Contest Winner - The Economist's March Event

Through yesterday at midnight GMT we ran a contest for a chance to win a free ticket ($1,500 value) to The Economist's event - "Innovation Fresh Thinking For the Ideas Economy" at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley on March 23-24, 2010.

There will be a lot of great, top-flight speakers at this event, including a couple of new additions:

• Christina Romer, Chair, White House Council of Economic Advisers


• Juan Enriquez, Managing Director, Excel Venture Management

Contestants filled in the blank in the following statement on our LinkedIn or Facebook discussion:

• When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about ______________.

Congratulations to the winner - Rick Smyers!

Please contact us ASAP with your e-mail address to claim your prize. Failure to do so before midnight GMT on March 4, 2010 will result in the ticket being awarded to the alternate - Melinda Lockhart!

The winner was chosen at random by my daughter, but here are my five favorite quotes:

1. "When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about philanthropy." - Jenn Lew Goldstone


2. "When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about how to cross the enormous bridge from creating an idea to the challenges of implementing a new idea and gaining acceptance from the people at large." - Melinda Lockhart


3. "When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about vision building. Innovative ideas are no longer hard to find. However, people who can build vision are the ones creating blue oceans and making them a reality. We don't need more ideas....we need more vision builders." - Adam Dole


4. "When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about the desperate need to clean up the current knowledge - of its fallacies and redundancies and help minimize the time wasted on unvalidated verbose" - Jeyaseelan J


5. "When it comes to innovation, I wish somebody would write about what it's necessary for every person start living consciously and caring for every human being. What about innovating on our way of living..." - Pedro Norte

As an added value for our loyal Blogging Innovation readers, we have negotiated a $150 discount when you register using our discount code - "BLINN" - register now.

We hope to see you there!


EDITOR'S NOTE: Winner is still responsible for all travel costs and the ticket is granted at The Economist's discretion not ours. There is only ONE (1) ticket up for grabs in this contest and it will be awarded to ONE (1) winner.


Don't miss an article - signup for our rss feed or our Continous Innovation group today!

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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.

Join our Innovation Discussions on LinkedIn

I created the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn five months ago and it already has 1,300+ members getting together to share innovation articles, discussions, and job postings.

Blogging Innovation's mission is to make innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good, and the LinkedIn group is another way for us to help facilitate conversation, collaboration, and education.



LinkedIn groups don't require people to join yet another social network and build yet another profile (most people are already members of LinkedIn - or should be). LinkedIn is part of many people's routine, and if it's not they can sign up to receive a daily or weekly digest of group activity by e-mail.

So if you have a news article you'd like to share, a best practice you'd like to share, a question to ask of the group or a job you'd like to post, please come join us in the Continuous Innovation group.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. Ellen Levy of LinkedIn

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Ellen Levy's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. Ellen Levy, VP of Corporate Development and Strategy at LinkedIn was the opening speaker at the event. She set the stage by talking about how social networking is not a fad, and how the key elements of a successful network are identity (authenticity/ownership), trust, and reputation.

As an example of the importance of trust, she described how on the same day that LinkedIn started allowing people to add headshot photos to their profile, they also launched a feature that allowed other users to say "never show me a photo." This is of course key for people like HR managers who need to systematically avoid being biased by things like photos in their screening processes.

Dr. Levy went on to describe how the problem now is not access to information, but information overload. Now of course the manual solution would be to spend more time doing things like answering email, but at the same time there could also be technology solutions like having artificial intelligence determine which emails to answer. There is of course a third way, and that would be to solve the problem using social inferences. Think about the Amazon recommendation engine as an example, and think about extending that to show you books that were also purchased by other heads of innovation.

Switching our attention to open innovation, there is a very real reason for having a broad range of sources for ideas, and companies are trying to figure out how to handle this. A lot of business books assume you will have the ability to look up information about people, that they are trustworthy, and that you will be able to reach out them. These same books also assume that people halfway around the world will actually want to work with you. This is one of the keys to open innovation - identifying how to make these trusted connections and finding ways to grab their attention.

She closed by admitting that their iPhone application is not as good as it could be. She did say however that they not only have a newer iPhone application coming, but they are also building an API for site owners to use.

So, how can you take advantage of the things that are taking place on the consumer internet in your business?

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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.

LinkedIn or Ning for Innovation Community?

Which do people prefer for sharing interesting news, articles, videos, and all around community - Ning or LinkedIn?

I created an Innovation Community a year ago on Ning and to date it has 42 members.


Ning had a lot of promise when it first came on the scene, but I'm not sure that it has a bright future because it hasn't found a way to make itself an integral part of people's lives.

I created the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn two months ago and it already has 470+ members.


LinkedIn groups don't require people to join yet another social network and build yet another profile (most people are already members of LinkedIn - or should be). LinkedIn is part of many people's routine, and if it's not they can sign up to receive a daily or weekly digest of group activity by e-mail.

LinkedIn groups may not offer all of the functionality of Ning groups, but they do offer discussions, job postings, and the ability to share news articles or other links. I think that's good enough.

What do you think?

Care to discuss this in the Continuous Innovation group?

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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.

incentive2innovate - Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

Day two at the incentive2innovate conference at the United Nations featured a keynote by Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn.

Reid Hoffman took the stage and began by speaking about how individiduals are now small businesses, before moving on to discuss how the venture capital industry started in Boston but has been eclipsed by Silicon Valley. Proliferation of open networks in the valley are the reason. Collaboration has driven the success of Silicon Valley, not just physical proximity - other locales have been more controlling of information.

Reid talked about how often entrepreneurs don't want to tell anyone about their idea. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur with a great idea, then identify the right people to talk with about your "secret" idea and spill the beans. You will get lots of useful feedback more often than competition. Fail fast!

On the topic of social networks, Reid Hoffman talked about how 2/3 of his network thought he was crazy when he pitched LinkedIn, but he persisted anyways. Reid doesn't think that LinkedIn and Facebook compete today, and that Twitter and Facebook aren't directly competitive either - Twitter does universal sharing and Facebook does limited sharing. One of the best quotes of the talk was:

"MySpace is the bar. Facebook is the backyard BBQ. LinkedIn is the office."


Reid Hoffman's final major point was that we still penalize people for failure when we need to let people say - "No I learned and now I'm ready to play again."


What do you think?


Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)

Charlie Rose Interviews Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

Charlie Rose interviews Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn about the future of technology and social networking, and discusses with him the differences between LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace.

The most interesting point he makes is that while tolerance for risk and the ability to manage it are key skills for entrepreneurs, we are all entrepreneurs now. By that he means that each of us is now responsible for managing our careers and keeping an eye towards finding that next job opportunity to further develop our career.



What do you think?

@innovate