The Innovation Weblog

Grok Headline matches for The Innovation Weblog

The perfect webl0g system <Anne's
Webl0g about Markup & Style>

The perfect webl0g system <Anne's
Webl0g about Markup & Style> 08/16/2004 12:33 PM
what he thinks would be the perfect piece of logware .. The perfect weblog system this blogging wishlist .. Anne van Kesteren

annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/08/weblog-system
track this site | 3 links

Webl0g Empire: The World's Newest Webl0g
Network Launches

Webl0g Empire: The World's Newest Webl0g
Network Launches 06/05/2005 11:37 PM
Weblog Empire, the worlds newest weblog network has officially launched with an initial network of blogs attracting some 500,000 page views per month. [PRWEB Jun 4, 2005]

How much innovation is enough?

How much innovation is enough? 10/30/2003 11:58 PM
Sunday Times South Africa Oct 30 2003 11:09PM ET

Innovation and how not to.

Innovation and how not to. 01/17/2003 12:29 PM
I'm not sure what the magic formula for innovation is. I've read books about it. Thought about it. Kept track of companies that seem to be good at it. In an effort to assist everyone else who's been trying to...

Innovation Contest

Innovation Contest 02/12/2003 12:00 AM
One of my co-workers, JR, remarks on an innovation contest at work. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who wasn't sure what to make of the announcement. The initial announcement sounded a bit fishy for several reasons....

Beers to innovation

Beers to innovation 08/10/2004 05:03 AM
USA Today Aug 10 2004 9:03AM GMT

Adjusting for Innovation

Adjusting for Innovation 07/30/2004 05:19 PM
If research and development is an investment, why not treat it as such?

The Pace of Innovation

The Pace of Innovation 02/19/2003 08:08 PM
Kendall Clark muses on the apparent stall in innovation in XML technology -- is it a sign of failure, or a symptom of success?

Imitation is out, innovation is in

Imitation is out, innovation is in 11/14/2003 01:19 AM
Sunday Times South Africa Nov 14 2003 0:13AM ET

iTunes Innovation, Please

iTunes Innovation, Please 02/11/2004 09:46 PM
While I bellyache about how Apple is too busy developing the iTunes Music Store to add features to iTunes, I also want to point out that some of the innovations that were added to iTunes as a part of the Music Store could really improve iTunes as a whole. (Macworld via MyAppleMenu)

Democratizing Innovation

Democratizing Innovation 04/04/2005 07:28 PM

Eric von Hippel has released a PDF version of his book Democratizing Innovation under a Creative Commons license. Hippel explores the growing importance of innovation by users, and sharing of innovations by users.

The book is dedicated to "all who are building the information commons." Let's hope that's you!

Via Boing Boing.

Innovation through Integration

Innovation through Integration 04/08/2005 08:17 PM
danah boyd: Craigslist housing + Google Maps = brilliant

Google Innovation?

Google Innovation? 11/10/2003 11:40 PM
JR tries to remind us of history in light of Google's recent "innovation": You see, Hotbot was the first to introduce a tool like this. In fact HotBot had released such a tool quite a while ago, and at least they admitted that the bulk of it came from Dave Bau's tool. It's too bad the press covering this stuff has such a short memory....

Innovation Network

Innovation Network 04/29/2004 05:03 AM
Innovation Network
http://www.innonet.org/

They provide program planning and evaluation consulting, training, and Web-based evaluation tools to nonprofits and funders across geographic and programmatic boundaries. They want to make evaluation accessible to all nonprofits, so they have the knowledge and skills to:

* Manage their internal matters, programs, and services effectively;
* Gain a stronger understanding of what is happening in their programs, and how those programs are affecting people and communities; and
* Collectively raise a strong voice in funding and policy decisions.

Innovation Awards

Innovation Awards 01/03/2005 08:04 AM
How do you quantify corporate imagination? Meet the top companies on the first-ever Fast Company/Monitor Group Innovation Scorecard -- firms where new ideas are a competitive advantage.

Has IM Innovation Peaked?

Has IM Innovation Peaked? 05/07/2004 05:39 PM
Internet News May 7 2004 10:03PM GMT

Top UK innovation prize for IBM

Top UK innovation prize for IBM 06/11/2004 06:43 AM
IBM software described as the oil of e-commerce has won the MacRobert engineering prize.

