business models and didn't even see the innovators coming until it was too late. Their focus shifted from managing opportunities to managing risk, which in turn allowed them to manage themselves into brand decline...
Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "
In 1999, Jim Collins wrote a brilliant piece in the Harvard Business Review, "Turning Goals Into Results: The Power Of Catalytic Mechanisms." In it he addressed the problem that many managers face within their organization: they have a big goal but lack the organizational focus and courage to achieve it. Collins offered catalytic mechanisms as a potential solution. 
There's a reason the number of ideas far exceeds the number of true innovations: The lightning strike is just the beginning. 
Pete Maulik is Chief Operating Officer at innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212 in New York. 
Business schools and companies need to create more internships dedicated to innovation. Most 
Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at 
In the experimental deployments, without specific in-the-flow use cases, awareness is a bit tougher to come by. Often, there is a pilot group of employees that are designated to participate. The project lead and her fellow evangelists hold meetings, and send around their own emails announcing it. They may leverage tricks from the consumer web, such as exclusive invitations to drive up demand for participation. There is precedent for viral adoption strategies to work. Here's a case noted by 
After the employees have (or have not) used the social software, it's time to look at the results. Again, there is a fork in the road for this activity.
But if a company feels it's ready to give social software a try, the culture-as-impediment argument loses steam. More likely, failure is a case of no defined use cases for the software. Stop laying the blame on culture.
Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to 
I had the opportunity recently to interview Scott Anthony, President of 
A couple of weeks ago I received "The Silver Lining" by Scott Anthony in the mail. "The Silver Lining" is a relatively short, easy, and pleasant read. Scott introduces several different concepts in the book in addition to the main thesis - which seems to be that companies must prune their innovation portfolios, refeature their products to meet ever-changing customer requirements, and re-tool their organizations to better deal with the constant change that is becoming the norm in the world today.
Undaunted by China's lack of a financial backing system for developing promising fashion designers, Kun has broken new ground. Until the arrival of Mr. Lu, no Chinese designer had achieved a presence on the international catwalk.
It is done by enthusiastic folks around the globe with decent web programming knowledge. They downloaded the SDK, developed the app and hosted it all for free. The buck doesn't stop there. After it gets uploaded, the importance of these applications is decided by other users. As more folks add a particular application to their profile, its rating goes up. If the application is not interesting enough for the community, it gets automatically pushed down the stack. From the user's perspective, they can choose and install applications of interest to them, thereby 'personalizing' their profile. This is the real power of crowdsourcing - consumers as creators.
On a larger scale, the idea of crowdsourcing has been harnessed by Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) - these firms designed a monetization model allowing developers to host their applications and quote a price. When users download the developer's application a portion of payment goes to the developer. 
Many CEOs see collaboration as key to their success with innovation. They know they cannot achieve their innovation targets using internal resources alone. So they look outside for other organisations to partner with. A good example is Mercedes and Swatch who collaborated to produce the Smart car. When Mercedes wanted to produce an innovative town car they did not choose another automobile manufacturer - they partnered with a fashion watch maker. Each brought dissimilar skills and experiences to the team.
The next step beyond collaboration is open innovation. This is something that Proctor and Gamble, IBM and Kimberly-Clark have focussed on as a way of driving innovation. Open innovation replaces the vertical integration of innovation processes within one company with a network of collaborators working on innovation projects. Using outsiders can speed up processes, reduce costs, introduce more innovative ideas and reduce time to market.
Proctor and Gamble aims to source 50% of its innovations from outside using open innovation. Early results include new products such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Pringles Prints. In 2005 Kimberly-Clark partnered with more than 30 companies including joint-development, joint ventures, co-distribution, and licensing deals.
How on earth can companies compete in a global economy where staff costs in India are a tenth of those in the West and where Chinese companies are now looking to outsource their operations to cut costs further? We can not continuously improve our way out of the current challenges, rather we must fundamentally change what we do and how we do it - in short we must innovate. 
