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April 28, 2006

The most powerful woman in the FORTUNE 500 is also an innovator

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) named ex-Chevron executive Patricia Woertz as CEO, making it the largest publicly traded firm in the U.S. that is headed by a woman. At Chevron, Patricia was in charge of the oil company's "downstream" operations, including its refining, marketing, lubricant, supply and trading businesses. After a 29-year stint at Chevron, she becomes only the 8th CEO in the 104-year history of ADM.

The real story, though, doesn't involve the "woman CEO" angle or the "end of the Andreas dynasty at ADM" angle. As the Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link available) points out, Patricia Woertz is an "energy-savvy outsider" who will spearhead the company's push into groundbreaking new products:

Archer Daniels Midland, placing a big bet on the business of turning farm crops into fuel and chemicals, shattered company tradition by appointing a woman and energy-savvy outsider as its new CEO... Ms. Woertz is accustomed to the role of pioneer. Throughout her professional career, she has never taken a job previously held by a woman. [,..]

In picking Ms. Woertz, who has done business in such far-flung places as Kazakhstan and Venezuela, ADM is luring someone who knows how to turn a raw commodity into hundreds of products and can talk about it with Wall Street analysts as well as foreign dignitaries... A big part of Ms. Woertz's assignment is to lead ADM's push into transforming crops into more profitable industrial products, most of which would be alternatives to goods now made from petroleum."

Tags: PatriciaWoertz ADM innovator

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April 28 innovation linkage, A.M. edition

Best-kept secrets of the world's best companies [Business 2.0]
Rod Boothby's micromanagement diagrams [Innovation Creators]
A revolutionary hybrid from the automotive industry [LeftLane News]
Corporate Facebooks [Tech Crunch]
Chinese make a fake Ferrari, get busted by the EU [Trend Hunter]
The Master Idea [PINK Magazine]
Top 5 creative uses for your iPod [SCI FI Tech]
An Amazon tribe with no numbering or counting system [The Globe and Mail]

[image: Creating Passionate Users]

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"We're down to one idea, which is innovation"

CNN profiles legendary management guru Tom Peters, who shares his ideas on the importance of innovation for future U.S. economic competitiveness:

"According to Peters, future economic success will spring from entrepreneurial individuals and small firms agile enough to seize new opportunities. Freed from the constraints of top-heavy management structures, they will generate the ideas and innovations needed to survive in an ultra-competitive world.

While many Western business leaders worry about the accelerating shift of economic power to rising forces such as China, Peters sees the change as an opportunity, urging companies to "race up the value chain" in order to prosper. Continuing to focus attention on mergers and cost cutting just won't get the job done any more.

"The only way we're going to survive is to innovate our way out of the box," he told a recent conference audience. "We're down to one idea, which is innovation."

With that in mind, Peters suggests that business as we know it today will no longer exist by the year 2020: "Peters says 90 percent of all existing white-collar jobs will either disappear or be reconfigured "beyond recognition" within the next 10-15 years." The key to surviving this period of disruptive change, says Peters, is tapping into the creativity and innovative thinking of each individual employee:

"According to Peters, sitting at the very heart of this tumultuous change is the individual. Only by encouraging original thought and "nurturing the freaks" will companies have the skills and drive needed to grow. He points out that history is made, not by normal people, but by the "freaks" who dare to think differently and stand out from the herd. The companies who encourage individual thinking and endeavor will be the ones that succeed."

Tags: TomPeters innovation

[image: Tom Peters]

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Your engineering team is lying to you

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, continues his popular "Top 10" series with a look at the Top 10 lies of engineers. As Guy points out, it's best to start listening carefully when the engineering team starts talking about "beta" releases and "scalable architecture." He also points out the pitfalls of the outsourcing myth: "Somehow we've got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet." So, without further ado, here are the Top 10 lies told by engineers:

1. "We're about to go into beta testing." ("This is a meaningless statement because it doesn't matter when you go into beta testing--what matters is when you come out of beta testing.")

2. "I don't know anything thing about marketing..."

3. "I'll comment the code, so that the next person can understand what I did."

4. "Our architecture is scalable."

5. "The code supports all the industry standards."

6. "We can do a Macintosh version right after we finish the Windows version; in fact, much of the Windows code can be re-used because of how we architected it."

7. "We have an effective bug reporting database and system."