The space of innovation

The space of innovation 09/07/2004 12:15 PM
Interesting discussion at slashdot about a blog system written on top of Google Gmail. Is it permitted? Is it frivolous? Is it in Google's interest? These are all fair questions, but the main point I think is: Open up a capability and people will do the unexpected with it....

End the FCC, begin innovation

End the FCC, begin innovation 06/07/2004 02:14 PM

I try not to fall for Declan's grandstanding, but his piece on why the FCC should die is spot on.

What it means is returning to bottom-up law rather than the top-down process that has characterized telecommunications for the last 80 years.

Maybe it's the programmer in me talking but I think the Internet and unlicensed wifi spectrum show that unregulated spaces produce the most innovation and create new markets for technology and information. In many ways, the FCC has spent the last few decades slowing technology progress and most recently is now in the censorship game, which doesn't make any sense at all.

Innovation as Collaboration

Innovation as Collaboration 02/01/2005 09:04 PM

A few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters to talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them. They ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some very creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business, and about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture 'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift prototypes on the fly. I was impressed. Being a consultant, the first question I asked them was about their innovation process. Specifically, I asked, how were customer needs, complaints and ideas routed from the front-line customer contacts (the sales and marketing people) to R&D. I got blank stares. New product ideas were developed in the laboratory, it seems, and the only customer input was from surveys and focus groups once the R&D people already had something to show them. An interesting discussion ensued. The gist of it was the company's argument that customers, not being experts in furniture, don't know what they want until they're shown something. If you were to ask them what they want, they'd just respond "what can you offer me?" My response was two-fold: First, I said, you shouldn't be asking people what furniture they want, because  it's not a piece of furniture that they're looking for, necessarily, it's the attributes and benefits that the furniture offers that people want: Comfort, orthopedic support, mobility, prestige, 'workability'. I described a company I had recently read about that had abolished chairs. All the work surfaces had been raised to a comfortable work-level while standing, and each employee had been given a lightweight, personal 'memory cushion' to stand on that clipped to their belt, and a pair of personal orthopedically-designed shoes designed to make standing for long periods comfortable. In this company, people were constantly on the move and an enormous amount of time was spent booking meeting rooms. Now, the entire office could be configured as ad hoc meeting areas, chairs (with their high attendant cost and floor-space needs) could be eliminated, and mobility was optimized. People even found that they were more productive standing up and constantly moving around. This was a company that understood furniture was a means to an end, and the end for them was mobility and flexibility, so they 'invented' tools (furniture, cushions and shoes) that had those attributes. Secondly, I added, you need to use an iterative process to elicit what people need, want and would use, a process Imperato and Harari (in their book Jumping the Curve) call "Thinking the Customer Ahead". This process entails a combination of visioning, asking a lot of 'what if' questions, and generally helping customers imagine the future state of their own organizations and needs, and how they would react if something new were suddenly available. This is an inherently collaborati ve process, as much as it is an innovative one. Just as asking people 'what would you like to see on the company intranet?' is likely to produce unimaginative (or no) answers, so would asking customers what furniture they need. But if you helped them to envision what the future of their business would look like, and then worked from that vision to ask an iterative set of 'what if' questions to elicit the kinds of furniture they could imagine using effectively in that future environment, and then collaboratively work with them to 'design' it, then you'd be getting somewhere. As it turned out, the new product they had asked me to evaluate was designed to solve a problem in the professional services industry that had been widely talked about for a generation. Now they had an answer, but it was an answer to yesterday's problem, for which effective work-arounds had been found and were still evolving. And they had designed a product that had several critical inconvenience factors that were show-stoppers, and which they could have known about by spending more time talking to customers much earlier in the process. One of my creative suggestions to them, as a customer, was that if they really want to sell their top-of-the-line ergonomic chairs to CEOs, they should give them away free to hotels and conference centres for their meeting rooms, where CEOs hang out and where the chairs are notoriously uncomfortable. The proviso would be that the name of the chair be conspicuously emblazoned on each chair. I don't think they ever took me up on the idea. I still think it would work, and pay for itself in no time. Specialization has created