Andy Bruce is widely acclaimed as an authority in 'Innovation Management', the author of "
Recently, I had the dubious honor to work with a senior executive who just doesn't get it.
The leadership rabbit hole is where would-be leaders go when they've "checked out" and stopped leading. Their reality is distorted and the hallmark is self-deception. More to the point, you can tell if your colleague, friend, or loved one is down the rabbit hole if they go to great lengths to make it clear that the cause of all the trouble in their life is somewhere "out there," outside the rabbit hole, well outside of their control and certainly not their fault. None of the issues at hand are the fault of the individual, all solutions worth trying have been tried, and you clearly don't understand the roadblocks - no, dare I say persecution - they face.
Self-deception is a question of focus. Focus is shifted from a no-holds-barred dedication toward delivering on things that are truly factors critical to the end goals of the business (e.g. - revenue, profit, customer inquiries, sales, product quality ratings, etc.) to complaints about things that sound critical but really probably aren't (e.g. - systems delays, taxes, paperwork, etc.). To be sure, it is critical to plan for and solve roadblocks. But when they become the focus and the consistent refrain in defense of lack of performance when a more appropriate response would be no defense at all but rather a concise, well-formed plan for delivering results, that is proof positive we've entered the leadership rabbit hole.
Results must be delivered upon. So it is critical to provide accountability to facilitate achievement of the new vision and plan. A simple system of controls is critical to check for performance and provide corrective action.
Dustin Walling is Principal of Dustin Walling Associates, a Seattle-based management consulting firm providing strategy and operational consulting. For article topics, questions, or comments, Dustin can be reached at 
Mark Payne is President and Head of Innovation at Fahrenheit 212 in New York. 
"Radical Innovation" refers to high risk, high uncertainty projects which hold the potential to both influence the marketplace and bring high returns to firms. It's a kind of "promised land" of differentiation, growth and wealth for businesses and nations. Radical innovation is different from gradual innovation, in which small, incremental changes are made to activities in order to create more value with less waste. The focus of this article is how firms can realize radical, or breakthrough, innovation, which is the more difficult type to foster.
Finally, 
Julia Fischer Baumgartner is a founder and principal of 
Why do some nations and geographic regions seem to be hotbeds of creative entrepreneurship and economic growth, while others remain innovation laggards? In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Harvard professor David Landis writes, "If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference." National governments the world over are waking up to this truth as they struggle to improve their countries' global competitiveness and economic prosperity.
Obviously, culture is something that builds up over a very long time and is incredibly difficult to change. You can't turn just flip a switch and turn a country like Angola - currently occupying last place on INSEAD's Global Innovation Index - into an innovation powerhouse like America (still rather unsurprisingly ranked first). But there are definitely some practical steps governments can take to foster innovation at a national level. John Kao, author of the book Innovation Nation notes that Singapore's transformation over the last four decades, from what he calls "a developing country fishing village" to Asia's poster child of innovation and economic growth, has unquestionably been driven by the city-state's visionary government. Other countries of the world would do well to take a page from Singapore's playbook as they seek to define their own national innovation agendas.
One of the questions governments should therefore be asking is "Are we creating an environment that is truly supportive to grass-roots entrepreneurs? Or does our bureaucracy continually get in the way?" For example, how difficult is it for someone with an interesting business idea to get the funding for a start-up? How difficult is it for the average citizen to register a company? Are we giving potential entrepreneurs financial incentives and making their lives easier, or do they still have to fight their way through miles of red-tape and legislation? And, to my previous point, do we only take innovators seriously if they work in science labs, or are we open to innovators whose big idea is simply an unconventional new business model?
The first quote above, from a New York Times piece by Steve Lohr, represents the types of implementations I'm seeing. Companies want the ideas from their employees. They're looking for the incremental ideas, and the ones that will disrupt an industry (theirs or a new one). But of course they apply their judgment as to which ideas ultimately get taken up.