8. "We can do this faster, cheaper, and better with an offshore programming team in India."

9. "Our beta sites loved the software."

10. "This time we got it right."

Tags: engineer innovation GuyKawasaki

[image: Creating Customer Evangelists]

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Pushing the (Netflix) envelope

Innovation sometimes comes in small packages (literally), as Joyce Wycoff of the Heads-Up on Organizational Change blog explains in a brief post about innovation at Neflix:

"It's popular to talk about radical innovation and making breakthroughs, swimming in blue oceans and so on, but Netflix reminds us of the importance of innovation on the basics. As an ardent Netflix customer, I've been truly amazed by the efficiency of their processes and the rapid turn around of those little red envelopes which make it so easy to receive and return movies.

It was great to find a Business 2.0 article on the evolution of the envelope (currently in it's 13th iteration.) It's hard to put a direct ROI on a piece of the process such as the envelope, but I know from my own experience, it's a major source of value. If it were at all cumbersome to send movies back, my own inertia would kick in and I'd probably become an ex-Netflix customer. The bright red envelopes are easy to find and remind me that there's a movie waiting for me.

It's great to have a reminder that innovation can be found anywhere in the process ... and that we don't always have to get it "right" the first time."

Anyway, the Business 2.0 photo gallery slideshow has images of the 13 different Netflix envelopes that Joyce mentioned:

"Years of experimentation went into creating the perfect DVD envelope. In 1999, Netflix started out with a heavy cardboard mailer. With only 100,000 subscribers, costs weren't a concern yet. Then the company experimented with plastic envelopes, which proved not to be recyclable, and padding, which added too much to postage costs. Both top-loading and side-loading envelopes made an appearance. Seven years of tweaking have paid off: Netflix's low-cost mailers have helped it fend off competition from Wal-Mart (Research) and Blockbuster..."

[images: Nigel Holmes for the Stanford alumni magazine]

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April 27, 2006

Gary Hamel on why Google is so innovative

On the op-ed pages of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, strategy guru Gary Hamel (now a visiting professor at London Business School), analyzed why Google continues to be one of the most innovative companies in America. According to Hamel, Google has managed to avoid or circumvent four "evolutionary risk factors" that usually derail entrenched market leaders. By understanding why other innovation leaders have fallen by the wayside, and then embedding these lessons within its business model, Google has successfully managed the evolution from "Google 1.0" to "Google 6.0":

"The ultimate test of any management team is not how fast it can grow its company in the short-term, but how consistently it can grow it over the long-term. In a world where change is relentless and seditious, this demands a capacity for rapid strategic adaptation. In recent years we have witnessed adaptation failures by incumbents across a wide variety of industries: airlines, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, newspapers, and recorded music. In many cases, companies haven't been changing as fast as the world around them. What the laggards have failed to grasp is that what matters most today is not a company's competitive advantage at a point in time, but its evolutionary advantage over time. Google gets this.

While Google's growth will inevitably slow, there's a good chance that its revenues will arc upward for years. Why? Because its novel management system seems to have been designed to guard against the risk factors that so often erode an organization's evolutionary potential."

As Hamel explains, there are four important "evolutionary risk factors" that innovators must confront:

(1) A narrow or orthodox business definition that limits the scope of innovation;

(2) A hierarchical organization that over-weights the views of those who have a stake in perpetuating the status quo;

(3) A tendency to overinvest in "what is" at the expense of "what could be";

(4) Creeping mediocrity.

Tags: GaryHamel innovation Google management

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Does your CEO have a videogaming strategy?

The videogaming industry has been on a roll recently. With sales of videogames now outpacing box office ticket sales for Hollywood films, it was perhaps only inevitable that Major League Gaming managed to line up a lucrative cable TV deal with USA Network. On top of that, it looks like Microsoft is paying anywhere from $200 million to $400 million to acquire videogame advertising start-up Massive, while media conglomerate Viacom is paying $102 million to acquire gaming/instant messaging company Xfire.

What really made me stand up and take notice of videogaming's stealth infiltration of Corporate America was an article in Wired magazine by Xerox PARC innovator John Seely Brown about the allure of videogaming skills for HR recruiters across Corporate America. The article made me realize that the economic and cultural impact of videogaming is about more than just the professional videogaming circuit and a bunch of game-crazed teenagers. Moreover, it looks like even economists are embracing the videogaming industry as a worthy research topic.

