K@Wharton: Innovation: Sometimes It Takes A Village
Published 24 June 2009
Whether it's a faster way to move data, a cheaper way to power a car, or a cleaner way to sweep up dust bunnies, the right innovation can deliver huge profits to an organization. But given today's fast-paced global marketplace and limited resources for research and development, companies often struggle simply to survive, let alone innovate.
Yet the same forces that have flattened our world may also yield new directions for the future of innovation. During a recent conference at the Mack Center for Technological Innovation, academics and business leaders argued that, rather than going back to the drawing board, companies should go outside their walls and tap into "innovation networks."
An "innovation network" is a web of people, institutions or companies outside of a firm that help it solve problems or come up with new ideas. While organizations have formed alliances and strategic partnerships for hundreds of years, experts say this web of connections is becoming increasingly important today.
"It's all about diversity. It's about getting to everybody who might be able to bring an innovative idea to the table," said conference speaker Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of InnoCentive, of Waltham, Mass. "Almost all these things are about [being] better, faster and more cost-effective.... In this kind of economy, organizations have a phenomenal opportunity to think fundamentally differently about the innovation process, and restructure around that."
The conference, titled "Innovation Networks: New Insights, Open Questions and Management Fashions," explored the benefits of innovation networks and looked at different ways that firms manage their expanding webs of partners. Although there was general agreement that a company could benefit from shifting its focus outside its own world, questions remained about how to make innovation networks more successful. Companies often find it hard to open up to innovation from outside sources, or may use their networks poorly and not get the full benefit. A consensus emerged that many companies must change their culture to take full advantage of the power of network innovation.
Despite their importance, alliances between companies only succeed about 40% of the time, said Wharton management professor Harbir Singh, a conference organizer and Mack Center co-director. "Why is the success rate not higher?" Singh asked. "How do we improve performance above 40%?"
Organizations grapple with how to build external networks -- what Singh calls "the extended enterprise" -- without shifting too much focus away from the core needs of the firm. "In order to be successful in the extended enterprise world, you have to invest in alliances and network capabilities," Singh said. "But from a 'focused firm' approach, you would say that alliance and network capability is secondary to the core focus of the firm.... Really, what it comes down to is the tension between creating shared resources versus protecting one's own resources."
Existential questions emerge as alliances proliferate, said Harvard Business School professor and conference participant Ranjay Gulati. "You begin to ask, 'Who am I? Who are we, the firm? Who is 'us'? Who is 'them'? Who are we competing with? Who are we not competing with? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?'" Nevertheless, real-world examples show payoffs that can be worth the tension.
As vice president of knowledge and innovation at Procter & Gamble for many years, Larry Huston improved the company's innovation productivity by 60% through strategic alliances and partnerships. Huston created and led P&G's "Connect and Develop Strategy," which involved hundreds of outside partners in research and development. The strategy presumed that for every scientist at P&G, there were at least 200 outside the company who could do similar work. With that mindset, the company's intellectual assets became not just "our know-how" but also "who we knew," said Huston. The result: more than $10 billion in revenue from more than 400 new products -- most of which were created in collaboration with outside partners. In 2007, for example, 186 companies were involved in the 125 new products that went to market. "What we fundamentally did was redefine our organization as 1.8 million people," said Huston. "What you're doing is building an unbelievable infrastructure to innovate with other people's ideas."
From Inventing to Connecting
Now managing director of consulting firm 4iNNO in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a senior fellow at the Mack Center, Huston helps companies re-think their approach to innovation and open networks. "If you look at most organizations, they're focused on what is their intellectual IQ," Huston said. "What we're talking about is moving from inventing to connecting."
Spradlin of InnoCentive puts in another way: "Do you consider the lab your world or the world your lab?"
For InnoCentive, the answer is definitely the latter. The company's raison d'être is to solve problems by throwing them out to the world and seeing what comes back. Companies, foundations or groups of like-minded organizations define a problem and offer a financial reward to whoever comes up with the best solution. "Pick your problem," noted Spradlin. "You can assign an economic inducement to it, organize the masses and get them excited about solving the problem."
InnoCentive now boasts 175,000 "solvers" from more than 200 countries around the world. About 90% are individuals, 10% are organizations and 60% have masters degrees or PhDs. Last year, nearly 50% of the "challenges" posted on InnoCentive's web site generated a solution that was put to use.
Academics who polled InnoCentive's winning solvers discovered something "both startling and intuitively obvious," said Spradlin. "What they found was that typically ... the background of the solver who solved the problem" was "no less than six disciplines away" from the subject area in which the problem emerged. "What that means is, if all the Stanford PhDs in your chemistry lab could have solved the problem, they would have solved it already."
