Yes, innovation is a game. It is a game because it requires knowledge and skills to compete and win in the ever changing markets. Innovation is a game that every business today needs to play to avoid becoming useless or even extinct.

In addition, part of the game of innovation is global competition, the energy crises, economic system failure, poverty, population expansion, and many other mega trends that are here to stay. All of these are converging upon every business sector simultaneously. They are like huge rivers all merging in to one. The turbulence, the waves, and the force created by these mega trends have never been seen by humanity before.

That is why running a business the ‘same old way’ will only guarantee that its management will end up on a so-called “commodity island” – where everything is price competitive and customers don’t see very much difference between that business and the competition. From my perspective as an innovation consultant, I believe that every business must figure out a way to meet every challenge directly or indirectly, with a focus on winning the game of innovation. This means, businesses must learn to experiment, fail, learn from failure, and try something else – until they develop new business acumen to sustain and grow.

The rules of the innovation game have also changed. This is primarily due to two “major” forces: the information revolution and globalization. There is plenty of evidence that shows how these two major trends are shifting consumer buying patterns, local and regional economies, access to education, environmental issues, and the pace of life for everyone.. This has created a more urgent need to invent new ways of doing business and do it faster than ever before. The average life span of a company is shortening and more businesses are failing faster due to these two major trends.

Innovation is generated from the act of being creative. Creativity comes from people. So to play this game correctly and compete in this new age, CEO’s must find a way to tap in to the hearts and minds of The Role of Innovation for Individuals and Organizations.

Our latest research shows that the most critical new competencies that must be developed and managed in your company culture will be discovery, creativity, influence, implementation, and mindful action . These skills cannot be outsourced and will play a more important role when creating and keeping customers for life.

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The business environment has changed drastically over the past 5-10 years. Traditional strategies are failing. Markets are created seemingly overnight and die off just as quickly. Over 60% of employees are disengaged, frustrated by their work.Executives are lapsing into passive management practices rather than growth leadership.

Resources are scattered all over the world - suppliers, employees, customers, partners, and technologies. As knowledge doubles every few years and redoubles, technology becomes a great equalizer and divides into even more specialties. This means, each organization must master and integrate more of them faster. The system is no longer simple and larger systems breed greater complexity.
Never before have business leaders faced the amount of technological change, business model change, market change and degree of competitive variation all at the same time.

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Role of IT in the Corporate Innovation Program

What is the role of IT to help drive an innovation agenda for a company?
In most companies, IT is a support function and not a strategic function. This has always been intriguing to us. When most amount of changes in the world are due to automation and globalization, it is difficult to understand why most senior teams do not position technology as a strategic weapon.
One of the reason why this occurs is because organization and the senior team has not created distinctions between technology and information systems(IT departments). Most successful innovators have. Without such clarity it is hard to introduce innovation in an organization correctly, especially when most think of innovation only in terms of hard products.To be successful, IT departments must master the delivery and quality demands of information systems first. This means,they must demonstrate that they are making money(coming below the budget and helping the organization achieve a customer centric focus) for the organization and not just a cost center for the organization. Then, they have the right to own the innovation agenda for the organization.

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15 Killer Questions to help build a New Marketing Strategy:

So you think you need a new marketing strategy? Or do you want to make sure your current marketing strategy is solid. 

Review and answer the following killer questions to help you develop maximum clarity quickly. 

1. Is there a written strategic plan and/or marketing plan with measurable goals? If not, what is the goal of a new 

marketing strategy? To achieve what?

2. What is driving the new “go to market strategy” and what are the expectations from the corporate view?

3. Are the products the same or repositioned?

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Can you really decouple innovation from entrepreneurship?We are not alone in our belief that innovation in one respect has Plateaued. In his seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen elegantly explains why big firms can’t innovate. But we believe a recent development--paradoxically fuelled by Christensen’s theories--is contributing to big companies’ innovation struggles: The rise of the innovation professional. In their innovation quest, large corporations and institutions have set up new organizational structures to capture the value of innovation. Innovation managers and consultants have swept into corporate hallways and boardrooms promising a clear, more effective, systematic, and rigorous approach to innovation. But it seems what they are really doing is making innovation more abstract and institutionalized.

The creation of the innovation consultant marks a sea change. Through the industrialized age, innovation was tied to entrepreneurs; now, it seems to depend on salaried employees who are more concerned about securing their pay checks than with taking the gambles that lead to big innovation rewards. Whether decoupling innovation from entrepreneurship will be successful has yet to be seen.

The new breed of innovation professionals we have encountered can be placed in two categories: innovation custodians and innovation word-slingers. The custodians are middle managers assigned to oversee the innovators and their processes. The word-slingers are external consultants that will take corporate managers through endless innovation workshops or blabber on about the aforementioned processes.

The problem with the innovation professionals is twofold. First, they rarely have the stubborn, single-minded maverick attitude that it takes to innovate in a substantive way. Second, it professionalizes innovation, which should be an attitude that organically runs through the culture of an organization. Companies that succeed at innovation--Apple, Google, and GE, for example--have their own innovation DNA that exists independent of innovation managers. They’ve also been fortunate to have true entrepreneurs at their helms, an aspect that can’t be easily replicated by other firms. Sure, not all companies can be Google.

So how does an ordinary, not so innovative company go from innovation-thinking to innovation-doing?

Innovation only occurs if it’s an attitude that runs through a company’s culture.We believe that a bigger, more diverse, and more creative innovation ecosystem could be inspired by the high-tech, biotech, and the movie industries. These fields don’t devise innovation road maps or hire dozens of consultants; instead, they invest in concrete, tangible outcomes. How would film history have looked if Sergei Eisenstein had spent time defending his ideas against consultants warning him against risky movie-making? We mention Eisenstein because he hadn’t turned 27 when he got massively funded to make The battlership potemkin, what some regard as the best movie to date and certainly was when it aired. The method relied on combining the right task with the right talent. We believe there is such a method you can follow that improves your chances of developing effective innovation, because when we examine the creative processes involved, it is possible to identify a number of common traits.

