There is no winning formula or established convention for measuring long-term innovation bets.
Do CEOs Lead Innovation In American Companies?
Gartner CEO Survey Shows 2012 is the Year of Living Hesitantly
The survey results showed that CEOs are advancing innovation management, but many face a digital business strategy gap. This year, Gartner probed investment attitudes toward innovation management and leadership attribution. Overall, innovation management is advancing with few CEOs cutting innovation, and approximately half the CEOs saying they are investing more. However, a quarter indicated that they still don’t address it as an explicit discipline. When Gartner asked who leads innovation in their firms, approximately one-third of the CEOs selected themselves. After that, a wide variety of executive and senior management leaders were named, however CIOs were rarely identified, and CFOs were never identified.
“Any CEO who believes that he or she is the innovation leader of the firm must retain a close direct working relationship with the CIO in this age of rapid business digitization, or risk being blindsided,” Mr. Lopez said. “CIOs must improve IT-related competitor intelligence, and use that information to build a productive relationship with the person the CEO sees as the leader of innovation.”
Should there be a chief innovation officer? Or does it cut across everything? Is innovation likely to be found in the IT side of things? Why don’t more companies have research and innovation labs?
Great inventors engage in divergent or “wrong” thinking, which allows them to explore the full realm of possibilities for a solution - no matter how silly or far-fetched. They’re not necessarily concerned with the most logical solution, and certainly not with one that draws on “conventional wisdom.” As modern-day inventor Sir James Dyson puts it:
We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way… When I was doing my vacuum cleaner, I started out trying a conventionally shaped cyclone, the kind you see in textbooks. But we couldn’t separate the carpet fluff and dog hairs and strands of cotton in those cyclones. It formed a ball inside the cleaner or shot out the exit and got into the motor. I tried all sorts of shapes. Nothing worked. So then I thought I’d try the wrong shape, the opposite of conical. And it worked.
The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption. Serial disruption is an uncomfortable state for an organization to exist in. As the story above shows, disruptions are usually enabled by “desperate” necessity. Desperation is not something management is trained to aspire for.
The parable of Nintendo - Asymco
(via paperbits)
Of course, the only solution to the problem of human innovation is more innovation. After a resource is exhausted, we are forced to exploit a new resource, if only to sustain our craving for growth…But the escape is only temporary, as every innovation eventually leads to new shortages. We clear-cut forests, and so we turn to oil; once we exhaust our fossil fuel reserves, we’ll start driving electric cars, at least until we run out of lithium. Although human creativity has generated a seemingly impossible amount of economic growth, it has also inspired the innovations that allow the growth to continue. So here’s the paradox: creativity is the only solution to the very problem of creativity.
Why Ditching The Office Could Help You Be More Creative | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
Ariel Schwartz reports on new research, suggesting that working in a moderately noisy environment — like a coworking space or a café— can lead to a low level of distraction, a state that prompts abstract thinking. So, if you want to do some creative thinking, move to a slightly noisier corner of the office.
@tomforemski: Wow. I can’t believe Autodesk CEO Carl Bass said innovation has nothing to do with corporations! #tedxberkeley
‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration - Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com
A great overview of how online, communitarian, open science sites are transforming the wold of science journals, and research.
Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”
Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.
Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.
The web is subversive and corrosive to established power configurations, and now is the time for the scientific journal oligopoly to crash.