Case in point: Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, as many as 80,000 barrels of oil remain on the floor of Prince William Sound because the oil has been frozen by sub-arctic temperatures, making it difficult to pump to the surface. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute, established by Congress after the spill, ran a $20,000 challenge with InnoCentive in 2007 to try to solve the dilemma, which had perpetually stumped the world's oil experts. After three months, a construction engineer from the Midwest came up with the winning answer, surmising that vibrating the oil could keep it in a semi-fluid state, in the same way cement is kept flowing while it is poured into a form. Modify the drilling equipment, vibrate the oil and you'll be able to pump it, he suggested. It worked.
"When you're ready to move the problem to the outside world, what you really need is some fresh thinking," Spradlin said. "Organizations today aren't set up to do that very well. That's why this network innovation is such a powerful idea."
Conference speaker Mervyn Turner, senior vice president of worldwide licensing and external research at Merck, agreed that the crowd can be powerful. The pharmaceutical giant, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., cultivates dozens of strategic partnerships and joint programs with external companies worldwide every year. "You have to expand your horizons about where innovation can be found and what it means to innovate in our business," said Turner. "The idea is to celebrate the global nature of innovation, not fight it."
But to make full use of those external networks, the company has to be strong internally, Turner added. "We came to the conclusion that you [need] a really strong internal research and development capability if you are going to leverage external opportunities." Out of 6,000 potential external opportunities annually, the company chooses to purse only about 45 or 50, he stated. "We say 'no' nicely about 6,000 times a year... .You [need] a really good organization to filter through that many opportunities and leverage that capability through collaboration.... [We] continually evaluate things in a highly coordinated way."
Managing the network is even more vital in the aerospace and defense industries, where a handful of companies compete for contracts that can make or break business for decades. "Every aerospace and defense company has mastered alliance formation and alliance management," said Michael Langman, who leads the aerospace and defense practice of PCE Investment Bankers in Winter Park, Fla. In the aerospace and defense industries, external networks are often a substitute for internal innovation, Langman said. "Co-opetition is a fact of life. It just costs so much money to develop the next generation aircraft."
Companies rely on "risk-sharing partners" in dozens of countries to help meet industry demands. In one case, Raytheon won a $11.2 billion contract by assembling a team of 64 different companies across the United States.
"Managing the network is incredibly important," Langman said. "It's a winner-take-all game. If an airline buys a 707, it's going to be 20 or 30 years before it buys the next generation aircraft.... In the [defense] market, it's the same thing. If you're not part of that program, you're going to be shut out for 20 years. It's not like fashion or consumer goods."
Harnessing the power of innovation networks requires not just tight management but vision -- and sometimes a shift in company culture. That was the case for GE, which embarked on a systematic approach to building its innovation network once the company realized it was necessary to maintain a competitive edge. "Historically GE didn't partner very well," said conference speaker Patia McGrath, GE's global director of innovation & strategic connections. "We would either acquire it or build it ourselves."
GE developed a firm-wide initiative to identify key network players and map their importance to the company. In small groups, project teams brainstormed about their immediate network by dividing it into five broad categories: customers, competitors, influencers, scientific development players and suppliers. Categories were then subdivided, analyzed and drawn into maps. Once the team maps were linked together, a clear picture of the company's network began to emerge, and an action plan for leveraging that network took shape.
"The individual maps themselves are terrific, but when you combine them ... you really start to see some key data points emerging," McGrath said. Lesson learned: "If it's simple and cheap -- all it takes is people's time -- you'll get some adoption."
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Government and Innovation
Can Governments Till the Fields of Innovation?
INNOVATION — the tricky, many-step process by which ideas become products and services — has typically been seen, studied and celebrated at the micro level, as a pursuit for entrepreneurs and clever companies.
But governments are increasingly wading into the innovation game, declaring innovation agendas and appointing senior innovation officials. The impetus comes from two fronts: daunting challenges in fields like energy, the environment and health care that require collaboration between the public and private sectors; and shortcomings of traditional economic development and industrial policies.
Innovation policy, to be sure, is an emerging discipline. It lacks crisp definitions or metrics. The most explicit embrace of it has been outside the United States, though the Obama administration is taking some initial steps. Its new budget directs the Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop statistics that “uniquely measure the role of innovation” in the economy. And the government’s new chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, speaks of building “innovation platforms” to spur growth.
The rising worldwide interest in innovation policy represents the search to answer an important question: What is the appropriate government role in creating industries and jobs in today’s high-technology, global economy?
That central issue animated much of the discussion at an unusual gathering earlier this month at a lodge north of San Francisco. This invitation-only affair was organized and moderated by John Kao, a former professor at Harvard Business School and founder of the Large Scale Innovation.
A few speakers covered big-think issues like climate-altering geoengineering and water-management technologies. But the main participants were innovation-policy practitioners from nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Colombia, Finland, India, Norway and Singapore.
The meeting offered a window onto the state of innovation policy — how it is being defined, and what countries are doing. Above all, innovation policy is an attempt to bring some coordination to often disparate government initiatives in scientific research, education, business incentives, immigration and even intellectual property.