Shortly after taking office, President Obama’s CIO (Vivek Kundra) formed a “tigre” team (technology, innovation, and government reform) in order to implement IT reform within the US government The US IT budget representing an astounding $80B, representing over 2,000 data centers. 

This recent article by the Sydney Morning Herald highlights Mr. Kundra’s focus on IT transparency including an online IT dashboard with performance rankings. The result of his effort was a shift towards consolidation (to increase datacenter capacity) and virtualization (to leverage cloud-based provisioning speed and consumption based costing).

While Mr. Kundra has since moved on (he joined Salesforce.com after a brief stint at Harvard), his innovative IT dashboard lives on as an open source offering.  More importantly, he highlighted the importance and value of IT transparency.

Corporate IT department can learn a lot form Mr. Kundra’s TIGRE initiative. The most important lesson and most difficult being practices of transparency. If your IT organization is trying to figure out how to drive more value, innovation can help, but innovation without transparency will give you only average results. IT leaders can produce breakthrough value by building innovation behaviors at every level. This requires transparency between employee and their managers, and transparency between IT and the business units.

Apple vs. Google… Creativity vs. Science… Convergence and Collaboration 

If you’re curious where the world is heading and what is top of mind for global leaders, there’s few better vantage points than from Davos and the World Economic Forum. 

World-changing innovation is also discussed at Davos. 

This year, there was an interesting discussion about innovation by consultant John Kao, as reported by the New York Times (click here for the original article).

The innovation discussion and article focused on the differing strategies of Apple and Google. 

Mr. Kao compared Google and Apple’s approach to innovation, pointing out it “highlights the ‘archetypical tension in the creative process.’”  

The article notes, “The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down. When asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. ‘It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’” 

Regarding Google, the article reasons: “Google speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making, and of online experimentation and networked communication.  The same Internet-era tools enable crowd-sourced collaboration as well as the rapid testing of product ideas — the essence of the lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere…”

Importantly, the article quoted Errol B. Arkilic, program director at the National Science Foundation, on the important use of “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification.”   

While not expressly mentioning it, the article highlighted the value in collaboration. In fact, regarding the importance of collaboration, the article referenced how some of Apple’s top ideas have been sourced through collaboration. 

Consider these article highlights about Apple: 

“Apple product designs may not be determined by traditional market research, focus groups or online experiments. But its top leaders, recruited by Mr. Jobs, are tireless seekers in an information-gathering network on subjects ranging from microchip technology to popular culture. “ 

The article further notes that Apple’s early computing design included a point & click mouse and graphical, on-screen icons that came from a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto labs; and Siri, a more recent acquisition and now key iPhone feature, originated in the Pentagon’s DARPA. 

Wow! What innovation nuggets. 

Apple leaders tirelessly pursue convergences of market data and trends - and collaboration with other entities has been critical to Apple’s success.  It would be interesting to apply our Innovation Styles diagnostic across Apple leadership to see if they have a mix of complementary styles. 

Interestingly, we at The DeSai Group have been focused on two fundamental drivers to innovation:  1.) convergence of market issues/trends; 2.) collaboration.   And it looks like these strategies have been responsible for some of the world’s top innovations. 

That’s good to know, especially today as I am currently leading several innovation leadership sessions with a major India-based, multi-national conglomerate in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai, India. 

I’m guiding the innovation discussion by summarizing global trend convergences and identifying how specific collaborations can make a major impact in the world.   And we’re specifically addressing key concerns voiced at the World Economic Forum. 

What do you think about Apple vs. Google’s approach to innovation? 

-Jatin

Cathal Garvey’s home laboratory in Cork, Ireland, is filled with makeshift equipment. His incubator for bacteria is an old Styrofoam shipping box with a heating mat and thermometer that he has modified into a thermostat. He uses a pressure cooker to sterilize instead of an autoclave. Some instruments are fashioned from coffee cans.

One of the movement’s rallying points is Genspace, a nonprofit laboratory in Brooklyn that is open to members of the public, regardless of scientific background. Since it opened in 2010, on the seventh floor of an old bank building, similar labs have sprouted in Boston and San Francisco.

Genspace has roughly a dozen members, and each pays $100 a month to cover rent and what laboratory people call consumables: chemical agents, disposable tubes and other paraphernalia that need to be replaced regularly.

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Source: New York Times

RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give names to everything (even things that did not need them), came up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.

Robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da Vinci Surgical System, a device that scales down a surgeon’s hand movements in order to allow him to perform operations using tiny incisions. That leads to less tissue damage, and thus a quicker recovery for patients. Thousands of da Vincis have been made, and they are reckoned to be used in over 200,000 operations a year around the world, most commonly hysterectomies and prostate removals.

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Source: The Economist

Google's YouTube plans to invest $100 million in professional production companies producing YouTube-only content beginning this month. Premiering Monday, Young Hollywood takes place on the ninth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. The show's creators will produce programming for viewing on mobile devices, computers and Internet-connected TVs.

YouTube VP of Global Content Robert Kyncl announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the first wave of YouTube channels from artists like CSI creator Anthony Zuiker and Deepak Chopra.

Within a few years, online video will contribute 90% to all online traffic; and by 2020, the Web will give birth to 75% of all media channels, Kyncl said, calling the Web a vehicle for distribution.

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Source: MediaPost News - Online Media Daily