Pick Your Best People to Lead Innovation

by Paul Sloane

Many businesses make the mistake of giving innovation projects to junior executives. It seems natural to hand innovation opportunities to enthusiastic and promising upstarts. But generally it is the experienced heavyweights who can overcome all the process and political obstacles that will occur.

In September 1999 Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM, read a line buried deep in a report which said that current quarter pressures had forced a business unit to cut costs by stopping efforts in a promising new area. Gerstner was incensed and wanted to find out how often this happened. He asked J. Bruce Harreld, IBM's senior VP in charge of Strategy to find out. Harreld found a similar pattern in at least 22 other cases. IBM had plenty of new ideas but it had a remarkably hard time turning those ideas into businesses. IBM had produced many crucial inventions, such as the relational database and the router, then watched while others, such as Oracle and Cisco built huge companies around them.

Harreld investigated the causes and found that IBM rewarded short-term results and was reluctant to devote management attention and resources to rolling the dice. IBM's leaders did not spend much time on new businesses and they did not tap their "A-team" of executives to run them. "We were relegating this to the most inexperienced people," said Herrald. "We were not putting the best and brightest talent on this." (Quotes from FastCompany magazine, March 2005 issue)

Gerstner and Harreld reversed this approach. They deliberately put their most experienced and talented executives in charge of Emerging Business Opportunities (EBOs). Their mission was to find areas that are new to IBM that can yield profitable billion-dollar-plus businesses in five to seven years. The program has been a remarkable success. Between 2000 and 2005 IBM launched 25 EBOs. Three failed and were closed down but the remaining 22 produced annual revenues of over $15 billion and growth of over 40% per year.

More importantly than their revenue impact, the EBOs helped change IBM's culture. "We've become more willing to experiment, more willing to accept failure, learn from it and move on. Now being an EBO leader is a really desirable job at IBM," says Harreld.

The lesson from IBM is clear. If you want to change the culture of an organisation so that it values innovation and new business start-ups then get your most senior and best people involved in these activities. Don't delegate it to lower level staff and hope for the best.


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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Is Open Innovation a Tournament?

by Stephen Shapiro

A magazine asked me to write a book review of "Innovation Tournaments" by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich. The book arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately turned to the index to see if InnoCentive was listed. Sure enough, we are mentioned in several places in the book.

This got me thinking: Is InnoCentive a tournament?

The word tournament is derived from the French word for "medieval sport" and is now used to describe a wide variety of competitions.

Most competitions/tournaments are quite entertaining. And by their very nature, there is always a winner. One could argue that tournaments are "spectacles designed to find a champion."

Given this widely held point-of-view, using the word tournament as a descriptor of InnoCentive seems to be inaccurate.

The NCAA basketball championships are a tournament. The "World Series of Poker" is a tournament. American Idol is a tournament. With each of these, there is always a winner. The purpose of the tournament is to find that winner while (usually) providing entertainment value.

InnoCentive is not interested in finding a winner for the sake of naming the champion. The objective is to find workable solutions to real business problems. Their approach is one I call a "contingency-based, value-driven pricing model." Admittedly, that does not sound as sexy as calling it an innovation tournament.

Here's how it works. A company has a problem they want solved. They decide the "value" of finding a workable solution and they offer a "bounty" to anyone who can provide one. The bounty is only paid when they get what they need. This "pay for solution" model outsources the risk associated with complex problem solving.

Here are other examples that illustrate the key difference between the bounty-based approach with the tournament-based approach.

The NetFlix Prize was not a tournament. They only paid the team that improved the recommendation engine by 10%. This makes is a bounty-based approach. You only pay the bounty when you get a successful solution.

In contrast, The Cisco iPrize, can be thought of as a tournament. According to their website, they will "select up to 32 semifinalist teams that will work with Cisco experts to build a business plan and presentation... Up to eight finalist teams will present their business ideas to a judging panel to compete for the grand prize: a $250,000 award shared equally by members of the winning team." The LG Electronics competition (read my article on it here) was also a tournament-based approach.

The key difference is the way the challenge is articulated. With the bounty-based approach, the success criteria is clearly defined and you know if someone provided a successful solution: Did you improve the recommendation engine by 10%? Did you find a chemical compound that has specific properties? Did you develop a mathematical model that optimizes solves a specific problem? The "winner" of the bounty is determined by this success criteria. If the criteria is not met, the bounty is not paid.

