Archive for July 2008
Innovation networks involving universities and enterprises
“iBridge Network is a not-for-profit initiative that uses its Web site to provide understandable and searchable access to innovations developed by university and other not-for-profit research labs. NineSigma and the Network will work together to help connect industry leaders with the research and innovations produced inside the country’s colleges and universities.”
Press Release: “NineSigma Welcomes iBridge Network to Innovation Alliance Program.”
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Innovation networks are helping companies accelerate research and development. Some of these address alliances with venture capital firms, strategic coopetition with other enterprises in the same market segment, collaboration with suppliers, distributors and companies delivering complementary products and services, partnerships with universities and public research centers, as well as crowdsourcing and open source programs involving contributions from independent researchers and users.
When it comes down to working with universities, quite a few of the initiatives focus on scientific research, leading edge technologies, forward looking applications and usability, economics and business modeling. A few universities happen to offer cross-functional research programs addressing the technical and the business sides of a given project getting research and business faculty to work together.
iBridge has been running a successful pilot network for two years already. This organization claims to deliver the largest global network of scientists and technologists, helping universities and their technology transfer offices to partner with entrepreneurs and established corporations.
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| Chicago, IL 31 July 08 |  |
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Innovation and the role of government (6)
“Broadband access, vital to life and commerce in America, must be an early and high-level priority for the next Administration (…) a coherent set of policies and goals to accelerate universal adoption of high speed Internet (…) The IIA has embarked on an aggressive campaign to expand awareness and help government leaders understand the need for universal broadband availability and adoption.”
IIA’s press release: “Internet Innovation Alliance Works to Build a Stronger Broadband America.”
Related posts: Innovation and the role of government (5) where you will find more links of interest.
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The IIA is calling for a national broadband strategy and has summarized McCain’s and Obama’s thinking, which you can read by clicking on that link. This organization stands for streamlining current policies, regulatory restraint, low taxation and limited regulation in favor of realizing a high degree of competitiveness on the supply side, driving the introduction of innovative IP, Internet Protocol, based applications and lower cost for broadband users.
The IIA claims that the U.S. compares unfavorably with some other countries as far as high speed Internet access is concerned, ranking 16th in broadband deployment. A speedier Internet and broader adoption would be the springboard for innovations, some of which can become greener alternatives when compared with oil consumption. The IIA quotes some number from the American Consumer Institute implying a potential 11% reduction of annual U.S. oil imports, and also lists a variety of other stats from various sources pointing to economic growth, job and quality of life.
Disclosure: as shown in my Linkedin profile I work for Alcatel-Lucent, a corporation which happens to be an IIA member. Consultaglobal and this blog are neither related nor sponsored by them. To be more precise, no Consultaglobal post can be interpreted as Alcatel-Lucent’s policies and opinions. If you are interested in Alcatel-Lucent matters, please visit the company’s site where you will also find one of my Alcatel-Lucent articles under the title “Getting to a segment of one.”
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| Chicago, IL 30 July 08 | |
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Corporate Innovation and Research Fair. Mountain View, 15 Aug 08.
Innovation and the role of government (5)
“Government policies aimed at encouraging innovation in manufacturing may be doomed to failure unless companies learn to take more risks, according to academic research. An unpublished study of more than 700 manufacturers in 17 countries found no correlation between the degree of innovation at each company and the countries in which the specific companies were based.”
Read Peter Marsh’s article, “Corporate Culture Key To Innovation Success,” on the Financial Times.
“U.S. companies are now shifting more engineering and design work to low-cost nations such as China, India, and Russia. Surely, innovation itself must follow. Apparently not, according to a new study published by the National Academies (…) argues that, in sectors from software and semiconductors to biotech and logistics, America’s lead in creating new products and services has remained remarkably resilient over the past decade.”
Read Pete Engardio’s article, “Is U.S. Innovation Headed Off-Shore?” on BusinessWeek.
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Pete’s article comments on a collection of studies gathered under the title “Innovation in Global Industries: U.S. Firms Competing in a New World” published by The National Academies Press. The reviews I have read about this book highlight that:
- globalization is clearly accelerating, beyond the point of no return,
- this is a highly dynamic environment in which no country can afford falling into a state of complacency,
- global competition does not translate into the demise of American innovativeness.
Some business researchers are emphasizing the role of culture over the impact of any public policy aimed to take care of a country’s innovation. From a demand standpoint, this relies on consumer behavior openly embracing the adoption of new products and services and, the more demanding users become, the better. On the supply side, there is a need for an entrepreneurial and risk taking mindset that yields new intellectual property.