Adapting your small business or nonprofit during the recession may be difficult - even painful - but it must be done or you risk joining the dinosaur in extinction. 
I know what you're thinking, "I just don't have the energy," or "I'm busy just trying to stay alive," but you've got to get some gumption and get moving.
Geri Stengel is President of Stengel Solutions, a strategic planning and marketing firm that advises and develops social impact organizations. She teaches Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise at The New School in New York City.
If you think about the world's population as one interconnected cloud computer, and follow that analogy through - billions of our processors are offline. If the rest of the world were as wealthy as the United States, there would be five times as many scientists and engineers.
I had the opportunity to meet and chat with local ethnographic researcher 
Because the team will likely only get the insights mostly right, it is important that your go-to-market processes include a great deal of modularity and flexibility. In the same way that product development processes have to design for certain components that are 'likely' to be available, but also have a backup design available that substitutes already released components--should the cutting edge components not be ready in time.
PLANNING - Innovation must be linked to strategy
I am constantly asked how to best structure a financial reward system in an effort to motivate people to contribute ideas and improvements. My answer: Just say no.
Would you like to go to the 
It happened a few months ago, when I was meeting with some people from one of the world's leading consumer goods manufacturers. This is a company where you would expect innovation to have been honed down to a fine art because it has launched a slew of successful innovations over the course of its long, proud history.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against electronic suggestion boxes or idea management software per se. Indeed, one of my key messages is that companies should involve as many minds as possible - inside and outside the organisation - in their innovation efforts. So, essentially, these platforms are a good thing.
One company that has done this highly successfully is Whirlpool, the global appliance manufacturer. Instead of just setting up a passive electronic suggestion box, the company established a sophisticated IT infrastructure several years ago called 'Innovation E-Space' which is open to anyone at Whirlpool who has intranet access.
Gradon Tripp is the founder of 
Business Strategy Innovation has published a white paper to its web site on "
We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer. The man or woman stitching up your clothing has no idea whether the stitching method worked well for you, or if you were happy with the product. They only know whether or not they made their daily quota and how much failed Quality Control. If the person stitching your clothing had access to the voice of the customer, would they do their job differently? Would they feel differently about their job?
"The community building began with the students placed into teams and, led by Jens Hoffmann of Strategic Play, proceeded with the team members building LEGO models to represent themselves, their ideal teammate and what each individual would contribute to their team during the two day workshop. From there, the teams created a group model, with the team members building and writing about how their community could service society. While the models were challenging to think about, the students all were creative in their models and bonded while building the group model, with groups getting more and more animated in their discussions and building. Building was punctuated by comments and laughs as teams built different models and items. With a common goal, the teams began to bond, regardless of language and culture, and by the end of the day, each table had a shared model, a shared language and shared view of the world."
"Afterwards, there was a final session devoted to evaluating the lessons learned. Bashar Al Safadi of Omniegypt was the host of this session, where the teams discussed what they learned from all of their activities. From their discussions, the top points were determined and presented to all of the teams. And through all the differences the students had when they first met, they found they had a lot in common - and they all had learned to communicate and have fun with each other.
The new reality TV series, "Stars of Science," gives 16 young Arab inventors a chance to design and build their dreams. From a solar-powered generator for tents, to an oxygen-infused juice drink, contestants vie to impress the judges and the audience. The show has captured the attention of many viewers, some of whom are eager to demonstrate that the Arab world can produce innovations as clever and profitable as the rest of the globe.
Contrary to the popular perception, innovation is actually the process of uncovering a problem for which there is no solution (or no good solution), and then developing a way to solve the problem. For example, the light bulb, when coupled with a citywide electrical grid, solved the problem of providing light after sunset without the mess and danger of candles. The wheel, when attached to a cart, solved the problem of transporting goods long distances over land. In these cases, the innovative solution was a tangible item, but innovation can also take the form of a process or approach that solves a problem.
