Again, What is Innovation?

Does it mean that for the sake of being ‘in’ and sounding like we get it, we re-invent the wheel? Do we do the same stuff in a different way? Do we reach the same results using different-from-normal methods?

To innovate, do we reap the same rewards by sowing different seeds?

All organizations want more profit.
So what’s new? Should they think up new ways to cut costs, fire people, manufacture something different or sell differently? Is that what innovation is?

Or is it just another way of ‘doing it right’?
But there never is a way of doing/getting it right! Because all organizations have peculiar problems that are indigenous only to them.

Instead of looking for tailor-made solutions and innovation, organizations would do much better to look within and use their everyday knowledge. Processes and systems only work well till they allow work to be done. Slowing down and obstructing work means that the process needs to be changed or gotten rid of.

What is innovative about that?
It’s common sense.

But most of the times, it takes a third person to come in and tell you that your processes need to change. I still have to understand why one needs to hire external help when your own internal team has been telling you about the problems AND suggesting solutions.

It is all about trust and communication.

From “Innovation Watch”

Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott says 2005 was a breakout year for consumer generated content. Citizen’s media is hot, she says, and it is fundamentally changing the way we use the Internet MySpace ranked fourth in visitor traffic, increasing “market share of visits” by 846 last year. Wikipedia is now the most popular reference site on the web. Visits to Flickr grew by 1,317 percent in 2005. Blogging has gone mainstream. Video promises to be the next big thing, with Google and others launching video search services, iTunes selling TV programming, and home videos finding an enthusiastic audience. “Young Internet users,” she says, “appear to enjoy consuming content created by their peers, and feel less of a need to get information and entertainment from established, authoritative sources.”

Tom Kelley’s Nov 29 talk at the Commonwealth Club is now available online (in RealAudio format).

I heard the complete conversation/talk and the question & asnwer session too and found it rather interesting – more from the point of view of IDEO as a company. I think it’s a “must-listen”.

Go here to listen to the talk. Tom Kelley is the General Manager of IDEO and the brother of the co-founder of IDEO, David Kelley.

I recently started blogging on the WordPress blogging platform for the aside design studio blog and have found it to be more functional and with more features to enable me to write a truly professional blog.

Personally, I feel that a good blog is one with good content and the platform does not make much of a difference, but when one can write good content and the platform can contribute to easy manageability as well as aesthetics, why not move to the better platform.

Blogger had indeed made it easy for *anyone* to start blogging but that has also led to splogs and my business networking blog being duplicated and used by someone else – even after repeated complaints to the hosting people [ something called txthub ] and also after alerting Google [ because the duplicate blog is being used for Google AdSense too ] – nothing has been done about it.

WordPress is more secure as far as I have seen – the number of plugins to tweak a WordPress blog are innumerable and also allow for more security and functionality.

The content of this blog will be transferred instantly onto a new WordPress blog but I will not be removing the content from the asideconsulting.blogspot.com domain name [ there is no way I can transfer the Google PageRank! ] – hopefully with better content in the future, I will be able to build a better PageRank on the new WordPress blog and will then probably remove content from this domain.

MIT’s online course summary for “Managing Innovation“

Here you will find links to PDF class material as well as reading lists and links to PowerPoint presentations made in class by the course Professor.

Fortune [ the magazine ], launched an Innovation blog recently and have already put up some very readable content – interviews in collaboration with various other innovation blog authors like Chuck Frey and Renes Hopkins. The new blog has been inspired by a collective force of leaders in business innovation.

Worth a look.