With the tournament-based approach, the success criteria is not defined. The winner is the "best" of the submissions. Although these types of competitions can yield excellent solutions, I know from inside-information that the results are often less than stellar. One company that uses this type of tournament described the results as a "PR success yet a commercial failure."

Both approaches can provide value to any organization. It's just important to recognize that they are useful in different ways. Tournaments can be great to get a broad set of ideas for an undefined space. Bounties are great for when you are hunting down usable solutions.


Related articles:

• Innovation Tournaments Interview - Christian Terwiesch
  
• Book Review - "Innovation Tournaments"

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.

Cisco Announces $250,000 iPrize Competition v2.0

by Braden Kelley

Cisco has announced its second Cisco iPrize Competition. At stake is a $250,000 Grand Prize that will be awarded after eight selected finalists have the opportunity to present their innovation idea to Cisco's selection commitee using Cisco Telepresence.

The first Cisco iPrize was awarded to an idea focused on reducing the energy consumption in the electrical grid. This idea is currently undergoing development in Cisco. But the winners are back at it again and have entered an idea in Cisco iPrize v2.0.

I had the opportunity to do a video interview with Sharon Wong, Director of Business Development in Cisco's Emerging Technology Group about the competition:

Interview with Sharon Wong about Cisco iPrize from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

In this open, global competition entrepreneurs submit proposals and collaborate to create the seed idea for Cisco's next billion-dollar business.

You have until April 30, 2010 to submit your idea. Idea submissions should fall in one of four categories:

1. The Future of Work: New solutions that accelerate and change the way we do business


2. The Connected Life: Technological inspirations that dramatically improve living conditions and disseminate culture


3. New Ways to Learn: Next-generation solutions that transform when, where, and how people learn.


4. The Future of Entertainment: New solutions that change how people play together

Below on the left you'll find a video of Marthin De Beer announcing the Cisco iPrize Competition and on the right you can watch Guido Jouret speak about some of Cisco's views on what makes a big idea:



You can submit an idea by yourself or you can work together as a team. Once ideas are submitted, iPrize community members can vote for the best ideas, and otherwise engage with the community of people who have submitted ideas. For complete rules and other information, please check out the Cisco iPrize Questions and Answers.


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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.

The Decade's Top Performing CEOs

by Adam Hartung

I was intrigued when I read on the Harvard Business Review web site "Do we celebrate the wrong CEOs?" The article quickly pointed out that many of the best known CEOs - and often named as most respected - didn't come close to making the list of the top 100 best performing CEOs. Some of those on Barron's list of top 30 most respected that did not make the cut as best performing include Immelt of GE, Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Palmesano of IBM and Tillerson of Exxon Mobil. It did seem striking that often business people admire those who are at the top of organizations, regardless of their performance.

I was delighted when HBR put out the full article "The Best Performing CEOs in the World." And it is indeed an academic exercise of great value. The authors looked at CEOs who came into their jobs either just before 2000, or during the decade, and the results they obtained for shareholders. There were 1,999 leaders who fit the timeframe. As has held true for a long time in the marketplace, the top 100 accounted for the vast majority of wealth creation - meaning if you were invested with them you captured most of the decade's return - while the bulk of CEOs added little value and a great chunk created negative returns. (It does beg the question - why do Boards of Directors keep on CEOs who destroy shareholder value - like Barnes of Sara Lee, for example? It would seem something is demonstrably wrong when CEOs remain in their jobs, usually with multi-million dollar compensation packages, when year after year performance is so bad.)

The list of "Top 50 CEOs" is available on the HBR website. This group created 32% average gains every year! They created over $48.2B of value for investors. Comparatively, the bottom 50 had negative 20% annual returns, and lost over $18.3B. As an investor, or employee, it is much, much better to be with the top 5% than to be anywhere else on the list. However, only 5 of the top best performers were on the list of top 50 highest paid - demonstrating again that CEO pay is not really tied to performance (and perhaps at least part of the explanation for why business leaders are less admired now than the previous decade.)

Consistent among the top 50 was the ability to adapt. Especially the top 10. Steve Jobs of Apple was #1, a leader and company I've blogged about several times. As readers know, Apple went from a niche producer of PCs to a leader in several markets completely unrelated to PCs under Mr. Jobs' leadership. His ability to keep moving his company back into the growth Rapids by rejecting "focus on the core" and instead using White Space to develop new products for growth markets has been a model well worth following. And in which to be invested.