For instance, when a person shines his shoes, does he care more about having a good shining experience, or about having polished shoes? Focusing on the experience of shoe shining, as the shine manufacturer might do, may lead to various product improvements, such as a quick-drying or non-streaking formula. However, focusing on the end result (polished shoes) might lead to the formula for a spray that can be applied when the shoes are made to provide long-lasting shine. The first is merely an incremental improvement, but the second is an innovation that not only meets the customer's end goal, but also broadens the market for the shoe shine company.
Kamal Hassan is President and CEO of 
I was having an interesting discussion this morning with a couple of innovation colleagues of mine. One is an entrepreneur with an outsourced "skunk works" business. The other is a creator and inventor who led disruptive innovation efforts at a major office products company. We came to a sad conclusion, at least for us innovation-oriented types.
Is this gloomy assessment accurate? If so, what should be done about it? Is this just the result of trying to weather the economic storm, or is this an ongoing trend?
All of this, of course, is not to say that deadlines are unimportant, spending should be unrestricted, or managers should not drive for achievement. Going back to the Apollo 13 engineers, they had absolute deadlines and minimal resources with extremely serious consequences that could not be ignored. Their success came from combining that urgency with a willingness to do what it took to get the job done. Corporate business practices should also encourage such willingness, and will find greater innovation and financial success by doing so.
"Who's Got Your Back" is a book all about the importance of building an inner circle of deep, trusting relationships that create success and won't let you fail. These kind of peer groups can be built both by individuals for personal and professional development, but can also be consciously built within organizations to increase collaboration and team success.
Yesterday we used an electronic device until it broke or a better one superseded it. We disposed of the old with great dispatch. Brands using a Parallel Model of product development kept us enthralled with a constant churn of new shiny objects and updated versions. Durables were recast as disposable. Sales and stocks soared. Best Buy created a whole new business, Geek Squad, to help us keep up. We wanted new toys, but needed Geeks to show us how to use them. We delighted at every new feature. We also started feeling pangs of "buyer's hesitation" as Moore's Law kept shortening product life cycles. Particularly as we started replacing devices that still worked just fine.
Today's economic realities compound these past experiences. The consumer technology industry has inadvertently trained us to delay purchases. Though it drove 15 years of unprecedented growth, this Parallel Model won't hold for the next 15. Lowered components costs will not be enough to spark demand.
The extra dollar spent on a modular manufacturing schema saves countless dollars on retooling for new gadgets, shipping, warehousing and more. Value-conscious consumers are now ready to see the long-term savings of buying modular products from trusted brands.
Marcus Oliver is an Innovation Director at innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212 in New York. 
I want to return to an issue that sparked some healthy debate a few weeks ago but didn't go far enough in my opinion.
Anyone who has ever read anything about job training programs knows the critical role that legitimacy plays in the vicious cycle of poverty. If you don't look the part you don't get the job and if you don't get the job you will never have the resources to look the part. The second nasty thing about legitimacy is of course the question of access. Organizations and individuals who lack legitimacy also lack access. And in the case of funding innovation, they simply lack access to funding opportunities and to exposure for their ideas. At IssueLab we spend a great deal of time actively searching for research from smaller organizations. It's key to the work we do and it's why our collection can include research from a small after-school media project alongside research from the MacArthur Foundation. What will foundations and the Office of Social Innovation do to identify innovative projects?
Gabriela Fitz is the Co-Director of IssueLab, a publishing forum for nonprofit research. She and her team blog about third sector research on IssueLab's blog "
Thanks to all of you, Blogging Innovation has experienced incredible global growth (even 
Congratulations to Evelyn Hannon!
In 1982 when few women were doing it, Evelyn Hannon put a backpack on and went out into the world to travel solo. An early adaptor on the web, in 1997 she began telling her travel stories online at 