“It’s about setting an agenda and helping build a portfolio of skills that let an economy and a society move forward in smarter, faster ways,” Mr. Kao said.
Yet if the reach of innovation policy is broad, the attendees agreed, it is best done with a lighter touch than industrial policies of the past, which often focused on specific companies for government support. They used metaphors like “impresario” and “orchestra conductor” to describe government’s role. The ideal, they said, is “stewardship,” not command and control.
In Britain, a national innovation agenda is beginning to take shape with policy documents and the creation of a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. “We’re determined not to second-guess the future by trying to pick winners and losers,” said Philip Rycroft, a senior government official overseeing innovation policy. “But we do think government can create the conditions so that new industries can rise more easily.”
Finland has long taken a comprehensive approach to innovation policy, investing in areas as varied as an outstanding national education system and high-speed Internet connections for its residents. It has also produced a power in the cellphone industry, Nokia.
But Mikko Kosonen, president of the Finnish Innovation Fund, a public investment fund, says Finland now needs an “innovation policy 2.0” to climb the economic ladder to remain competitive. “We see value migrating to software and services,” he explained.
The country has the second-fastest-aging society in the world, after Japan, and its health care costs are rising rapidly. To turn that challenge into a growth engine, Finland intends to become a global leader in developing software and services for medical monitoring and preventive health services. “We think well-being services are the next big opportunity for Finland,” said Mr. Kosonen, a former senior executive at Nokia.
Other governments are also focusing on targets of potential advantage. In Australia, the government is looking to nurture industries that arise from its harsh climate and a scattered population. So research centers are working to improve strains of drought-resistant wheat and cotton for export as adaptive technologies to cope with climate change, said Terry Cutler, who recently headed a government-appointed expert panel on innovation in Australia. And Boeing last year selected Australia as the location for a Phantom Works lab for developing unmanned aircraft, he said.
“Test flights don’t bump into things,” he said. “Sparsity can be a global competitive advantage.”
In India, the government and industry have financed research into products and services that reverse the traditional pattern of innovation flowing gradually from wealthy nations to the rest of the world, said R. A. Mashelkar, chairman of the country’s National Innovation Foundation. Early evidence of the trend, he said, includes the $2,000 Nano automobile, and low-cost drugs for tuberculosis and psoriasis.
“If you make something for the rich, the poor cannot afford it,” Mr. Mashelkar said. “But if you design for the poor, everyone can afford it.”
CLEARLY, the innovation meeting in California was a gathering of enthusiasts. One view not heard was that innovation policy itself is a mistake — government meddling in decisions best left to the marketplace — as free-market purists contend.
Lars Aukrust, executive director for innovation at the Research Council of Norway, answered that criticism by comparing a nation with a large corporation. “If you are going to run a big company,” he said, “are you going to leave it all to serendipity or make some strategic choices?”
“Innovation policy is a probability game,” Mr. Aukrust added. “You can improve the odds of success.”
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill
Helsinki, Finland May 12, 2009 -- Nokia, Technopolis and Tekes today unveiled the Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill, a ground breaking initiative to recycle Nokia's unused ideas and innovations to selected Finnish ICT companies for further development and exploitation. Prepared and launched in cooperation with several Finnish cities, the initiative aims to match ideas with companies that will be able to develop them into world-class products and services.
Nokia's research and development efforts produce massive amounts of new mobile innovations. Only a fraction of the ideas and concepts finally make it in the market as part of Nokia's offering. Consequently, over the years, thousands of potentially successful innovations have been shelved.
This unique initiative to recycle innovations stems from the founding organizations' commitment to strengthen the Finnish ICT sector and generate new, internationally competitive businesses. The investments in the development projects to be launched as part of the Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill are expected to total up to 8 Million Euros, including 4.5 Million Euros of public funding.
The three-year initiative is a joint effort by Nokia, Technopolis, Tekes and several Finnish cities. Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, has granted a significant amount of the public funding. Technopolis, one of Europe's largest science and technology park chains, will coordinate the initiative and provide business development services to support and enhance the funding effort. The participating cities add to the funding with the aim of boosting the ICT sector in their regions.
"We feel it's important to support the birth and growth of Finnish companies that base their offering on technology and service innovations and aim to build internationally competitive businesses," said Mr. Esko Aho, Nokia's Executive Vice President, Corporate Relations and Responsibility. "As we will not take all of the innovations generated by our R&D into production, we are happy to give other competent companies the opportunity to turn these innovations into success stories."
"Speeding up the economy calls for a new degree of openness. We hope that the Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill sets an example that companies across other sectors will follow. The current economic climate is just right for a critical evaluation of intellectual property portfolios and the release of the innovations that are more suitable for others to exploit," continued Aho.
The innovations released by Nokia are in areas such as environmental and energy-related solutions, location based services and advertising, near field communication, mobile security, health care applications and future internet services, among others. The objective is to evaluate the thousands of available innovations and select around one hundred to be matched with a company which demonstrates the best ability to exploit them, and which is then granted funding for further development and commercialization.