Similarly, the leaders of Cisco, Amazon, eBay and Google have been listed here largely due to their willingness to keep moving into new markets. Cisco was profiled in my book Create Marketplace Disruption for its model of Disruption that keeps the company constantly opening White Space. Amazon went from an obscure promoter of non-inventoried books to the leader in changing how books are sold, to the premier on-line retailer of all kinds of products, to the leader in digitizing books and periodicals with its Kindle launch. eBay has to be given credit for doing much more than creating a garage sale - they are now the leader in independent retailing with eBay stores. And their growth of PayPal is on the vanguard of changing how we spend money - eliminating checks and making digital transactions commonplace. Of course Google has moved from a search engine to a leader in advertising (displacing Yahoo!) as well as offering enterprise software (such as Google Wave), cloud applications to displace the desktop applications, and emerging into the mobile data/telephony marketplace with Android. All of these company leaders were willing to Disrupt their company's "core" in order to use White Space that kept the company constantly moving into new markets and GROWTH.

We can see the same behavior among other leaders in the top 10 not previously profiled here. Samsung has moved from a second rate radio/TV manufacturer to a leader in multiple electronics marketplaces and the premier company in rapid product development and innovation implementation. Gilead Sciences is a biopharmaceutical company that has returned almost 2,000% to investors - while the leaders of Merck and Pfizer have taken their companies the opposite direction. By taking on market challenges with new approaches Gilead has used flexibility and adaptation to dramatically outperform companies with much greater resources - but an unwillingness to overcome their Lock-ins.

Three names not on the list are worth noting. Jack Welch was a great Disruptor and advocate of White Space (again, profiled in my book). But his work was in the 1990s. His replacement (Mr. Immelt) has fared considerably more poorly - as have investors - as the rate of Disruption and White Space has fallen off a proverbial cliff. Even though much of what made GE great is still in place, the willingness to Defend & Extend, as happened in financial services, has increased under Mr. Immelt to the detriment of investors.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are now good friends, and also not on the list. Firstly, they created their investor fortunes in previous decades as well. But in their cases, they remained as leaders who moved into the D&E world. Microsoft has become totally Locked-in to its Gates-era Success Formula, and under Steve Ballmer the company has done nothing for investors, employees - or even customers. And Berkshire Hathaway has spent the last decade providing very little return to shareholders, despite all the great press for Mr. Buffett and his success in previous eras. Each year Mr. Buffett tells investors that what worked for him in previous years doesn't work any more, and they should not expect previous high rates of return. And he keeps proving himself right. Until both Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway undertake significant Disruptions and implement considerably more White Space we should not expect much for investors.

This has been a tough decade for far too many investors and employees. As we end the year, the list of television programs bemoaning how badly the decade has gone is long. Show after show laments the poor performance of the stock market, as well as employers. We end the year with official unemployment north of 10%, and unofficial unemployment some say near 20%. But what this HBR report tells us is that it is possible to have a good decade. We need leaders who are willing to look to the future for their planning (not the past), obsess about competitors to discover market shifts, be willing to Disrupt old Success Formulas by attacking Lock-in, and using White Space to keep the company in the growth Rapids. When businesses overcome old notions of "best practice" that keeps them trying to Defend & Extend then business performs marvelously well. It's just too bad so few leaders and companies are willing to follow The Phoenix Principle.

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Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption", is a Faculty and Board member of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Managing Partner of Spark Partners, and writes for "Forbes" and the "Journal for Innovation Science."

Why Open Innovation Matters

by Stefan Lindegaard

A few weeks back someone told me an interesting story about Procter & Gamble and their competitors. It is well-known that P&G is the open innovation champion and their long focus on open innovation has given them an important advantage.

They get to see interesting proposals within their business areas before their competitors. In the story I heard, one of P&G competitors complained they only saw ideas and proposals that P&G already had rejected. Ouch, talk about being a second-tier choice...

This leads to a very important point on open innovation for market leading companies and those aspiring to be. The key game is to become the preferred partner of choice.

A preferred partner of choice simply gets to see the best ideas first and such a position can help a company out-innovate their competitors and develop substantial long term overall business advantages.

