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Most entrepreneurial companies can’t afford an innovation center, but they can apply some of the principles.

1. Combine ideas. Xerox Corporation looks for intersections between ideas and how they might merge. “Several ideas could get combined in a next-generation offering,” says Tom Kavassalis, vice president of strategy and alliances for the Xerox Innovation Group, which drives Xerox’s R&D-based innovation.

2. Think backwards. McDonald’s innovation team thinks in terms of “backcasting”—starting with an end product in mind and working back toward the basic idea in a way that’s practical from a cost and technology perspective.

3. Do rapid prototyping. McDonald’s puts ideas through rapid prototyping that can last as little as one day. “What we try to do is to get from the blackboard to 3-D as fast as we can,” says Koziol.

4. Create an internal incubation fund. Xerox sets aside funds that encourage employees to network and chase ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have a budget. “We’re interested in thinking of new ideas that are different from ones we’re currently funding,” Kavassalis says.

5. Take it online. Idea management software is automating the innovation proc-ess. “Everybody can contribute all the time,” says Anthony Warren, director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Penn State.

Read MSNBC.

Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about the Disruptive Innovation team, started last year.

This team is looking 12 to 18 months out to identify trends that we think are relevant to eBay’s business. The company has created a more structured innovation program so that when people come up with ideas, they can submit them to a database and an environment that is reviewed on a regular basis, usually weekly or bi-weekly.  And if things are pretty interesting they are able to bring people into a rotation on an innovation team to work on their ideas.

Change management is very important to developers because they have to react and update their applications.  So one of the first things Max did at the Developers Program was to staff up product managers so that things don’t slip by.  This has happened in the past because we’ve had very limited product management support on APIs and that’s changing now. Now, there is a good team focused on that: anytime we release a feature on the site, that feature should be API/Web services-enabled, because our external developers can innovate more than eBay’s can, there are 45,000 of them and 12,000 eBay employees. So there are definitely great advantages to having a robust developer program.

eBay’s research points to end users going to more of a rich media, interactive experience that we have traditionally seen on desktop applications but that can be delivered to the Web.  Think AJAX and Flash. So they are spending a fair amount of time investing in buyer experience, specifically around rich media experiences delivered via the Web.

Read NetworkWorld.

Slim Devices is a small startup offering a glimpse of an ecosystem that depends on the active participation of broad networks of contributors. “Everywhere you find innovation today, a community is involved,” says Patricia Seybold, author of Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (Collins, October 2006).

The player, which has sold an impressive 50,000 units, is largely the brainchild of its customers around the world, who have done much of the vital engineering and design work–for free. They’ve been motivated by their passions–for great audio, for cool products, for the art of engineering–and also by the satisfaction of being admired and relied on by a global community of their peers.

Read FastCompany.