"More efficient utilization of existing innovations is a novel and interesting perspective in boosting R&D and innovation," said Mr. Martti af Heurlin, Deputy Director General of Tekes."The Nokia Technopolis Innovation Mill is fully aligned with the Finnish national strategic intent to develop new knowledge intensive ventures. Ideally, the initiative will create significant volumes of new international business."
"Nokia is demonstrating exceptional corporate responsibility by releasing innovations for further development and use without compensation," said Mr. Keith Silverang, CEO of Technopolis. "In economically challenging times we need these kinds of collaborative initiatives that benefit the community as a whole. On top of the innovation and financial support, the participating companies will be offered a wide range of Technopolis business development services to help them ramp-up their businesses swiftly."
A selection committee formed by Nokia, Technopolis and Tekes representatives has already started screening and evaluating the available innovations and candidate companies interested in one or more of the ideas. Potential companies are being screened primarily from the databases of Technopolis, Tekes and the participating cities.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Who Says Innovation Belongs to the Small?
New York Times, May 24, 2009
By STEVE LOHR
FOR more than a decade, the prevailing view of innovation has been that little guys had the edge. Innovation bubbled up from the bottom, from upstarts and insurgents. Big companies didn’t innovate, and government got in the way. In the dominant innovation narrative, venture-backed start-up companies were cast as the nimble winners and large corporations as the sluggish losers.
There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 classic, "The Innovator’s Dilemma," which examined the process of disruptive change.
But a shift in thinking is under way, driven by altered circumstances. In the United States and abroad, the biggest economic and social challenges — and potential business opportunities — are problems in multifaceted fields like the environment, energy and health care that rely on complex systems.
Solutions won’t come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors.
"These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game," said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations.In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration is financing programs to generate innovation with technology in health care and energy. The government will spend billions to accelerate the adoption of electronic patient records to help improve care and curb costs, and billions more to spur the installation of so-called smart grids that use sensors and computerized meters to reduce electricity consumption.
In other developed nations, where energy costs are higher than in the United States, government and corporate projects to cut fuel use and reduce carbon emissions are further along. But the Obama administration is pushing environmental and energy conservation policy more in the direction of Europe and Japan. The change will bolster demand for more efficient and more environmentally friendly systems for managing commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways.
These systems are animated by inexpensive sensors and ever-increasing computing power but also require the skills to analyze, model and optimize complex networks, factoring in things as diverse as weather patterns and human behavior.
Big companies like General Electric and I.B.M. that employ scientists in many disciplines typically have the skills and scale to tackle such projects. Their advantage is in "being able to integrate innovations across these complex systems," said James E. Spohrer, a scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.
Technology trends also contribute to the rising role of large companies. The lone inventor will never be extinct, but W. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Palo Alto Research Center, says that as digital technology evolves, step-by-step innovations are less important than linking all the sensors, software and data centers in systems.
Today, Mr. Arthur said, the unfolding "digitization of the economy" is in some ways a modern rerun of past technology waves, from steam power to electricity. "It’s not individual inventions that matter so much, but when large bodies of technology come together and have an impact across the economy," he said. "That’s what we’re seeing now."
In computing, some technological frontiers require size and deep pockets. To be competitive in Internet search and some other Web services, which cater to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, a company must build data centers of gargantuan size, and only a handful of companies can design and afford them, led by Google and Microsoft.
"There are just a few companies in a position to do computing and process data in a way never done before," observed Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president for research.
The innovation tilt toward big companies, to be sure, is a rebalancing. There is still plenty of bottom-up innovation, including promising start-ups in the environmental and energy businesses. At the individual level, tinkering users have made significant contributions in fields as diverse as software and sporting goods.
STILL, the pendulum of thinking on innovation does seem to be swinging toward the big guys. In health care, institutions that have done best in improving the health of patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes have been larger, integrated systems like Kaiser Permanente in California, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. They have the scale and incentives to invest in things like wellness programs and electronic health records.
In a new book on health care, "The Innovator’s Prescription," Mr. Christensen and the co-authors, Dr. Jerome H. Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang, say that such large integrated systems "have the scope to create within themselves a new disruptive value network."
In an e-mail message last week, Mr. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, said that big companies do tend to resist disruptive innovation but that size need not spell failure. "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking," he wrote, "the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change."
By STEVE LOHR
FOR more than a decade, the prevailing view of innovation has been that little guys had the edge. Innovation bubbled up from the bottom, from upstarts and insurgents. Big companies didn’t innovate, and government got in the way. In the dominant innovation narrative, venture-backed start-up companies were cast as the nimble winners and large corporations as the sluggish losers.
There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 classic, "The Innovator’s Dilemma," which examined the process of disruptive change.
But a shift in thinking is under way, driven by altered circumstances. In the United States and abroad, the biggest economic and social challenges — and potential business opportunities — are problems in multifaceted fields like the environment, energy and health care that rely on complex systems.