As each industry only has one - or perhaps two - winners in this game, companies should begin to focus harder on their open innovation strategy and efforts. It becomes even more important as this positioning game already plays out in many industries. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Mobile phones: Apple and Nokia seem to have taken the lead here. I do not see much open innovation activity from Motorola, Samsung, HTC and the other players.

Software: IBM, SAP and Intuit are doing great things here. I acknowledge that software is a very broad business category that can be divided into smaller segments. Nevertheless, these are the companies I hear about on open innovation. What about the many other companies?

Technology: Cisco seems to build momentum over their direct competitors HP, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks.

Companies should have in mind that this game is very much about perception. A company starts an open innovation-like initiative and if they get some success they are encouraged to continue down this path. This is picked up by bloggers and others in the open innovation community and the word quickly spreads that a certain company is doing interesting things.

This spreads just as fast in the industry of the given company resulting in two things; internally the company gains even more momentum on their open innovation efforts and externally the company is perceived as an open innovation leader within the given industry.

Voila, the company is on its way to claim a preferred partner status and if they do not mess up they can soon reap the benefits of this.

I think this provides another example of why companies need to wake up with regards to open innovation. Your thoughts?

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

How Understanding Customer Jobs turns Crowdsourcing into Smartsourcing

by Graham Hill

Crowdsourcing is becoming a part of many companies' innovation strategy. But crowdsourcing suffers from a number of problems that limit its effectiveness. By selecting 'emerging customers' - who are better at spotting winning innovations - and helping them innovate around unmet customer needs, crowdsourcing can be turned into smartsourcing. Leading companies like Cisco already use smartsourcing to identify tomorrow's winning innovations.

Peter Drucker the gurus' guru famously said, "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." Marketing is hard enough to get right, but innovation is a whole lot harder still. Depending on the industry, about 80% of new products fail on introduction in the market. And up to 60% fail in reintroduction.

To overcome this disastrous failure rate, companies have started to recruit customers to generate ideas for new products. A process Jeff Howe called Crowdsourcing in a 2006 article in Wired magazine. There are a number of great examples of successful crowdsourcing programmes, however, two examples illustrate what happens when companies start crowdsourcing programmes without really thinking them through properly.

The first of these is Dell with its Ideastorm programme. Anyone can come up with a computer-related idea, post it on the Ideastorm website, vote for the best ideas, comment about them and hopefully, see them implemented. Sounds great. Why not harness ideas from customers? And why not get customers to vote for them to cut programme staff costs. Unfortunately, crowdsourcing has a number of serious problems. The first problem is that customers, even large numbers of them, typically produce average, unremarkable, incremental innovations, rather than the step-change innovations that companies hope for. Although 12,483 ideas have been posted on the website since Ideastorm started in February 2007, only 366 have been implemented to-date, a miserly 2.9% of the total. And most of the implemented ideas provide only incremental improvements to Dell's business. To its credit, Dell says that Ideastorm is intended as an extension of its relationship with its customers, rather than just as a source of product ideas. Just as well, as Ideastorm is a failure as a source of winning new innovations.

The second example is Starbucks with its My Starbucks Idea. Similar to Ideastorm, My Starbucks Idea allows any registered customer to post an idea, vote for the best ideas, comment on them and see them implemented. Or not as the case may be. My Starbucks Idea, despite receiving over 75,653 ideas, has only implemented 315 ideas to-date, an even more miserly 0.4% of the total. You wouldn't think that having ideas to improve a coffee-house chain would be all that difficult to implement. But the low rate of implementation illustrates the second problem with crowdsourcing; that customers have no idea of how the business works, what business capabilities it has and thus, no idea whether even the simplest of ideas can realistically be implemented, (let alone whether they will turn a profit). In stark contrast to Starbucks, Toyota implements over 1,000,000 employee ideas every year, 95% of them within 10 days of being submitted. But unlike Starbucks's customers, Toyota's employees know exactly where the best innovation opportunities lie, what can realistically be implemented and the profit-impact of doing so. Coming up with innovations like this is part of the Toyota Way. It's what makes Toyota such a unique company.

And there is another big problem too. Customers expend a lot of creative goodwill generating ideas for Dell and Starbucks, only to see the vast majority of them shot down by their peers or ignored by the companies. All that talk by Dell of building a relationship with customers quickly comes to nothing when its customers' hard work creating ideas is neither recognised nor rewarded. As Dell and Starbucks attempts at crowdsourcing illustrate only too clearly, crowdsourcing's supposed advantage of harnessing customers as sources of innovation is in fact its biggest weakness. The fact is that most customers simply don't have any good ideas, those that do are often not implementable and the miniscule implementation rate burns a lot of customer goodwill in the process.

