From Business Week - January 2, 2008

"The bulk of innovation is low-amplitude and takes place over a long period. Companies should focus on refining existing technologies as much as on creation"

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.

Here is an interesting blog post and slideshow from Indris Mootee on the design thinking and strategic business innovation.

Here's a quote from the post that sums up Indris' thinking:

"I was often asked the question of what "design thinking" has to do with business strategy. When talked about "design thinking" people refer to asthetics (mainly high stlye design or usability) and generally they cannot relate to strategy (strategy means spreadsheet). I explained to them that “design thinking” is crucial to any innovation effort if a company wants to break out of its current competitive structure."

And here is his slideshow with the 10 principles for strategic business innovation:

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"It’s a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience."

In this article in the NY Times, Janet Rae-Dupree discusses innovation and the curse of knowledge.  Sje also references a book called "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Fail".

This article from InformationWeek discusses innovation with WaMu's e-commerce team.  "Every executive, every leader recognizes that in order to be successful, our technology has to be very, very strong," says Debora Horvath, executive VP and CIO.

They do it by working with customers and technology vendors to spec out projects, build prototypes in as little as 48 hours, then pushing forward into development and testing.

This is a presentation by Google CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google from August 1, 2007.

Latency and speed matters.  How fast is fast?  In Google's mind, speed is a response rate of < 400ms.  User experience is also very important to Google, especially if users are not getting what they are trying to do.

In this article from CIO.com, Diann Daniel outlines the 6 keys for creating innovation in IT based on a discussion with CIO Steven Agnoli from global law firm K&L Gates. 

The keys are:

1. Lay a strong IT foundation
2. Create an IT team that inspires trust and confidence
3. Stay in synch with the business
4. Speak the language of the business
5. Reframe the problem
6. Create groups that focus on daily and long-range goals

In this article from Wired Magazine, Clive discusses the world of "radical transparency" and the shift from secrecy to openness and full disclosure.  Radical transparency is also a shift from top-down control of information to distributing more power to rank-and-file employees. 

The conclusion to the article from RealInnovation.com says it all - "The “why” of innovation has been answered thousands of times.  Without innovation, an organization is caught in the death spiral of continuous improvement on a single, finite evolutionary path.  Businesses must reinvent themselves if they want to survive.  This reinvention has to be driven by strategic and disruptive innovation. Systematic innovation must be the core of any program engaged in ideation and problem solving.  Innovation must become systematic and its’ outputs made repeatable, predictable and reliable."

Here is an article from Realinnovation.com that  "illustrates the variables that describe an organization’s “innovation readiness” – the likelihood that creative ideas will emerge and be successfully implemented. Understanding the leading indicators of innovation success is crucial to overcoming organizational barriers."

Tom Kelley, general manager of the design firm IDEO, wrote a very interesting book on innovation.  During his work with leading companies, he identifed various roles that are important to the innovation process -- Anthropologist, the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-Pollinator, who mixes and matches ideas, widely disparate people, and technologies to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. 

Ten Faces will show you how to create a culture of continuous innovation and renewal, and the link takes you to the book's website.

As a bonus, here is a link to a podcast Tom had with Dave Iverson from KQED in San Francisco.

In this article from User Interface Engineering (UIE), Kim Goodwin discusses the 10 ways to kill good design.  Read the article to learn more about each of these ways:

1. Poor choice of pilot project
2. Not having one consistent project owner
3. Incomplete design or insufficient communication
4. Not getting buyin from top execs
5. The wrong people doing design
6. Not committing resources to design
7. Failure to separate innovation from renovation
8. The inmates are running the asylum
9. Unrealistic expectations
10. Unhealthy corporate culture

This article was originally published by Kim Goodwin on the Cooper Web Site in 2004. You can view the original article here: Ten Ways to Kill Good Design.

This survey is from strategic consultants, McKinsey & Co.  The document was downloaded from the McKinsey Quarterly website.

• Senior IT executives say they are well-aligned with their business partners in shaping corporate IT strategy, according to a recent McKinsey survey. Things have changed markedly since a decade ago, when many CIOs merely responded to business information needs.
• This change shows that IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance.
• However, IT leaders are less confident that they are driving innovations that lead their companies to new products and processes. Innovation demands a new approach to IT planning.

This is an 18-minute video from the 2003 TED conference.

The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 Gold Rush, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: "I believe there's more innovation ahead of us than behind us."

This is a 20-page overview of the challenges and opportunities facing the software industry authored by McKinsey & Co. and Sand Hill Group.

The preface starts out..."The software industry is in the midst of a wave of innovation that is defi ning the foundation for customer and vendor value in the next era. McKinsey & Company, in collaboration with the Sand Hill Group, has analyzed this new era of innovation and its impact on vendors and customers. Our results are presented in this report for Software 2007. The report includes an overview on the innovation going on within the software ecosystem today, a discussion of the various drivers, a diffusion model for these innovations and a look ahead to the types of products, business models, and process innovations that the software ecosystem will experience in the future."

Here is a summary of the conclusions:

• Innovation is rapidly growing in importance to the software industry, and the vast majority of software customers think the best is yet to come.
• With continued globalization of both software demand and supply, and strong funding for innovation (e.g., more than $12 billion in VC and PE investments into software companies in 2006), there is now more fertile ground than ever for software innovation.
• Innovation waves typically occur in predictable stages, starting with the introduction of disruptive technology and then leading to the “diffusion” stage in which the technology is translated into innovative products, services, business models, and processes.