Theoretically, the end result is a virtuous circle that enhances a country’s competitiveness, being able to leverage cost efficiencies anywhere in the world. The fact is that there is a strong debate out there on the need for an American innovation policy as captured on this series of posts (see links below). “A Space Program for Technology” is a recent article featuring a new book advocating a national competitiveness strategy. The title is “Winner Take All” by R.J. Elkus.
Related posts:
- NESTA’s innovation metrics due in 2010
- Innovation and the role of government (1)
- Innovation and the role of government (2)
- Innovation and the role of government (3)
- Innovation and the role of government (4)
Picture credits: Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corporation.
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| Chicago, IL 28 July 08 | |
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Celebrating 100,000 page views as of 27 July 2008
This is just a quick post to thank you all for visiting this blog, which just went over 100,000 page views. The click count captures page visits from actual people reading consultaglobal’s posts. In case you wonder, note that WordPress’ statistics collect neither my own visits nor those of spiders and robots.
A quick Technorati search shows 86 blog reactions. This is the number of links shown on other blogs indexed by Technorati, which are currently linking to consultaglobal. Technorati’s authority is 25. This is the number of unique blogs that have linked to consultaglobal in the past 6 months.
Once again, many thanks for your interest in this blog.
Related posts: First Annual Blog Review.
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| Chicago, IL 27 July 08 | |
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Innovator’s dilemmas: the budgeting problem (1)
“If budgeting is to have any value at all, it needs a radical overhaul (…) the traditional budgeting process takes too long and consumes too many management resources (…) [and] fails to move people to act in their company’s best interest.”
“Why Budgeting Fails: One Management System Is Not Enough” by Prof. Peter Horvath and Dr. Ralf Sauter. Paper published by Harvard Business School Publishing.
Given alternative investment options, budgeting ends up being about prioritizing what projects get what type of assets and resource levels. Common sense dictates that the decision making process should be driven by specific goals that maximize the return on that investment.
However, competing and often conflicting demands, legacy requirements, inherited commitments, assumed entitlements, inward looking and bureaucratic behaviors can stifle innovation and a company’s growth.
When starting a project it pays to figure out roles and responsibilities. In large organizations, the project’s champion, budget holders and those expected to do the leg work might not necessarily come from the same departments and business units.
This helps taking down corporate silos. It allows managers to cross-pollinate innovative initiatives. Ideally, cross-functional teams save themselves from tunnel vision and elevate their competence level to deliver breakthrough innovations.
In some other cases, this approach facilitates the integration of end to end offers focusing on incremental innovations where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But, realizing any, if not all, of the expected synergies can become an excruciating undertaking under traditional annual budgeting processes. This is my first post on this subject and a few other will soon follow. In the meantime, I will continue to appreciate your comments and emails.
Picture credits: Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corporation.
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| Chicago, IL 26 July 08 | |
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Google’s innovation recipe (2)
Interview with Tom Davenport, Professor of Information Technology & Management, Babson College.
A Harvard Business Publishing video.
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| Chicago, IL 25 July 08 | |
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ENoLL: innovation driven by the European network of living labs
“Living Lab is a new concept for R&D and innovation (…) [based on] the human-centric involvement and its potential for development of new ICT-based services and products. It is all done by bringing different stakeholders together in a co-creative way.”
Visit the European Network of Living Labs’s website.
http://openlivinglabs.typepad.com/
User centered designs and lead user innovation happen to be on the rise. Industrial designers are in the forefront of this trend, joining cross-functional teams cross-pollinating knowledge coming from diverse disciplines. Interest in human factors engineering is regaining momentum and has become a source innovative research and products.
Projects involving: ethnographic studies, coolhunting, end user collaboration, usability testing as well as analytics coming from software embedded in products people are actually using, is overcoming the kind of limitations suffered by traditional market research when solely based on surveying focus groups and polls.
ENoll’s living labs and innovation networks enable public-private partnerships where companies, research institutions and citizens can collaborate, co-create and validate technologies in real life contexts.
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| Chicago, IL 25 July 08 | |
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ad:tech Chicago. Chicago, 5-6 August 2008
“ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. Worldwide shows blend keynote speakers, topic driven panels and workshops to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world.”
Click here to access the registration page.
Leveraging Web 2.0 for New Revenue Opportunities. Chicago, 11 Sep 08
“On Thursday, September 11, 2008, Delivered Innovation is presenting ‘Leveraging Web 2.0 for New Revenue Opportunities,’ a seminar designed to familiarize attendees with new concepts in monetizing unique business processes, methods, concepts, and intellectual property using a commercially available SaaS application delivery platform such as Coghead.”
Read Delivered Innovation’s press release.
Click here to get the event details and the registration page.