So what should companies who still want to harness customers to generate winning innovations do? How can they turn wasteful crowdsourcing into productive smartsourcing.

One company that got it right is Cisco with its I-Prize competition. Starting in late 2007, Cisco asked innovators to come up with ideas that could it turn into the next billion dollar business. Cisco collected over 1,200 ideas from 2,500 innovators in 104 countries across the globe The ideas were initially filtered to see if they tackled Cisco's pain paints, if they could be delivered using Cisco's capabilities and if Cisco could make money from doing so. The filtering was done by a full-time, six-man team, drawn from across Cisco's business. The best 40 ideas were then assigned a mentor to help the innovators turn their idea into a workable business plan. The final 10 ideas were then selected, and taken though an interview and further filtering process to find the eventual winner. A single idea -- for a smart electricity grid -- by a German/Russian team was selected to collect the $250,000 prize.

Cisco's success at smartsourcing shows the importance of focussing ideas on particular pain points or opportunities. Rather than just let innovators come up with ideas, it is much better to focus their creativity on just those opportunities where they can produce a breakthrough. As innovation gurus Tony Ulwick of Strategyn and Prof. Clayton Christensen have shown, in today's customer-centric business environment this means understanding the jobs customers are trying to do and the outcomes they want from doing them. And not only functional 'doing' jobs, but also emotional jobs that describe how the customer feels about what they are doing and social jobs that describe how the customer relates to their peers too. Once you understand customer jobs and outcomes, they should be prioritised to find the areas where the importance to customers is highest but satisfaction with current solutions is lowest. This is the innovation sweet spot. Experience suggests that focussing on the innovation sweet spot can produce an 80% success rate for new products; a whole lot better than the 80% failure rate we commonly see.

Only when you know where the innovation sweet spot is should you seek to harness the creativity of customers. And not just any old customers either. As Dell and Starbucks' experience with crowdsourcing shows, harvesting ideas from the mass of customers produces a very small number of good ideas and a large volume of poor ones. It also generates a lot of wasteful costs if ideas are to be assessed properly. Recent research on emergent customers suggests that by screening potential customer innovators for their ability to imagine how innovations can be developed that will be successful in the market, the quality of ideas generated is significantly increased. Emergent customers produce much better ideas than the mass of customers, better ideas even than the lead-customers who are alredy pushing products beyond wheree they were designed to go. Just think what being able to identify the best innovators from the broad customer base could mean for companies. Companies could harvest a smaller number of high quality ideas. That would free up resources to help develop the best ideas together with customers. And more ideas would make it successfully to market. It would enable companies to turn inefficient, wasteful crowdsourcing into much more productive smartsourcing.

As the failure of Dell and Starbucks' crowdsourcing programmes, and the success Cisco's smartsourcing one shows, understanding customer jobs provides a solid foundation for targeted open innovation, whilst identifying emergent customers provides the best way to harness just those customers whose ideas will help produce winning innovations: new products that help customers get important jobs done well and create profit for the company too.

What do you think? Have you been disappointed by crowdsourcing initiatives? Have you seen great examples of smartsourcing in action? Are you an emergent customer?


Further Reading:

Jeff Howe, The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Matthew May, Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way

Harvard Business Review, Inside Cisco's Search for the Next Big Idea

Tony Ulwick, What is Outcome-driven Innovation?

Hoffman et al, Identifying and Using Emergent Consumers in Developing Radical Innovations

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Graham Hill is a Customer-centric Innovator and CRM Guru at CustomerThink.com. Follow me on Twitter.

Making Innovation Work in a Downturn

by Dan Keldsen

In this latest podcast, IAM Talking with Carlos Dominguez, Senior Vice President in Cisco's Office of the Chairman of the Board and CEO.

Carlos has worked at Cisco for 17 years in a variety of roles, and advocates for the broad and creative use of technologies that are transforming how companies do business, creating distinct competitive advantages and new business models for those who adopt them.

Dominguez says that video, Web 2.0 applications and the increasing use of social networks, at home and at work, are at the heart of the collaboration revolution that is helping companies use the power of collective intelligence to produce revolutionary ideas for new products, better customer service and greater cost reductions.