This videogaming phenomenon, as they say, has legs. Big, fat, hairy muscular legs. In a recent post called "Hollywood vs. the videogame industry," venture capitalist Baris Karadogan does the math and comes up with a few eye-opening statistics about the videogaming industry:

"I've always said that Hollywood has no chance against the video game industry. Games are more entertaining and interactive. Why would you watch entertainment when you can be part of it? [...]

I want to give you some statistics about one fo the most popular massively multiplayer role playing games, World of Warcraft. I found out that they have 5 million subscribers each paying $15/month to play in this virtual world. The New York Times wrote about how bad people want to advance in this game here. So this game generates about $900 million dollars of revenue per year. That's per year. Compare that to the highest grossing movies of all time: Titanic ($601 million), Star Wars - 1977 & 1997 releases combined ($461 million); Star Wars Episode I ($431 million). E.T. ($400 million) and Jurassic Park ($357 million).

As you can see none of them can touch the success World of Warcraft has achieved. If WoW goes on like this, without growth for 3 years, they'll make more than the top 5 all time highest grossing movies. And the cost to make the game is a mere fraction of what those movies cost. I think the people have spoken on what they prefer for entertainment. It's just a matter of time before the world realizes it.

Tags: videogaming innovation strategy

[image: Major League Gaming]

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More reasons why innovation is so hard

In a post called "Innovation Behind the Curtain," Mary Schmidt weighs in with three reasons why innovation is hard to do and even harder to measure:

(1) Innovation is highly subjective;

(2) Innovation can be more PR spin than reality;

(3) Innovation doesn’t have to be sexy or 'big.'

Addressing point #2, Mary explains that many of the glowing "most innovative companies of the world" stories that appear in the mainstream media do not always reflect reality:

"I worked for a couple of global companies that were touted for their innovation (including a glowing cover story in Business Week for one of them.) Such PR hoopla caused much cynical eye-rolling and guffawing by the companies’ employees. We knew what really went on behind the curtain. Intense bureaucracy, systems designed to inhibit innovation, and lots of (surprise) political plotting."

Tags: innovation strategy

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Jeff Pulver's quest to save the Internet

The whole "Net Neutrality" debate is starting to heat up in Washington. On Wednesday, for example, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, by a vote of 34-22, rejected a Democrat-backed Net neutrality amendment that also enjoyed support from Internet and software companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google. With that in mind, Vonage co-founder Jeff Pulver has launched a viral video contest to influence governments and politicians to encourage internet innovation. On his new "Save the Internet" site, he encourages Internet users to send along ideas, "creative marketing tools" and video clips that will change the course of debate in Washington:

"Ok, I am officially putting my money where my mouth is. I am initiating a viral video/ad contest to save the Internet.

I am fed up with the current wave of soundbites, platitudes, ads and marketing flooding the airwaves that profess to speak for the advancement of the Internet and communications. These ads are influencing Congress and governments around the World as they write the rules that will shape the future of the Internet and communications.

But, where is the voice and message of the Internet community -- the Internet innovators, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts -- in this world-changing discussion? We are primarily sitting out the battle, or perhaps comfortably blogging and Monday-morning quarterbacking on the sidelines. Sure, we'll be able to point to our blogs and do a big "I-told-you-so" if the rules ultimately prove to undermine the promise of the Internet. But, we will not be justified in our criticism if we don't at least try to affect a positive result.

Rules have to be written to enable us. If we do not participate in the debate, if we do not transform the messaging, the rules will not be written with our best interests at heart. And, frankly, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have to take over the messaging, both within the corridors of power and within the public zeitgeist.

We need soundbites of our own, messaging of our own. We are allegedly the revolutionaries of the Internet and communications. Shouldn't we be the ones revolutionizing the way advocacy is done and communicated in the 21st Century? Shouldn't we be the creative forces verifying that the medium is the message? Who better than us to harness the enabling power of the Internet to bring our message to legislators, to policymakers, to the public? Let's throw away the old rulebook and try to think outside the box to send a message to Congress from the global community of Internet innovators and enthusiasts. [...]

Send us short*, creative ideas -- videos and other Internet-based gimmicks -- that you think might effectively communicate to government that they must write rules to enable us the Internet innovators to transform the Internet and communications experience..."