Solutions won’t come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors.
"These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game," said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations.In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration is financing programs to generate innovation with technology in health care and energy. The government will spend billions to accelerate the adoption of electronic patient records to help improve care and curb costs, and billions more to spur the installation of so-called smart grids that use sensors and computerized meters to reduce electricity consumption.
In other developed nations, where energy costs are higher than in the United States, government and corporate projects to cut fuel use and reduce carbon emissions are further along. But the Obama administration is pushing environmental and energy conservation policy more in the direction of Europe and Japan. The change will bolster demand for more efficient and more environmentally friendly systems for managing commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways.
These systems are animated by inexpensive sensors and ever-increasing computing power but also require the skills to analyze, model and optimize complex networks, factoring in things as diverse as weather patterns and human behavior.
Big companies like General Electric and I.B.M. that employ scientists in many disciplines typically have the skills and scale to tackle such projects. Their advantage is in "being able to integrate innovations across these complex systems," said James E. Spohrer, a scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.
Technology trends also contribute to the rising role of large companies. The lone inventor will never be extinct, but W. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Palo Alto Research Center, says that as digital technology evolves, step-by-step innovations are less important than linking all the sensors, software and data centers in systems.
Today, Mr. Arthur said, the unfolding "digitization of the economy" is in some ways a modern rerun of past technology waves, from steam power to electricity. "It’s not individual inventions that matter so much, but when large bodies of technology come together and have an impact across the economy," he said. "That’s what we’re seeing now."
In computing, some technological frontiers require size and deep pockets. To be competitive in Internet search and some other Web services, which cater to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, a company must build data centers of gargantuan size, and only a handful of companies can design and afford them, led by Google and Microsoft.
"There are just a few companies in a position to do computing and process data in a way never done before," observed Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president for research.
The innovation tilt toward big companies, to be sure, is a rebalancing. There is still plenty of bottom-up innovation, including promising start-ups in the environmental and energy businesses. At the individual level, tinkering users have made significant contributions in fields as diverse as software and sporting goods.
STILL, the pendulum of thinking on innovation does seem to be swinging toward the big guys. In health care, institutions that have done best in improving the health of patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes have been larger, integrated systems like Kaiser Permanente in California, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. They have the scale and incentives to invest in things like wellness programs and electronic health records.
In a new book on health care, "The Innovator’s Prescription," Mr. Christensen and the co-authors, Dr. Jerome H. Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang, say that such large integrated systems "have the scope to create within themselves a new disruptive value network."
In an e-mail message last week, Mr. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, said that big companies do tend to resist disruptive innovation but that size need not spell failure. "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking," he wrote, "the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change."
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Types of Innovation
Stumbled across this article here which talks about different types of innovation
1. Foresight-powered vision-driven innovation
2. Modification and sustaining innovation
3. Open collaborative (industry) innovation
4. Jobs-to-be-done or user-driven innovation
5. Exploration and experimentation-based innovation
Good to acknowledge that not all innovation is the same and there are different forms of innovation. Looking for more articles on user-driven innovation.
1. Foresight-powered vision-driven innovation
2. Modification and sustaining innovation
3. Open collaborative (industry) innovation
4. Jobs-to-be-done or user-driven innovation
5. Exploration and experimentation-based innovation
Good to acknowledge that not all innovation is the same and there are different forms of innovation. Looking for more articles on user-driven innovation.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Student-Led Innovation
Stroke of Genius
Posted by: Jessie Scanlon on May 14
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/05/stroke_of_geniu.html#more
Tis the season of student design projects, as my colleague Bruce Nussbaum has pointed out. As students across the country publicly display their work, it’s a chance for potential employers to spot new talent and for potential funders to identify innovative product ideas. (For anyone who assumes student concepts are inherently blue-sky, impractical ideas, I have two words for you: Deborah Adler.) A striking example of student innovation goes on view today at Philadelphia University’s Senior Design Show: The Benson Rower, designed by Dan Tafe and Tim Poiesz, industrial design seniors at the university’s College of Design, Engineering and Commerce.
The machine is named for former New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson—an avid rower and a friend of the university’s president, Stephen Spinelli—who challenged the students last spring to create a more realistic rowing machine. Tafe and Poiesz, both mechanically inclined designers, leapt at the opportunity. To research the project, the students rode the erg machines that the school’s crew team trained on, and spent a lot of time talking to the rowers. Then the crew coach sent them out in a scull – a terrifying experience, according to Tafe, but essential for teaching them how the machine needed to feel.
Armed with their new rowing knowledge, the pair began building software models of how the machine could work, refining the models over the course of the fall semester. Based on the strength of these virtual designs, the pair got the funding to build a full-scale physical model over their winter break. It was clunky, but functional, and allowed Tafe and Poiesz to test the various cables, springs, and cylinders that allow the machine to pivot forward and backward and to roll from side to side. But the key to the Benson’s movement are the four custom-made pneumatic parts called “fluidic muscles” from the German company, Festo. These parts contract like muscles when they compress air and provide a remarkably wide range of smooth motion. (You can get a sense from this video of Festo’s AirJelly.)