It was a sincere pleasure of speaking at length with Carlos, and for my part, I believe we had a stunning array of innovation and collaboration-related tangents that emerged, which I believe are well worth paying attention to. Not your average interview, by any stretch.

A sampling of the highlights until we have a transcription ready:

Social networking and open innovation:
How did Journey find the next replacement singer after languishing for years with the missing voice of Steve Perry (lead singer) in the late 80s? YouTube and social networking located a replacement singer from... well, you'll have to listen to find out.

Virtual meetings and worlds:

Cisco is not immune from the worldwide dip in the economy, has taken steps to ban all large scale travel for their sales meetings, executive meetings - at a 10x cost reduction (minimally), and with no perceived decrease in the richness or validity of the outcomes. What is the role of telepresence? Gaming as a competitive driver for salespeople? Take a listen.

Culture:
To paraphrase Carlos:

"Most great innovations are killed within organizations... as they are threats to the existing business... and the Cisco culture is specifically built and tested to prevent potential ideas from being killed"

Cisco has a requirement for executives and managers each quarter, or at the least, yearly, to indicate exactly what they are doing within their business unit to Innovate (BIG I in my vernacular or "disruptive innovation" to some) versus innovate (small i or improvememt) within their areas. How does this compare with YOUR organization?

Healthcare:
What is Cisco doing themselves, internally, to innovate in the health and wellness of it's own employees as well as their families? And what has the impact of that investment been?

And much, much more in this slightly more than 30 minute interview...

We had some issues with Skype introducing noise into the system, but keep your ears open for some fantastic points on the state of Innovation within Cisco, Cisco's customers, and what Carlos' experiences in seeing and working with some of the most cutting-edge technologies available, make possible.

Listen now!

Download the MP3 of this podcast

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.

Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Innovation

I came across a nice cut of Guy Kawasaki's frequently delivered "Art of Innovation" presentation from Cisco Live 2009 that makes it possible to enjoy the key points in eight minutes.





So are you letting the bozos grind you down?


Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

My Experience with Cisco TelePresence

I had the opportunity to experience a conference today using Cisco's TelePresence to connect four locations (New York, New Jersey, Seattle, and Silicon Valley) and Cisco's WebEx to connect scores more people on the internet. It was supposed to be five physical locations, but London got ten inches of snow overnight and so they did not join.

The conference ran for five hours and I must say that the high definition video ran flawlessly, and there were only minor glitches in getting people's computers synched up with the projector. The system seamlessly switched amongst the four locations on our three flat panels, based on who was talking, and the sound was crystal clear.

Not bad for $300,000 (for the 3-screen Cisco TelePresence 3000). I'm sure it will get cheaper over time, but I can only imagine that there must be renewed interest with the reduced travel budgets at most companies today.

It is hard to fully explain the experience, but life-size imagery and high-definition with directional audio is a leap ahead of any video conferencing system I've experienced (including Microsoft Office Roundtable). The additional benefits of Microsoft Outlook integration, screen sharing and easy operation would make it a very intriguing purchase for any company with distributed teams.

Additional Links:
On-stage experience
Promotional Video (more details)

What do you think?

@innovate

Tomorrow - Bright Idea Birds of a Feather 2.0 - Innovation Conference

Tomorrow I will be lucky enough to attend an international innovation conference via Cisco's TelePresence solution. Brightidea, the software provider behind the successful Cisco I-Prize, is sponsoring the conference with Cisco tomorrow, February 2, 2009.

This Innovation Birds of a Feather conference will bring together innovation leaders both online and via Cisco TelePresence locations in Seattle, London, Silicon Valley, New York, and New Jersey.

The Brightidea Innovation Leaders "Birds of a Feather" Conference is a peer to peer discussion on innovation management among innovation executives and managers at top global corporations. It promises to provide a forum to exchange ideas and best practices on implementing innovation in large organizations.

Companies represented will include: American Express, Astra Zeneca, Safeway, Unilever, Travelers, Merrill Lynch, and more.

The conference will also feature three authors including:

- Mike Kanazawa - "Big Ideas to Big Results"
- Gregg Fraley - "Jack's Notebook"
- Joe Wheeler - "The Ownership Quotient"

I'll try and report on some high level takeaways after the event.

Braden Kelley
@innovate
Blogging Innovation