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.

Optimizing Innovation - Roopa Unnikrishnan of Pfizer

by Braden Kelley

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

Roopa Unnikrishnan, Senior Director of Worldwide Strategy & Innovation at Pfizer, focused on the the messy-ness of innovation in her talk and that while the idea of four grey-haired people beavering away on innovation is true, it is also true that innovation has become more democratized (at least in Pfizer). The pharmaceutical industry has gone from trying to beat diseases, towards having to focus more on price and cost - but this has helped us think more creatively about innovation and focus more on the customer.

Instead of just having centralized innovation funding, Pfizer has put little pockets of funds in every business unit that they can access to test and fail fast with ideas they think need to be explored. They've looked at what the areas are that customers care the most about and think about their innovation efforts as a string of pearls, so that everything hangs together.

Similar to Whirlpool and others, they have 2 1/2 people at the center and a broad network of senior managers with an innovation mandate distributed around the organization as 'innovation champions'. They also have a Senior Innovation Advisory Board of outsiders that includes Saul Griffith and Esther Dyson. Roopa also talked about the importance of networking to innovation. To encourage networking:

• They have held a two day, in-person, 150 person event that 600 people would have liked to attend


• They use Spigit to help people organize around interests and profiles, and also to serve up targeted challenges


• They are also creating a manager network - because that is the level that is the most important to innovation success

Pfizer looks three different types of innovation:

1. Transformative (creates new markets)


2. Pushing the envelope (expands into new markets or better serves existing markets)


3. Sustaining

And finally, when it comes to implementing innovation, Pfizer speaks about how there is a Mindset Change Cycle, an Intellectual Change Cycle, and an Emotional Change Cycle.

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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.

Smarter Cities - Smarter Planet

by Hutch Carpenter

IBM recently launched its Smarter Cities initiative. Part of its overall SmarterPlanet project, Smarter Cities is an effort to find solutions to the problems that will occur due to our ever-increasing population growth in urban centers around the world:


"In 1900, only 13% of the world's population lived in cities. By 2050, that number will have risen to 70%. We are adding the equivalent of seven New Yorks to the planet every year.

This unprecedented urbanization is both an emblem of our economic and societal progress - especially for the world's emerging nations - and a huge strain on the planet's infrastructure. It's a challenge felt urgently by mayors, heads of economic development, school administrators, police chiefs and other civic leaders."


IBM has the smarts and global heft to be a major voice in innovating solutions for the problems that urban population growth will bring on. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that there will be government expenditures to make sure we've got the infrastructure ready.

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano laid out three fundamental changes to global urban areas:

1. Our world is becoming instrumented: Sensors and devices are coming down in cost, and increasing in functionality, giving us "for the first time ever, real-time instrumentation of a wide range of the world's systems"


2. Our world is becoming interconnected: With the rise of devices with these sensors, "systems and objects can now 'speak' to one another"


3. All things are becoming intelligent: Better sensors, increased computing power and more information from interconnection mean that "intelligence can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive-in a word, smarter."

The sensors thing is interesting. I've heard both Tim O'Reilly and Paul Saffo talk about sensors as the big area of technology growth and opportunity.

As part of this initiative, IBM (in conjunction with Spigit) is running a series of prediction markets that you can participate in. The objective is to tap the collective wisdom of people around the world. Here are the prediction markets for which they're seeking your perspectives:

Education

• Which approach will be most effective in enabling better education outcome within a major city? (link)


• In order to increase the proportion of the population completing high school by 10% over the next five years; major cities will begin transforming education in what way (link)

Transportation

• Which company offers the best portfolio regarding Smarter Transportation? (link)


• In a major city, what will need to be improved in order to make transportation more efficient? (link)


• What enhancement can a major city make over the next year to be a global technology leader in public transportation? (link)


• What transportation enhancement will a major city, like New York, need to make to relieve its traffic congestion? (link)

Utilities

• Which of the following will be the most important to the rapid deployment and adoption of Smart Grids? (link)


• Over the next five years, what changes should a major city first implement to reduce energy waste and use its resources efficiently? (link)


• Which of the following will reduce household energy consumption the most within a major city like New York? (link)


• Which of the following should be a primary objective for a major city over the next five years? (link)

Government Services

• The current economic crisis will change plans for high priority projects in a major city in which way over the next few years? (link)


• If you were a mayor of a major city, which method would you use to assess the needs of your city, the business community and your citizens? (link)


• In 2011, what will be the primary method for citizens to communicate with their smarter city governments? (link)


• What immediate step should a major city government take over the next year to emerge as a leader in e-governance? (link)

Public Safety

• Over the next five years, what transformation will large cities make to their public safety systems to reduce the physical / personal crime rate against people, property, and infrastructure by half (50%)? (link)


• If a large city wants to improve its overall public safety position (i.e. reducing traffic fatalities, decreasing gang violence, improving emergency response capabilities) in which public safety area (or related city sub-system) should it target investment over the next year? (link)

Healthcare

• Which of the following sub-system improvement will be most effective in providing immediate benefit to healthcare delivery for citizens in a leading smarter city? (link)


• Over the next five years, what will major city hospitals do to increase efficiency and deliver better quality healthcare to its citizens? (link)

Other

• What are the top challenges large cities (i.e. populations over 5M) within emerging markets will face within the next five years? (link)


• What region(s) will recover most quickly from the current global economic crisis? (link)

If addressing these issues is something that interests you, check out IBM's SmarterCities Predictive Idea Markets.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Spigit Innovation Summit Wrapup

by Braden Kelley

Last week (August 13-14, 2009) I had the opportunity to attend the Spigit Innovation Summit from the Four Seasons Resort Aviara in Carlsbad, CA.