intellectual and imaginative silos in organizations, and a recent Wharton study written up in S+B Magazine has found, as I did on that trip, that these silos are a huge obstacle to innovation: "The most effective product development and commercialization processes encourage dynamic communication and idea sharing among engineers, marketers, and customers...Failure to incorporate the customer’s perspective often seriously limits the potential financial and competitive value of corporate innovation...Often, engineers are tucked away so far within a company that they don’t see firsthand what customers really need." Other key findings of the study: over-concentration on technology and under-emphasis of the emotional appeal of products leads to market failure better products result when employees are themselves customers of the product 'anthropological research' -- visiting customers to see how they actually use (and mis-use) products can provide huge insights on need and innovation opportunities when entering new markets, having local partners 'on the ground' can help tweak products to meet needs that are unique to that new market using cross-functional teams and having the R&D people 'get out more' can help reduce 'customer blindness' spreading R&D efforts around the world can help global companies enhance their 'environmental scan' and tap into ideas and adaptations that may not be apparent at head office surveys that gather data on customer behaviour are insufficient -- it's more important to know why customers do what they do, to determine their true wants and needs, and this usually requires face-to-face contact and collaborative effort to determine it's important to understand customers' aversion to change, and annoyance with having too many choices, when developing products key qualities needed of the facilitators of dialogue between R&D, sales and customers: humility and curiosity This study focused mainly on new product innovation, but the same need for collaboration with all the departments of the company, and with customers as well, applies equally to other types of business innovation. I like the Doblin Group's Ten Types of Innovation, an excellent way of parsing all the innovation opportunities open to a company: Business model: How you make money (e.g. Dell's pay-in-advance for a custom-made PC model). Networks and alliances: How you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit  (e.g. Sara Lee sticking strictly to branding and outsourcing all manufacturing) Enabling process: How you support the company's core processes and workers (e.g. Starbucks' premium wage and benefits packages to attract superior staff) Core processes: How you create and add value to your offerings (e.g. Wal-Mart's reinvention of retailing as shelf-space leasing) Product performance: How you design your core offerings  (e.g. the Mercedes Smart Car's unique and imaginative attributes -- pictured above -- pick up the new Feb/05 Fast Company for a fascinating discussion of why you won't see it in the US) Product system: How you link and/or provide a platform for multiple products (e.g. the Microsoft integrated productivity suite) Service: How you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around your products (e.g. Singapore Airlines' thoughtful and pampering extras) Delivery Channel: How you get your offerings to market (e.g. Martha Stewart's multi-media ways of getting her 'home' stuff to your home) Brand: How you communicate your offerings (e.g. Absolut vodka's "theme and variations' advertising concept) Customer experience<>: How your customers feel when they interact with your company and its offerings (e.g. the Harley Davidson owners' community) Collaboration within company departments and with customers is absolutely essential to the success of any of these ten types of innovation. My sense, however, is that in most large organizations collaboration (as opposed to mere coordination) is antithetical to corporate culture, modus operandi, and hierarchical structure. That's why many innovation advisers think innovation is best done in a business unit separate from the main operating unit, where emphasis is inevitably on protecting the status quo. And that's also why I was surprised to see the results of a new study, by KPMG and Ipsos-Reid, of Canada's most innovative companies. Only three of the top 10 are small-to-medium sized businesses (Research in Motion, Westjet Airlines and Ballard Power Systems). The others include four of Canada's five largest telecom and broadcasting firms, its largest grocery chain, its largest engineering firm and its largest software distributor. And while this 'bias to big' is less noticeable in the Innovation category than in the overall Most Admired rankings (which are top-heavy with banks), it struck me as peculiar -- until I read how the winners had been selected: Only the CEOs of Canada's leading (read: biggest) corporations got to vote. It's not surprising, then, that they picked almost exclusively other large corporations. I wonder what the answers would have been if they had asked customers?

Apple is all about innovation

Apple is all about innovation 12/03/2003 12:10 PM
Analysts are again praising Apple's ability to innovate. "The company is now shaping the explosive market for digital music and devices. Apple's innovations are once again changing the face of consumer electronics and its professional customer base is ripe for an upgrade cycle," says Forbes. JP Morgan adds that Apple's "innovation has no bounds," but believes the value of innovation is already reflected in Apple's stock price. The company has given Apple's stock...

