As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• Why B-Schools Set Up Entrepreneurs To Fail [Forbes]
  Starting new venture involves a lot more than going cap in hand to the folks with money.
• Innovation – an era or a fad? [Innovate on Purpose]
  Should we all start boning up on design thinking?
• How to Kill Innovation: Keep Asking Questions [Scott Anthony @ HBR]
  The future can’t be analytically derived.
• The Constitution of Innovation [Ross Emmett @ Vimeo]
  An interesting series of videos on the role of innovation in business and society from Ross Emmett.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• Cisco’s Patent Strategy: It’s More Than Numbers [BusinessWeek: NEXT]
  Innovation—at least as measured by patents—seems to fading in the U.S. For the first time, moreover, foreigners obtained more patents than U.S. residents.
• Technology First, Needs Last [jnd]
  Don Norman has come to an interesting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.
• Boyer Lectures [Radio National]
  General Peter Cosgrove, AC MC (ret’d) presented the Boyer Lectures, from 8 November 2009, with his 40 years of military experience and service to Australia placing him in a unique position to talk about the challenges and opportunities faced by society today and into the future.
• Head to Head: Innovation in China and the US [Innovate on Purpose]
  A survey comparing the attitudes and expectations about the US and China in regard to innovation finds some relatively unexpected differences, and some safe assumptions.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• Patent Volume Isn’t the Best Innovation Gauge [BusinessWeek: Innovate]
  Patent volume isn’t necessarily a valid proxy for innovation. A study by the Patent Board, an intellectual-property consultancy, shows there are other—and better—ways to quantify innovation. Ranked by sheer volume, Honda Motor is No. 1, with 54. That’s almost twice second-place Panasonic, which has 28. Ranked by other metrics, though, Honda isn’t a leader.
• The Downside of Seeking Common Ground [strategy+business]
  People’s tendency to find common ground in conversation by focusing on what’s familiar can stifle the most innovative thinkers.
• Is America Losing Its Mojo? [Newsweek]
  Innovation is as American as baseball and apple pie. But some traditions can’t be trademarked.
• Innovation relies on synthesis [Innovate on Purpose]
  We often talk about the importance of combining disparate skills or capabilities when innovating, or holding two diametrically opposing ideas and finding the happy medium. What should be obvious is that one of the most important skills from an innovation perspective is the act and insight of synthesis.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• Warren Buffett’s bet against innovation [BusinessWeek: Innovate]
  In proclaiming an “all-in wager on the economic future of the United States, Warren Buffett just paid $44 billion for a 19th century technology platform, a railroad, that carries 20th century goods—coal, agriculture, imports from Asia, petroleum. This is a vision of an America mired in the past and in economic and political decline. And Buffett just might be right. He has a great track record betting against innovation.
• Embracing Innovation: a new methodology for feature film production in Australia [Centre for Screen Business]
  Do too many Australian films fall into a budgetary ‘no-man’s land’ – not big enough to compete with the US studios, yet too big to stand a chance of commercial viability in a market flooded with independent films? Robert Connolly’s recommendations provide us with valuable grist for the mill as we, in the IT industry, work our way through the current evolutionary phase our industry is going through, driven by the shift from large, on premises applications to a future increasingly dominated by cloud solutions. His approach to the problem is also an excellent model of how to engage with the wholesale transformation of an industry.
• 10 examples of minimum viable products [Venture Hacks]
  Brilliant products are rarely the result of brilliant ideas. Most products start small, as minimum viable products, and then grow as the customers and developers work together to learn what the product should be.
• What do the crowds know about innovation? [Innovate on Purpose]
  Companies use different strategies and techniques for crowdsourcing ideas. All of these approaches help gather ideas from the crowd, but they also serve as trend spotting and public relations opportunities as well, and some companies might be more interested in these secondary effects. As Henry Ford pointed out, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Peter Drucker’s Seven Sources of Innovation [Snake Coffee]
  A good example of applying Peter Drucker’s Seven Sources of Innovation to the emergence of Sony’s Walkman.
• Building Snowmobiles and a Fine-tuned Situational Awareness [Law Enforcement & Security Consulting]
  John Boyd saw innovation as essential to winning in a changing environment — be that the battle field of our modern business environment. A skill he termed building snowmobiles.

  “A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change; whereas a winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in the appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.”

• Operational Excellence – once an enemy, now a friend to innovation? [Innovate on Purpose]
  Operational Excellence is focused on streamlining business processes — reducing variation and waste to try and increase their velocity and reliability. This usually makes it the enemy of innovation. Is it time to turn this attitude on its head?
• IT’s Not about the Technology [Fast Company]
  Gartner researcher Tom Austin on why your head of IT should be a cultural anthropologist and why you should think twice before you block YouTube.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Sex, Science and Profits [The Bookbag]
  Does science drive innovation? Or does technology?
• Angry shareholders say Microsoft squanders billions on pointless R&D projects [Network World]
  Build it and they will come does not seem to apply to innovation. It’s more important to manage execution and outputs, than it is to manage inputs.
• We just aren’t very creative [Innovate on Purpose]
  People don’t lack creativity, but organizations do. How can we leverage the creativity that our team brings to work, rather than stifling it?
• Ten sci-fi devices nearing reality [New Scientist]
  New Scientist’s take on what’s just around the corner. No flying cars, unfortunately (though there is a jet pack).

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Making things in a post-industrial society [Economist]
  Rolls-Royce shows us how to move on from being a traditional product driven firm, to one based on providing smart services. A good example technology driven business model innovation that I talk about a lot.
• What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you
  expect to live to see [EDGE]
  The EDGE’s annual question.
• Corporate culture: the enabler for innovation [Innovate on Purpose]
  The biggest barrier to consistent, sustainable innovation in any firm is corporate culture.
• Defensive design: magnetic zones on the unibody MacBook [37signals]
  Innovation is usually the result of people at the coal face solving the problems they face, not the product from some back room R&D lab.

So where do we find these ideas? One good source is the strange and mysterious place that is the Internet. Hidden in the Internet’s nooks and crannies we can find all sorts of new and interesting things, any of which might be the next big idea in our respective industry.

An informal network has been sharing interesting and unusual ideas from around the globe. Rather than keep these good ideas to ourselves, we thought that we would share them with our broader ecosystem. Our plan is to create a list of four to six interesting innovation things that are worth a look and which might get the creative juices flowing, and publish them every other Monday. The content will range from articles about innovation, case studies on how some companies innovate through examples of interesting (and hopefully innovative) stuff. Expect to see some old stuff refreshed if it’s still relevant. Also, if you see something interesting in your travels then send us a reference and we’ll include it in a future issue.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• 25 Internet startups that bombed miserably [Business Pundit]
  When innovation didn’t work
• Jeff Bezos, Ray Ozzie and Pierre Omidyar on Workspace [dashes]
  Names in their fields talk about the work spaces that helped them innovate
• Making innovation everyone’s job [Harvard Business Publishing]
  In a world where strategy life cycles are shrinking, innovation is the only way a company can renew its lease on success.
• Understimulated [Innovate on Purpose]
  Innovation requires the stimulation we get when we’re out in the field rubbing shoulders with customers and partners, not from the R&D lab back in head office. Too many innovation programmes fail because they are understimulated.