It was a great event with keynotes from Gary Hamel, Jeffrey Phillips, and Sean Toulon (TMAG). There were also panels on Spigit use cases (AT&T, Mitre, IBM) and best practices (Pfizer, MedPlus, Wal-Mart), along with ample opportunities for innovation management practitioners to converse and share their experiences with each other.

Some of the insights that came out of the panels and included the following:

• It is important to have a dedicated innovation team (even if they are not full-time) and discretionary funds available for funding selected ideas


• It is important to have connectors on your innovation team - people with relationships in lots of different business units and workgroups


• Whatever software you choose to use must allow for open submissions and for discrete, targeted innovation challenges


• Other things to consider when setting up an innovation management system are


• How do you allow for idea evolvement, multiple authors,tracking the evolution of an idea, and measuring value added to an idea?

One interesting question that came up at the summit that ties in nicely with August's Innovation Perspectives is the following:

Does alignment of your innovation management system to your corporate strategy erect a barrier to innovation?

The answer is - it depends. If you do choose to align your innovation management system to your corporate strategy, the consensus seemed to be that innovation challenges are the best way to do this.

Finally, when it comes to implenting an innovation management system,it is quite typical to have the following four phases:

1. Planning


2. Launching and Engaging


3. Evaluating Ideas


4. Metrics and Proving Value

Here are two other posts from the Spigit Innovtion Summit:

Top 10 Jeffrey Phillips Insights

Top 10 Gary Hamel Insights

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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.

Top 10 Jeffrey Phillips Insights (Spigit Innovation Summit)

by Braden Kelley

I had the good fortune to hear Jeffrey Phillips of OVO Innovation speak on the second day of the Spigit Innovation Summit on August 14, 2009. We are lucky to have Jeffrey Phillips as a contributing author here on Blogging Innovation.

Here are the top ten insights that I captured from Jeffrey Phillips' speech:

1. 1/10 of 1% of ideas submitted on Dell's IdeaStorm apparently are found to be useful (1 out of a 1000)


2. Suggestive innovation sites like Dell's IdeaStorm can have the problem of vocal minority influencing the broader majority


3. The directed, invitational external community model best for generating disruptive innovation (via @bhc3)


4. Lotka's Law and communities says that out of 100 people in a community, only 10 people participate, and only 1 participates frequently


5. Anywhere from 20-40% of employees may participate in your innovation community - Your rollout communications and culture have a huge impact


6. Lurking is a form of community participation - curiosity


7. You can't be a "little bit pregnant" with external innovation communities. You need to establish a strong engagement model upfront. (via @bhc3)


8. You should really visualize your process for integrating the ideas that come out of an innovation community before you begin


9. When building an innovation community, you have to position it as a site that highlights what's in it for the community participants


10. To get participation in an innovation community, its members must be able to trust that something will change as result of their participation

What do you think?

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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.

Top 10 Gary Hamel Insights (Spigit Innovation Summit)

by Braden Kelley

I had the good fortune to hear Gary Hamel of London Business School's Management Innovation Lab speak on the first day of the Spigit Innovation Summit on August 13, 2009.

Here are the top ten insights that I captured from Gary Hamel's speech:

1. We need to openly challenge our corporate management policies and processes, and experiment like we do in other scientific disciplines


2. The more consolidated the control of change is, the less resilient an organization will be


3. To come up with any really good idea, you have to challenge your deep orthodoxies - we need to do the same thing with our management principles


4. Two hard problems - (1) How do you do things at scale without being inflexible? (2) How do you have strong coordination without centralization?


5. "If call wait time is 30 minutes, how come I can't pay $2 and jump to the front of the queue?"


6. The future is not necessarily unpredictable, but it is often uncomfortable - As a result, management often fails to react


7. As knowledge becomes distributed across organizations and countries, it becomes harder to create sustainable differentiation


8. Not only is the pace of change going exponential, but business is getting a lot tougher because barriers to entry are falling, and things are changing so fast that by the time regulators understand something new, it's out of control


9. The time from leader to laggard in an industry is now sometimes measured in months


10. "We can create organizations that can manage incredible complexity, but with great inflexibility" - even though we complain about how organizations are managed, startups do it the same way only smaller

What do you think?

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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.

Coming Next Week - Spigit Innovation Summit

Last week (July 28, 2009), I had the opportunity to attend Brightidea's Birds of a Feather 3.0 event.

Next week (August 13-14, 2009) I will endeavor to bring you live coverage of the Spigit Innovation Summit from the Four Seasons Resort Aviara in Carlsbad, CA.

Gary Hamel will be giving the keynote at the event, and will likely share his perspectives on corporate innovation gathered from his consulting work, his work with London Business School's Management Innovation Lab, and his research from his latest book "The Future of Management".

Over the course of two days, a range of innovation-related topics will be open for discussion with innovation leaders from a variety of companies. There will be sessions on best practices, use cases and internal innovation applications with specific examples provided by participants.

If you will be at this event and would like to share your thoughts about barriers to innovation (on or off camera), or discuss the possiblity of having your company's innovation case study included in an upcoming publication, please contact me.

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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.