So one year and $26,000 after Benson issued his challenge, Tafe and Poiesz have a sleek functional prototype, which is impressive, given that lost of companies don’t work that fast. The pair also has a business plan—thanks to a collaboration with four Philadelphia University MBAs.
Angel funders, take note.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Future of Technology-led Economic Development
04.03.09
by Anthony Townsend
in The Future Now Blog incubation, innovation, R&D, science policy
The Future of Technology-led Economic Development
The American economy has long relied upon technological innovation to drive its economy. Today,basic investment in science and technology is once again taking center stage,as a cure for both our economic and environmental ills.
The signs of this shift are everywhere. For the first time ever, a professional scientist will craft our energy policy, as Secretary Steven Chu expands investment in clean, affordable, renewable energy. An eight-year ban on the use of federal funds in embyronic stem cell research is no more. The economic stimulus package injected money into basic R&D, biomedical research facilities and essential broadband infrastructure.
Turning Science into Growth: Existing Tools
As the federal government injects billions of dollars into federal labs and research universities, the challenge for economic developers is to capture these investments in ways that promote sustainable clusters that can innovate and create value and jobs over the long-term. Already, university research managers are grappling with the challenge of where this injection of funding, which may turn out to be a one-time windfall, will leave them after it runs out in a few years.
For the last fifty years, the main strategy for turning science and technology into local economic growth were research parks and incubators. The first generation of science parks in the United States, Stanford Industrial Park in California and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, became a model that’s been copied thousands of times around the world. At their heart, these were real estate plays, using low-cost land to create a low-cost home with easy access to research universities for technology-driven firms. Over time, it’s been so successful that parks like Research Triangle now actually have higher land values than surrounding areas.
In the 1980s, the emphasis shifted from attracting corporate branch plants and offices to creating and growing new startup firms. Instead of just subsidizing land, incubators provided everything from seed funding to bookkeeping for theirtenants. The thinking was two-fold: dating companies was a zero-sum game playing regions off against each other, and growing firms locally would be more "sticky" and likely to produce secondary benefits. Essentially, this was the Silicon Valley model, seeking to create a rich regional mix of mobile labor, entrepreneurs and clusters of firms. Almost universally, incubators have been positioned around universities, in the hope of leveraging their research and talent.
Challenges to Existing Strategies
Today, however, research parks and incubators are starting to show their age as an economic development tool. Tectonic shifts in the way scientific research and technological innovation happen are leaving them behind, and pioneering new models of collaboration that will require us to rethink how we create places for these activities. The next generation of technology-based economic development strategies will need to address a dramatically different world from the one in which research parks and incubators were born and thrived.
At the International Economic Development Council Leadership Summit held this past January in Tempe, Arizona, I shared preliminary results of a fifty-year forecast on the future of technology-based economic development that the Institute for the Future is conducting for the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. As one of the early pioneers of the research park model, Research Triangle Park is now confronting the need to reinvent itself for the next fifty years, and is supporting this study as a way to provoke a strategic discussion with peers around the world about the role of place in tomorrow’s networks of innovation.
Based on interviews with experts in innovation and entrepreneurship, scientific collaboration, university research management and urban design and development, we have identified external trends that will challenge our existing models for technology-based economic development in coming years:
The Biological World. If the 20th century was defined by physics, the 21st century will be defined by biology. Biomedical clusters will grow according to a very different set of rules than IT industries did.
Global, Networked Science. Science is becoming globalized, which means that local clusters cannot exist in isolated. To succeed they need to beconnected to other innovation hubs.
The New Scientist. The lone genius is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as young scientists pioneer massively collaborative work styles. Science 2.0 will shake the institutional foundations of science, from journals to patents to university departments.
Big Science, Lightweight Innovation. As the federal government pours money into basic research, companies are stripping their R&D organizations to the bone, instead favoring lightweight and open innovation strategies. The inevitable disconnect means a need for new systems that can take raw breakthroughs and prepare them for commercialization.
New Public Agenda. Turning federal dollars into jobs fast is the order of the day. But it’s not clear if research parks and incubators can deliver at the pace demanded.
The Persistence of Place. While science is taking full advantage of the web, place is more important than ever for the creative collaborative work that can’t be virtualized. But the way young innovators use space will bemore dynamic, ad hoc and flexible.
Universities Transformed. Today’s leading research universities treat intellectual property like corporations of yesterday, while the most innovative companies are opening up and becoming more like yesterday’s universities. As universities shift roles from ivory tower to economic engine, fundamental flaws in technology transfer mechanisms will become all too clear.