Tags: JeffPulver Vonage SaveTheInternet innovation Netneutrality

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April 26, 2006

Flipping the Equation

IBM has consistently been able to identify new trends in the world of innovation and then mobilize the appropriate resources to put these ideas into motion. In the recently published Global Innovation Outlook 2.0, there are a number of different ideas about innovation that have practical implications for any company looking for new ways of doing business. One of the most interesting ideas highlighted by IBM is something called "flipping the equation." It's a deceptively simple notion that can yield surprisingly powerful results:

"In short, participants believe that the application of intellectual energy in those areas exactly opposite of where it is currently focused could accelerate new breakthroughs and advancements. Why not, they ask, shift research into the decomposition of products rather than the composition, or develop transportation systems that focus on the divergence of people versus the convergence, or create business models that allow easier disaggregation of resources and talent rather than fostering their acquisition."

This isn't pie-in-the-innovation-sky type of thinking, either. In Chapter 3 ("The Environment") of the IBM innovation report, there's a mini-case study of how forward-thinking companies are "flipping the equation" when it comes to thinking about decomposition and composition:

"These days, of course, "newer" equals "better" in the minds of most consumers, and the constant flow of new models and features in everything from toasters to TVs to trucks has resulted in more products being disposed of more often...

But the problem with this mentality, as noted during GIO discussions around the world, is that it focuses innovation efforts on only one end of the product lifecycle. Currently, the majority of R&D time, money and effort is directed at the composition of products; participants say it's the back end, decomposition, that may actually provide the richest opportunity for breakthrough thinking.

In part, flipping the equation to focus on decomposition forces business and society to face up to the challenge of ever-increasing piles of products that have been reached the end of their useful lives. Viewing product lifecycles from back to front - starting first with questions of reuse, redistribution and disposal, and then thinking about distribution and, finally, manufacturing and supply - may also point to a host of new opportunities in which smart, progressive businesses and governments can realize economic advantages by pursuing environmentally sound practices."

The IBM report highlights a few examples of companies making products from eco-friendly materials: NTT DoCoMo and NEC are developing cell phones made of corn-based biplastics; Sanyo is working on "waterless" washing machines; and Fuji Xerox is developing power-saving e-paper. Anyway, there's a lot to consider here. As IBM points out, companies that embrace environmentally-sound business practices might also benefit from a "considerable halo effect with consumers." In addition, as companies rely more on "soft updates" and "plug-ins" for older products instead of forcing consumers to discard obsolete products every year or so, it may actually foster a more satisfying consumer experience and enhanced brand loyalty. In this case, it's all about "designing for downstream" and learning how to "convert waste into value."

There's the ROI (return on innovation) that everyone's talking about... The next time you hear about a company talking about an innovative new business model, ask yourself: Have they really flipped the equation?

Tags: innovation IBM GIO flippingtheequation

[image: Earth Day at the Dump, Haylstorm's Head]

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The BBC emulates MySpace.com to become a new breed of media company

The BBC is stirring up discussion across the Internet with its decision to adopt an innovative new strategy for its online operations, effectively turning its Website into a public service version of MySpace.com. According to The Guardian, that means more user-generated content in the form of blogs and videos and a brand new online architecture based around the three concepts of "share," "find," and "play." With that in mind, the BBC also plans to put its entire programme catalogue online (starting tomorrow) for the first time in written archive form, as an "experimental prototype", and rebrand MyBBCPlayer as BBC iPlayer. Here are the details of the plans that were laid out by the BBC's director of new media and technology:

"Ashley Highfield's presentation, Beyond Broadcast, outlined a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts - "share", "find" and "play". He said the philosophy of "share" would be at the heart of what he dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0. Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to "create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you", encouraging them to launch ther own blogs and post home videos on the site. The BBC is also running a competition to revamp the bbc.co.uk 2.0 website, asking the public to redesign the homepage to "exploit the fuctionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia".

At the heart of the play concept is MyBBCPlayer, which will allow the public to download and view BBC programming online and was today rebranded as BBC iPlayer. "BBC iPlayer is going to offer catch-up television up to seven days after transmission," said Mr Highfield. "At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want."

