Who’s Driving Your Innovation Bus?

Who’s Driving Your Innovation Bus?

Innovation has become the buzzword of the decade with every CEO, Senior Manager, and CTO beating the drum for "Innovation" in their companies. While I don't disagree with them on the need for innovation, I do have a major issue with the way that many of them are driving that innovation agenda. When tech leaders or business leaders drive an innovation agenda within their own areas of speciality without integrating that agenda with the core value creating areas of the business the agenda is doomed to mediocrity. In addition, in most cases these leaders are not differentiating between "Innovating" (solving problems in new ways) and "Implementing Innovations" (the application of other's innovations within your business). To be fair, I don't actually believe that Innovation is an either/or issue either, there are good reasons to implement other's innovations within your business. P&G has been very successful in knocking down the "not invented here" mentality that can slow the overall growth of an organization. But...
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Out Of The Box Opportunities

Out Of The Box Opportunities

There is a great article in this week's BusinessWeek magazine entitled 'Fertile Ground for Startups' that illustrates the opportunities that are at hand for truly innovative ideas in today's economy.  The article outlines that investment by angel investors and venture capitalists is up significantly over the first half of this year, and that as many as 50,000 new businesses will obtain some form of angel or venture investment in 2009 in the US. The article also highlights some of the ideas that are getting money, and there seems to be a pretty consistent theme - innovation gets investment. After the past 18-24 months of economic turmoil it shouldn't surprise anyone that it is innovation that is leading the way out of the mess.  Innovation has been a great buzzword for the past 10-15 years, but only a few of the really great companies have been able to really harness its power within their existing corporate frameworks, leaving much of the opportunity for the development...
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