Towards a New Model: Building Regional Knowledge Ecosystems
The trends described in the preceding section are global trends, which means there is little that economic developers in any one community can do to shape the speed or scope of how they play out. But there is one more important trend, the growth of regional approaches to technology-based economic development. Unlike those, the rise of technology regions is a trend that you can help shape.
We are just beginning to see the outlines of this approach, which involves many partners – research parks, large research-driven companies, startups, universities, investors and professionals – working together to develop regional knowledge ecosystems.
These networks consist of a number of elements, someformal and other informal:
· Research partnerships between universities and companies
· Social networks of entrepreneurs,professionals and amateurs
· Investor cliques and clubs
· Virtual networks and their members both inside and outside the region
Regional knowledge ecosystems are different from clusters, because they aren’t limited to a single industry, and companies aren’t necessarily the most important pieces. In a sense, for regional knowledge ecosystems, firms are the way that network expresses its ideas about what technologies ought to be commercially developed. For instance, when enough people in Silicon Valley begin experimenting with a new technology, inevitably a whole array of firms launch to develop it further. The firms emerge from the ecosystem, not the other way around.
The strength of regional knowledge ecosystems is that they can adapt faster than national systems, which are dictated by federal politics, and they can scale up successful enterprises much more effectively that individual research parks or municipalities. This is one reason why major policy think tanks in Washington – the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation – are all advocating that federal research grants be targeted to regional partnerships of federal labs, universities, companies and entrepreneurs.
What Can I Do?
The challenge of building regional knowledge ecosystems is enormous, and will not be accomplished without significant, sustained and coordinated investment and effort by every level of government over the next decade. But individual agencies and organizations can start to prepare for, and the foundations for future growth by taking steps today:
Get Foresight. Start a conversation in your community, and connect it to others in the region, about the long-term opportunities and threats to technology-based development. By thinking systematically about the future, you’ll be preparing yourself to make decisions today.
Recognize Dilemmas. In all professions, but especially economic development, challenges rarely appear as well-defined problems with simple solutions. Successful managers recognize dilemmas as challenges that need sustained attention.
MapYour Networks. The most interesting things going on in your region happen between institutions, but you probably haven’t measured them. Map the pipelines of people, ideas and money moving through. When you talk about these networks, you can be specific about what they are and what they do.
Sell Community, Not Place. The attractiveness of successful regional knowledge ecosystems like Silicon Valley is not the place, but the community and social and business networks there. Find the success stories (including the bold failures!) and connect them to your local strengths and assets.
Build for Flexibility. If anything defines success to today’s economic climate, it’s flexibility, resilience and agility. Regional partnerships provide more choices for you in designing programs and create buffers to rapid economic shifts. Instead of new buildings, think about how to make technology spaces mobile, temporary, open and accessible. Why should incubators only be for startups and not students? Be flexible, even if that means not being permanent.
Be Bold With Universities. Universities are likely to remain the hub of all successful regions, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be equal partners. As their importance in economic development grows over the nextdecade and beyond, they have the potential to place their interests above your community’s.
by Anthony Townsend
in The Future Now Blog incubation, innovation, R&D, science policy
The Future of Technology-led Economic Development
The American economy has long relied upon technological innovation to drive its economy. Today,basic investment in science and technology is once again taking center stage,as a cure for both our economic and environmental ills.
The signs of this shift are everywhere. For the first time ever, a professional scientist will craft our energy policy, as Secretary Steven Chu expands investment in clean, affordable, renewable energy. An eight-year ban on the use of federal funds in embyronic stem cell research is no more. The economic stimulus package injected money into basic R&D, biomedical research facilities and essential broadband infrastructure.
Turning Science into Growth: Existing Tools
As the federal government injects billions of dollars into federal labs and research universities, the challenge for economic developers is to capture these investments in ways that promote sustainable clusters that can innovate and create value and jobs over the long-term. Already, university research managers are grappling with the challenge of where this injection of funding, which may turn out to be a one-time windfall, will leave them after it runs out in a few years.
For the last fifty years, the main strategy for turning science and technology into local economic growth were research parks and incubators. The first generation of science parks in the United States, Stanford Industrial Park in California and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, became a model that’s been copied thousands of times around the world. At their heart, these were real estate plays, using low-cost land to create a low-cost home with easy access to research universities for technology-driven firms. Over time, it’s been so successful that parks like Research Triangle now actually have higher land values than surrounding areas.
In the 1980s, the emphasis shifted from attracting corporate branch plants and offices to creating and growing new startup firms. Instead of just subsidizing land, incubators provided everything from seed funding to bookkeeping for theirtenants. The thinking was two-fold: dating companies was a zero-sum game playing regions off against each other, and growing firms locally would be more "sticky" and likely to produce secondary benefits. Essentially, this was the Silicon Valley model, seeking to create a rich regional mix of mobile labor, entrepreneurs and clusters of firms. Almost universally, incubators have been positioned around universities, in the hope of leveraging their research and talent.