Innovation That Leaves No One Behind

Innovation That Leaves No One Behind 05/17/2004 03:00 AM
Business Week May 17 2004 6:23AM GMT

Who Cares about Innovation?

Who Cares about Innovation? 08/21/2004 08:54 PM
Technologists are divided in some ways, but united by a common faith. Stated simply, we worship innovation. Openist, deregulationist, libertarian, or cyber-anarchist all take innovation as the goal. Our battles are mostly internecine warfare, fights about how best to achieve that common goal. But how often do we ask ourselves:...

The Meaning of Innovation

The Meaning of Innovation 12/19/2004 03:12 PM

I'm at a "Global Innovation Outlook" event organized by IBM in New York. Lots of great folks here, and -- halleluja! -- open WiFi in the auditorium at Rockefeller University. It's too early to pass judgment on the program, but IBM is asking the right questions in exploring the nature of innovation in today's world.

Gmail innovation

Gmail innovation 04/17/2004 04:47 AM
Jeremy doesn't see the big deal with Gmail. "Oooh, a whole gigabyte. Who cares?" he asks. Do you honestly expect to see other large (and even mid-tier) web mail providers not increasing their offerings to match or surpass those of Gmail? Without the competition from Gmail, why would they have? Isn't extra space what their users pay them money for? So we've got threading (not new) plus virtual folders (not new) in a single mail interface. Well, stop the presses!...

PHP Programming Innovation Award

PHP Programming Innovation Award 04/13/2004 12:45 AM
PHP Programming Innovation Award is an initiative meant to honor PHP developers that make outstanding contributions in the form of innovative classes of objects. Any developer can participate with their classes even if they were already published in other sites. The initiative is repeated every month. Winning developers may gain prizes provided by well known sponsors that sell PHP products. The nominees of this month were already announced.

Innovation chez Orchard

Innovation chez Orchard 11/10/2003 11:29 PM

Dunstan Orchard's great looking blog has had a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them are pretty interesting. Firstly, he's taken my blockquote citations script and modified it to handle citations that aren't links in an intelligent way. He also now has a commen t spam blacklist (I really need to work out the syndication details for that and publish some code).

His most interesting new feature is comment alerts, a system that allows people to keep track of discussions that they have participated in on his blog. Dunstan's system allows users to "opt in" to allow future commenters to alert them if their comment is relevant to what the original user posted. It's well worth surfing over and checking out Dunstan's explanation of the system, which may well materialise on this site as well some time in the future. There are quite a few other neat tricks around the site, some of which are detailed in the Colophon.

Open Sourcing Innovation

Open Sourcing Innovation 04/18/2004 10:58 AM
Slashdot Apr 18 2004 3:14PM GMT

Innovation Is More Important Than
Invention

Innovation Is More Important Than
Invention 04/29/2004 04:25 PM
We recently posted an MIT Tech Review story looking at the return of "inventors" instead of innovators. The article named the well known "great inventors" from a century ago. In the comments, someone properly took me to task for simply parroting the line about these inventors, when most of the stories about their "inventions" were mythical. Now, Michael Schrage (again at MIT's Tech Review) is arguing convincingly that for all the hype around inventors, in novation is much more important - and (more importantly) is entirely separate from invention. He names the same "inventors" named in the original article and points out that the truth of the matter is that they were all innovators rather than inventors (and its only the distance of history that has rewritten their stories as if they were inventors). He points out that invention has nothing to do with commercial success - whereas innovation has everything to do with it. Furthermore, this ties into the ongoing debate over patent reform: "If you want to learn about the importance of "invention" over the past 300 years, talk to the lawyers. If you want to hear about the importance of "innovation," however, talk to anyone else." So, the real question then, is whether or not our intellectual property system should be encouraging invention or innovation? I'd vote for innovation, as that's what drives the economy, and that would suggest we need fewer lawyers involved with the patent system, and perhaps more innovators. The following point is also important: "the technical excellence of an invention matters far less than the economic willingness of the customer or client to explore it." In other words, any system designed to encourage innovation needs to encourage actually making use of the innovation - and not, for example, sitting on a patent and doing nothing with it, while waiting for others to innovate and then hitting them with a patent infringement lawsuit.