As might be imagined, some of the biggest names in Internet punditry are taking a crack at dissecting this announcement from the BBC:

The Sun Never Sets on the Beeb [Buzz Machine]
Beeb 2.0 [GigaOm]
An obituary for mass media [NevilleHobson.com]
bbc.co.uk 2.0 [Richard MacManus Read/WriteWeb]

Tags: BBC MySpace innovation

[image: Journalism.co.uk]

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Meet the ponytailed innovator of Sun Microsystems

According to John Markoff of the New York Times, Jonathan Schwartz, newly appointed as the CEO of Sun Microsystems, is the type of "unorthodox" thinker who can help the company tap into new consumer markets and discover innovative new business solutions. The way that Schwartz approaches business strategy mirrors to a large degree the way that he chooses to conduct his own life:

"Wearing the ponytail he has had since he was a liberal arts major at Wesleyan in the 1980's, Mr. Schwartz arrived at Sun by way of Lighthouse Design, a software company he helped to found in the late 80's with college friends. As a strategist, Mr. Schwartz, 40, is a contrast to the man he succeeded as president, Edward J. Zander, who ran Sun as the ultimate computer salesman...

Even Mr. Schwartz's place of residence — he commutes from a house on the edge of the Mission District of San Francisco, rather than one of the affluent suburbs perched above Silicon Valley — sets him apart from other executives here. "I belong to a club that exists around the world that says progress is made by the unconventional," he said in an interview. "And that is reflected in many things, whether it's where I choose to live or the company I work for or the ideals to which I aspire."

At Sun, initially as head of the company's fledgling software business and more recently as president and chief operating officer, Mr. Schwartz has made it a rule to conduct novel marketing experiments. In his hunt for new growth at Sun, he has begun giving away open-source versions of the company's software, has issued free computer workstations to corporate customers willing to sign up for service agreements, and has taken to selling computing time for a dollar an hour from a large grid of the company's servers..."

Anyway, you get the idea - Jonathan Schwartz is not somebody who will settle for the status quo way of doing business at Sun. Just take a peek at how he would reverse the fortunes of the struggling General Motors: "GM, he suggests, should think about giving away its cars to customers willing to subscribe to an aggressively priced version of OnStar, the company's cellular telephone-based support service — the way cable companies give away set-top boxes."

Anyway, be sure to check out Jonathan's corporate blog - on Tuesday, he posted a long entry called "When I First Met Scott". It's a moving tribute to the accomplishments of long-time Sun CEO Scott McNealy:

"There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And unlike Henry Ford and some of the industrialists that preceded you, not all of those folks just work for Sun - I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

And no single individual, outside my family, has been a greater influence on my life - I am quite confident the same is true for millions of network consumers across the world..."

Tags: JonathanSchwartz innovation SunMicrosystems

[photo: New York Times]

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The twenty most innovative companies in the world

European consulting firm Innovaro has released its 2006 Innovation Leaders report, which details the innovation practices of over 1,000 global companies in 20 different industries:

"Covering 20 different sectors from Food and Drink to Airlines and Fashion Retail to Logistics, the research looks at who is making the most impact, who's hot and who's not when it comes to innovation. Innovaro assesses more than 1,000 top companies against a range of criteria, looking not only at the financial aspects of the businesses but also strategic issues such as innovation and organisational excellence. The companies that achieve this most sought after accolade of Innovation Leader, have every right to be proud."

The list of the 20 most innovative companies in the world - the Innovation Leaders - includes six top U.S. companies (Apple, Google, Medtronic, Microsoft, PepsiCo and UPS) and five top U.K. companies (BP, RBS, Reckitt Benckiser, Rolls-Royce and Virgin Atlantic). Rounding out the Top 20 are a handful of top companies in Europe (Nokia, IKEA, DSM, Adidas, Novartis, H&M) and three companies in Asia (Canon, Samsung, Toyota). In addition, Innovaro's Innovation Leaders report identifies 40 companies to watch for future innovation leadership, including 14 in the U.S. Unlike other innovation reports, Innovaro establishes an explicit link between innovation performance and stock market performance:

"For five years running the portfolio of companies identified by Innovaro as Innovation Leaders have demonstrated superior share performance, with 75% of the companies appearing in last year's research outperformed not only the FTSE, but the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones - again highlighting the importance on innovation to overall business success."

