Burning Questions 2007

What if? Australia

I couldn't resist the headline: "Nudie Founder Plans 'Innovation Powerhouse.'" Did that imply a naked entrepreneur? No, Nudie is a brand of juice in Australia and its founder, Tim Pethick, is set to start a branch of the UK innovation consultancy What If? in his home country. His ambition is to "stoke the creative fires of Australian business."

What If?'s UK founders believe that established enterprises have ''inefficient and damaging approaches to creative innovation'' and it will be interesting to watch what Pethick's efforts have in Australia. It's his first attempt to go beyond a single start up to work with multiple businesses at once.

Is Innovation Being Democratized?

It's widely held that we live in an age of mass customization and user-generated content. One can get custom running shoes as Nike.com and sites like YouTube are thick with content from the masses. But has democracy really come to innovation?

The question still inspires debate as reflected in this story from The Wilmington Star. The iPod is an example they cite and most anything from Apple would follow -- this "innovative" product can't really be customized at all. It is the product of top-down innovation driven by an elite.

What does the democratization of innovation really mean? Yahoo! conducts hundreds of experiments on its web site every day and thus the actions and reactions of thosands of users inform their innovation decisions. But does any one of those users see themselves as part of the innovation process? Does the end-user have to be able to change the way he or she uses a product for them to be participants? Does it have to be open-source in the end -- or is regular feedback that is digested and applied by the innovation elite sufficient?

Innovation is a challenging topic because the word means so many different things to different people. Yes, the iPod can only be used exactly as intended by the sages at Apple, but the device (and iTunes which I think is the real innovation) changed the relationship of many people both to the music they own and the way in which they obtain new music. Perhaps this makes it a more paternalistic social democratic device rather than a rough-and-tumble full-throated democratic innovation but millions of users seem to be happy. It freed us from the choke hold of the full-length CD as the only unit of purchase. It actually brought us back to the 1950's in a way by turning every cut into the digital equivalent of a 45-rpm single and allowing one to preview every song before purchase as was common in mid-century record stores.

What does the democratization of innovation mean to you? What examples of it do you have to share?

Patents and Innovation

What is the role of patent policy on innovation? There's an interesting conversation going on over at Xconomy about potential effect of proposed patent reform act in the U.S.

One of the challenges in reforming patent law at this point is that the potential value of a patent is more widely understood than ever now that we are patenting genes and other things that no one would have thought of a generation ago. It's much harder to write law that is fair to such a wide range of players. There are also more lawyers than ever ready to challenge patents on behalf of their clients. Patent challenges have become, in some cases, a strategic weapon against competitors.

And the legislative process is slow and deliberative by design while innovation is moving more quickly than ever. Writing laws that are relevant not just today but ten years from now is incredibly difficult.

What do you think of the proposed reforms to the patent laws?

New Innovation Center for Ireland

"IBM has announced the opening of a new Innovation Centre in IBM Technology Campus Dublin, to accelerate entrepreneurship in Ireland. IBM is announcing plans to launch four Innovation Centres
across Europe including Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Switzerland."

IBM is also a sponsor of Burning Questions 2007: Leading for Innovation to be held in London on October 24 - 26, 2007.

UK Innovation Advantage?

In the United States, we rely on market mechanisms to drive innovation. The United Kingdom is taking a more directed approach, as I learned over lunch with David Kester, chief executive of the Design Council.

Kester told me that in the United Kingdom, where most schools are publicly funded, a decision has been made to create six “innovation centres” that will bring together academic institutions in design, engineering, and business. Many fascinating things happen at the intersections of disciplines, and this program is an interesting way to create those junctures where they might not otherwise occur.

One of these “innovation triangles” is being created by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. Imperial brings engineering and technology expertise through its Faculty of Engineering as well as business knowledge through its Tanaka Business School. The £5.8 million investment is designed “to create world-beating products and services.”

Academia in the United States has pursued increasing specialization, with interdisciplinary programs being more the exception than the norm. Achieving tenure still depends on publishing in highly focused academic journals that reward research more than practice. A recent review of articles in the International Journal of Applied Management and Technology revealed such titles as “A New Hybrid Algorithm for Multi Objective Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem” and “Pedagogy for Determining Alternate Solutions to Integer Resource Allocation Problems.” There is certainly value in this research, but one wonders how often it leads to world-beating products and services.

The “bump and connect” model of innovation -- creating environments where people can have semi-random but productive encounters -- has become popular among urban planners. This experiment in the United Kingdom is a more deliberate attempt to foster these interactions in campus settings.

Innovation is increasingly seen as the key to global competitiveness. China and India both push out more technical and engineering graduates than the United States or other developed nations. The Innovation Centres, the result of the government-funded Cox Review of Creativity in Business: Building on the UK's Strengths, are themselves an interesting innovation that may enable a relatively small nation to outpace larger rivals.

Should universities in the United States put more emphasis on multidisciplinary programs to foster innovation?

_________________________

David Kester will be among the speakers at Burning Questions 2007: Leading for Innovation.