Innovation stems boredom

Innovation stems boredom 12/08/2003 01:06 PM
Steve Jobs loves to learn about new markets and technologies, and would "get bored" if Apple and Pixar weren't innovating, according to a Business 2.0 article reported on by Macworld UK. Jobs mentions video editing as a source of drive and innovation. "Five or six years ago, we didn't know anything about video editing, so we bought technology to learn how to do that." As a further indicator of Jobs' passion for innovation, John Lasseter of Pixar says: "Before he...

Other News: Innovation and Adoption

Other News: Innovation and Adoption 09/21/2004 10:58 AM
Ex-Apple employee Don Norman talks about innovation and adoption in technology.

PHPClasses: PHP Innovation Award

PHPClasses: PHP Innovation Award 04/13/2004 08:43 AM
PHPClasses.org has created a new sort of award for PHP Innovation for people out there that have made significant contributions to the PHP community.

Palms, Pocket PCs and innovation

Palms, Pocket PCs and innovation 12/04/2003 02:27 PM
This has been tackled before (and certainly will be again), but Stephen Wildstrom explains why we've been seeing so much innovation with Palms lately (the Tapwave Zodiac, the Sony Clie UX50, the Treo 600) while Pocket PCs remain largely uniform. We do know that Microsoft is supposed to be loosening up a bit and letting manufacturers take more risks with Pocket PC design, but it's certainly taking a while to see some results. Read...

Outsourcing will rescue innovation

Outsourcing will rescue innovation 12/17/2003 09:33 AM
ZDNet Dec 17 2003 8:52AM ET

"A combination of innovation and
infringement"

"A combination of innovation and
infringement" 07/07/2004 01:08 PM

Annalee Newitz has a great article in Alternet about Mash-ups, going over the copyright laws involved and how the laws are viewed in the mash-up scene. It's an interested clash, where restrictive laws loom over digital musicians armed with low-cost computers and software that makes mixing easy. In this realm, Newitz sees mash-ups as a form of protest, where DJs knowingly violate laws in order to spread their art in the world.

As a masher on [Get Your Bootleg On] recently posted, "Everything is illegal." Under an I.P. regime where artists feel like nothing goes, it seems that everything could. The infringement generation aims to mash up copyright law in pursuit of better music. But it also has a chance to challenge social divisions more profound than the distinctions between hip-hop, rock and electroclash.

Steve Ballmer on innovation

Steve Ballmer on innovation 11/13/2003 04:07 PM
In an interview with Always On, Steve Ballmer comments on innovation, competition, Apple and the computer industry. Though he does recognize Apple's innovation and focus, he fails to see how a strategy of providing users with the best computing experience possible can increase Macintosh market share. Mr. Ballmer also seems to believe, like much of the computer industry, that commodity hardware, Windows and the computing experience this combination provides are "good enough,"...

The Difference Between Innovation And
Invention

The Difference Between Innovation And
Invention 03/22/2005 07:03 PM
For all the talk about protecting innovation, we've often pointed out that the patent system seems to do the exact opposite -- making it more difficult for those who are actually innovating, while giving money to those who haven't done anything at all. Last year, Michael Schrage wrote an interesting piece pointing out the very important diffe rences between invention and innovation, where he noted that innovation is more important -- but the patent system is more about protecting invention. Basically, plenty of people or companies who "invented" an idea were never able to capitalize on the idea at all. It took others who actually innovated and built off that idea to make a product that actually had an impact on the world. Helping to prove that point are a bunch of example cases where the initial inventor of something wasn't the one to make it valuable. In a market driven economy, the real winner is the company that can make something valuable through innovation -- not the inventor who happens to come up with something that the market may or may not want.

Innovation on the front lines

Innovation on the front lines 07/13/2004 10:09 AM
ZDNet Jul 13 2004 2:04PM GMT

Innovation in games needed

Innovation in games needed 07/24/2004 01:19 AM
News.bbc.co.uk - Fri Jul 23, 02:43 pm GMT
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