Tags: Innovaro innovation strategy ranking

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The father of disruptive innovation comes to India

Over the past several months, it seems like there has been more and more debate about India as a world-class innovator. Well, this following tidbit from The Times of India should make it clear that India is prepared to become a global innovation leader:

Disruptive innovations disrupt the business by changing the bases of competition, creating fundamental shifts in or creating new markets, says Clayton M Christensen, the world-renowned guru of Innovation and Business Strategy. The professor of business administration at Harvard Business School will address Indiatimes Strategy Summit on May 17 and 18, 2006 in Mumbai and Delhi respectively. He will share his perspective on how India Inc can create opportunities out of disruptive innovation, make the innovation process more predictable and shape an organisation capable of disruptive growth.

Anyway, stay tuned to Clayton Christensen's Innoblog for highlights from his India trip. This could be really interesting.

Tags: disruptive innovation ClaytonChristensen India

[image: Clayton Christensen]

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April 25, 2006

The wealth of networks: An interview with Yale's Yochai Benkler

The Open Business blog continues its innovator interview series with a one-on-one discussion with Yale law professor Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks. Building on ideas highlighted in his recently published book, Yochai Benkler analyzes how the Internet is making possible new commons-based methods for producing goods, remaking culture, and participating in public life:

"From GNU-Linux to Wikipedia to collaborative platforms for the creation and distribution of music, text, and moving image, creativity is flourishing in online networks. In the sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, the networked environment has brought together the imagination and productive powers of individuals to work on new and unique outputs. But according to Yochai Benkler, traditional economics shaped by industrial norms has failed to explain the emerging pattern of open production. Against this context he introduces the concept of commons-based peer production driven by non-monetary and non-propietary incentives."

In the middle of the interview, Yochai Benkler suggests that heavily-distributed collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia) are indeed sustainable over the long-term:

"There is no reason to think that these projects cannot be sustained. There are essentially two main concerns people suggest for skepticism: (1) Where will the motivations come from over the long haul, and why won’t human selfishness ultimately rend these projects apart? (2) Why won’t these degrade into a cacophonous medley as more people join in who are less competent or engaged than original contributors?

The answer to the first objection is that critical to the success of these projects is their ability to be broken down into discrete modules, capable of independent completion in relatively fine-grained increments. Because of this, people can contribute a little or a lot, and given large-scale connectivity as we have today, and diverse human motivations, it turns out that some combination of true believers, people who play around, occasional contributors, and people paid to participate at the interface of peer production and markets sustains these projects. What keeps them together differs in different contexts, ranging from technological platforms that serve what Clay Shirky described as social software, restraining anti-social behavior and allow communities to self-police, through social norms, in the case of free and open source software licensing techniques, in particular copyleft like the GPL.

The answer to the second question is that quality control and continuous self-correction is itself susceptible to peer production, and we see most of the successful projects implementing various systems of collaborative peer review of the contributions, as well as collaborative production of the ultimate information good itself."

Tags: networks Benkler collaboration opensource

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Virgin Galactic and the future of space innovation

If you're interested in the future of space innovation, it's worth signing up for the free Virgin Galactic e-newsletter. Virgin Galactic, of course, is the space tourism brainchild of billionaire tycoon Sir Richard Branson. Anyway, the fourth issue of the newsletter just crossed my desk recently, and it looks like the folks at Virgin Galactic have been busy recently. Among the highlights:

* The introduction of the newest member of the Virgin Galactic Founders Club. Pakistani-born Namira Salim, a citizen of Dubai, will be among one of the first 100 space travellers on Virgin Galactic when commercial operations start in 2008 or 2009;

* The announcement that any of the 700 pilots flying for Virgin Atlantic will have the opportunity to be trained as fully fledged astronaut pilots flying space tourists on SpaceShipTwo;

* Previews of the upcoming 25th annual Space Development Conference (Los Angeles), the Royal Aeronautical Society conference (London) and the Farnborough International Airshow (which will include an International Space Pavilion for the second year in a row).

Tags: space innovation VirginGalactic

[image: Virgin Galactic]

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The importance of regional innovation clusters

Kenneth Makovsky of the My Three Cents blog has posted an interesting Q&A with Randall Kempner, vice president for regional innovation at the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. According to Kempner, the U.S. must innovate faster and better than other countries if it hopes to preserve its competitive advantage vis-a-vis other nations. As Kempner suggests during the interview, it is also important for the U.S. to develop regional innovation clusters:

"We believe that regions are the place where innovation takes place, because innovation is actually a contact sport. In this highly-connected world, people still like to have personal interactions and know the suppliers, buyers and related institutions that enable new product and idea development.

