TOO many small and medium firms are shunning innovation and strategic planning, according to the managing partner in the Leeds office of accountants and business advisors PKF.

Source: LeedsToday

Technorati: innovation, creativity, consulting, idea, aside

posted by Naina @ Permalink 12/22/2004 02:11:00 AM   0 comments  --- Google It! ---

73% of Global Companies Will Increase Spending on Innovation in 2005, Up From 64% in 2004, Research Shows - More than 60% of Senior Executives Say Globalization Is Having a Major Impact on Innovation, But Fewer Than 35% Will Boost R&D Investments In China, India, or Other 'Low-Cost' Locations and Apple, 3M, and GE Ranked 'Most Innovative'

Source: BCG on Yahoo News


MIT Professors Study Innovation

Innovation has become an all-purpose tonic, the default prescription for every pain associated with the retrenching American economy. Whatever the problem -- slower growth, global competition, fewer well-paying jobs -- innovating, we are told, is the solution.

Now a pair of MIT professors has dissected the practice of innovating and found it to be generally misunderstood. In "Innovation: The Missing Dimension", published by Harvard University Press in October, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore argue that much of the innovation effort in American business goes into solving problems but relatively little into identifying possibilities and opportunities in the marketplace.

"We are in danger of learning the wrong lessons about innovation," Lester and Piore warn in the book. "As a result, we risk neglecting those capabilities that are the real wellsprings of creativity in the US economy -- the capacity to integrate across organizational, intellectual, and cultural boundaries, the capacity to experiment, and the habits of thought that allow us to make sense of radically ambiguous situations and move forward in the face of uncertainty."

Source: MIT Tech-Edu


Falling numbers of foreign students will hurt US innovation

Post 9-11 restrictions that appear to have cut the numbers of foreign graduate students will also impact on US innovation, says a new study. Keith Maskus, a researcher at the University of Colorado-Boulder, found that "strict enforcement" of student visa regulations would destroy a large proportion of the innovative activity that sprang up following the Bayh-Dole act. Maskus explains, "Our results show that foreign graduate students and immigrants under technical visas are vital when it comes to developing new technologies in the American economy. The impacts are particularly pronounced within the universities but spill over as well to non-university patenting."

Source: ResearchResearch

Technorati: innovation, creativity, consulting, idea, aside

posted by Naina @ Permalink 12/09/2004 11:32:00 AM   0 comments  --- Google It! ---

CEO interview: the InnoCentive model of open innovation
Robert J. Allio in Strategy and Leadership; 32: 4 2004; pp. 4-9
To read - go here - Articles and then here or simply download the PDF File

Source: EmeraldInsight

Technorati: innovation, creativity, consulting, idea, aside

posted by Naina @ Permalink 12/08/2004 11:14:00 AM   0 comments  --- Google It! ---

Countless visitors to France have admired the fabled 231-foot long BayeuxTapestry that celebrates the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Fewrealise that this work was outsourced to a community of nuns in southernEngland. Sounds familiar? As Michael Treacy points out, offshoring, likeglobal trade, is certainly nothing new.

Editorial from Emerald Insight

Technorati: innovation, creativity, consulting, idea, aside

posted by Naina @ Permalink 12/08/2004 11:11:00 AM   --- Google It! ---

Innovation has become an all-purpose tonic, the default prescription for every pain associated with the retrenching American economy. Whatever the problem -- slower growth, global competition, fewer well-paying jobs -- innovating, we are told, is the solution.

Now a pair of MIT professors has dissected the practice of innovating and found it to be generally misunderstood. In "Innovation: The Missing Dimension," published by Harvard University Press in October, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore argue that much of the innovation effort in American business goes into solving problems but relatively little into identifying possibilities and opportunities in the marketplace.

"We are in danger of learning the wrong lessons about innovation," Lester and Piore warn in the book. "As a result, we risk neglecting those capabilities that are the real wellsprings of creativity in the US economy -- the capacity to integrate across organizational, intellectual, and cultural boundaries, the capacity to experiment, and the habits of thought that allow us to make sense of radically ambiguous situations and move forward in the face of uncertainty."

While innovation is typically seen as a single process, Lester and Piore break it into two parts: problem solving and interpretation. Companies focus constantly on the former, which tends to be a rational step-by-step process. If they talk about the latter at all, it is under the guise of "listening to the customer," a less well-defined discipline.

Much of the book is devoted to case studies of product development in fields ranging from cellphones to medical equipment to bluejeans. Successful innovators ''created spaces where they could have open-ended conversations" about technology and markets, Lester, who directs MIT's Industrial Performance Center, said in an interview.

One of their chief strengths was the ability to interpret a situation. "We compare the interpretive manager to the host of a cocktail party," Lester said. "She decides who to invite, she brings people together, she begins conversations, and she tries to keep the conversations going. That's radically different from what the problem-solving manager does, which is often to get a product out the door."

A more sophisticated understanding of these conversations, and their role in innovation, could be a boon for Boston, a world center of technology, research, and expertise of all stripes. "When companies come here, they're locating in an environment that is intellectually rich and full of people who are asking questions," noted Mitchell Adams, executive director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

The collaborative runs the Massachusetts Nanotechnology Institute, devoted to bringing together people from science, business, finance, and academia who are interested in the field. "There is no club or bar you can go to to talk about nanotechnology," Adams said.

In the past, much of the conversation about technologies and their possibilities took place at corporate research centers, such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, that pioneered new technology and sparked the innovation that drove the great economic expansion of the 1990s. But corporations increasingly have been reining in their basic research and concentrating on applied research. As a result, more of the responsibility for innovation has shifted to research-oriented universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Smart companies seek to plug into campus technology dialogues by taking part in collaborative research projects, said Lester, who agrees the Boston area should be able to capitalize on the trend.

"In this area," he said, "we have institutions that are already some of the most important public spaces in our economy for this interpretive process: the universities, the teaching hospitals. Companies are coming here not because they want to solve problems but because they want to be in on the conversation in these interpretive spaces."

Source: Boston.com

Technorati: innovation, creativity, consulting, idea, aside

posted by Naina @ Permalink 12/06/2004 10:53:00 AM   2 comments  --- Google It! ---