Secondly, now that there are more places people can go, it has made quality-of-place all the more important in attracting the talented people that are the basis of innovation. You can live in the middle of Colorado on a mountainside with high-speed internet and still work as part of a world economy. That means that all the places that want to attract people to live there have to offer diverse amenities and a high quality of life, or people won't stick around...

It begins with talent. Regions need to grow, attract and retain the most talented people that they can. If you're able to do that, companies will follow because they know that they need to be in places where people want to live … they will put headquarters and research centers where the smart people are.

Tags: innovation competitiveness cluster region

[image: World Economic Forum]

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Tom Fishburne's innovation cartoons

Recommended: Tom Fishburne's business innovation cartoons over at SkyDeckCartoons.com. Every week, there's a new featured cartoon that highlights an issue or problem in the world of marketing or innovation. (This week, for example, the cartoon is about the so-called "fast followers.") In addition, Tom has a book out called Brand Camp that has a "best of" selection of marketing cartoons. You might recognize some of his work - his cartoons have been published by the Asian Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business School Publishing.

Anyway, I found this "Lifecycle of Innovation" cartoon on Flickr.

Tags: innovation lifecycle

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Highlights from the Maker Faire

Make: Blog has the most comprehensive coverage of Maker Faire 2006, an innovation event that took place over the weekend in San Mateo. The event featured the world's biggest iPod and a breathless assortment of other innovation marvels:

"Come see... a flying Pterosaur replica, a flock of whale blimps, a giant painting machine, DIY RFID implants, model rocketry, breadboarding, trailer-glass blowing, The Crucible's welding workshops off the back of fire truck, pinhole photography, soldering, spud gun building, bubble machines and a bubble guy that appeared on Johnny Carson in the 70's, Bunnie Huang, Joe Grand, William Gurstelle and his Backyard Ballistics, The Exploratorium, Zeum, The Lunar Society (rocket builders), Graffiti Research Lab, Squid Labs biodiesel, electric cars, a Linux supercomputer cluster running on veggie oil, neon art, circuit bending, VJs, slide rules, pinball restoration, the Phenomenauts, Satan's Calliope .... and much, much more. Quite an eclectic collection. That's not to mention Diana Eng of Bravo's Project Runway and the fifty craft booths in Bizarre Bazaar and the Swap-o-Rama-Rama."

As if that weren't enough, Yahoo apparently had a very visible presence at the event with something called the DIY booth. No, DIY doesn't stand for "Do-It-Yourself" -- it stands for "Do It Yahoo".

Other Maker Faire linkage:

10,000 people attend Maker Faire in San Mateo[CBS 5]
Maker Faire a Geek's Dream [ZDNet]
Maker Faire lets amateur inventors strut their creations [SF Chronicle]
Maker Faire photos [BoingBoing]
Photos tagged with Maker Faire [Flickr]

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April 24, 2006

Anne Mulcahy and the renaissance at Xerox

The new rising star of the FORTUNE 500 appears to be Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, credited by the Wall Street Journal with "managing one of the most adroit corporate turnarounds since Louis Gerstner rescued IBM..." She's the focus of the Monday "Boss Talk" column in the Wall Street Journal, where she discusses the amazing turnaround at Xerox. Ever since she took over in August 2001, she has been forced to make some tough choices when it came to cost-cutting, dealing with business partners and paring down debt. The results, though, have been phenomenal: the company has increased profits over the past four years, tripled its stock price and regained its lead in the high end of the copier marketplace by developing a number of innovative new products. Anyway, one of the most fascinating parts of the "Boss Talk" interview was the part where Anne Mulcahy discusses the difficulty that large, entrenched companies like Xerox have in embracing disruptive technological change:

"This is the pain of technology transitions. You can either sit and wait like Kodak or Fuji Photo and fall off a cliff when it happens. Or you can migrate. We're transitioning the light-lens [traditional copiers] out as quickly as possible. If you look at what that's cost us, this company would have been growing for the last three years very nicely. It cost six points of growth in 2003; four points last year. It will cost us probably a point and a half this year. So it's going away... It's always more attractive to stay in the old technology from a profit standpoint. Always. But you'll be going out of business."

You can read more about Anne Mulcahy at ZDNet's Between the Lines blog, which discusses a recent interview that Anne Mulcahy did with NPR.

Tags: AnneMulcahy Xerox innovation

[image: The Harbus Online]

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