Challenges to Existing Strategies
Today, however, research parks and incubators are starting to show their age as an economic development tool. Tectonic shifts in the way scientific research and technological innovation happen are leaving them behind, and pioneering new models of collaboration that will require us to rethink how we create places for these activities. The next generation of technology-based economic development strategies will need to address a dramatically different world from the one in which research parks and incubators were born and thrived.
At the International Economic Development Council Leadership Summit held this past January in Tempe, Arizona, I shared preliminary results of a fifty-year forecast on the future of technology-based economic development that the Institute for the Future is conducting for the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. As one of the early pioneers of the research park model, Research Triangle Park is now confronting the need to reinvent itself for the next fifty years, and is supporting this study as a way to provoke a strategic discussion with peers around the world about the role of place in tomorrow’s networks of innovation.
Based on interviews with experts in innovation and entrepreneurship, scientific collaboration, university research management and urban design and development, we have identified external trends that will challenge our existing models for technology-based economic development in coming years:
The Biological World. If the 20th century was defined by physics, the 21st century will be defined by biology. Biomedical clusters will grow according to a very different set of rules than IT industries did.
Global, Networked Science. Science is becoming globalized, which means that local clusters cannot exist in isolated. To succeed they need to beconnected to other innovation hubs.
The New Scientist. The lone genius is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as young scientists pioneer massively collaborative work styles. Science 2.0 will shake the institutional foundations of science, from journals to patents to university departments.
Big Science, Lightweight Innovation. As the federal government pours money into basic research, companies are stripping their R&D organizations to the bone, instead favoring lightweight and open innovation strategies. The inevitable disconnect means a need for new systems that can take raw breakthroughs and prepare them for commercialization.
New Public Agenda. Turning federal dollars into jobs fast is the order of the day. But it’s not clear if research parks and incubators can deliver at the pace demanded.
The Persistence of Place. While science is taking full advantage of the web, place is more important than ever for the creative collaborative work that can’t be virtualized. But the way young innovators use space will bemore dynamic, ad hoc and flexible.
Universities Transformed. Today’s leading research universities treat intellectual property like corporations of yesterday, while the most innovative companies are opening up and becoming more like yesterday’s universities. As universities shift roles from ivory tower to economic engine, fundamental flaws in technology transfer mechanisms will become all too clear.
Towards a New Model: Building Regional Knowledge Ecosystems
The trends described in the preceding section are global trends, which means there is little that economic developers in any one community can do to shape the speed or scope of how they play out. But there is one more important trend, the growth of regional approaches to technology-based economic development. Unlike those, the rise of technology regions is a trend that you can help shape.
We are just beginning to see the outlines of this approach, which involves many partners – research parks, large research-driven companies, startups, universities, investors and professionals – working together to develop regional knowledge ecosystems.
These networks consist of a number of elements, someformal and other informal:
· Research partnerships between universities and companies
· Social networks of entrepreneurs,professionals and amateurs
· Investor cliques and clubs
· Virtual networks and their members both inside and outside the region
Regional knowledge ecosystems are different from clusters, because they aren’t limited to a single industry, and companies aren’t necessarily the most important pieces. In a sense, for regional knowledge ecosystems, firms are the way that network expresses its ideas about what technologies ought to be commercially developed. For instance, when enough people in Silicon Valley begin experimenting with a new technology, inevitably a whole array of firms launch to develop it further. The firms emerge from the ecosystem, not the other way around.
The strength of regional knowledge ecosystems is that they can adapt faster than national systems, which are dictated by federal politics, and they can scale up successful enterprises much more effectively that individual research parks or municipalities. This is one reason why major policy think tanks in Washington – the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation – are all advocating that federal research grants be targeted to regional partnerships of federal labs, universities, companies and entrepreneurs.
What Can I Do?
The challenge of building regional knowledge ecosystems is enormous, and will not be accomplished without significant, sustained and coordinated investment and effort by every level of government over the next decade. But individual agencies and organizations can start to prepare for, and the foundations for future growth by taking steps today:
Get Foresight. Start a conversation in your community, and connect it to others in the region, about the long-term opportunities and threats to technology-based development. By thinking systematically about the future, you’ll be preparing yourself to make decisions today.
Recognize Dilemmas. In all professions, but especially economic development, challenges rarely appear as well-defined problems with simple solutions. Successful managers recognize dilemmas as challenges that need sustained attention.
MapYour Networks. The most interesting things going on in your region happen between institutions, but you probably haven’t measured them. Map the pipelines of people, ideas and money moving through. When you talk about these networks, you can be specific about what they are and what they do.
Sell Community, Not Place. The attractiveness of successful regional knowledge ecosystems like Silicon Valley is not the place, but the community and social and business networks there. Find the success stories (including the bold failures!) and connect them to your local strengths and assets.
Build for Flexibility. If anything defines success to today’s economic climate, it’s flexibility, resilience and agility. Regional partnerships provide more choices for you in designing programs and create buffers to rapid economic shifts. Instead of new buildings, think about how to make technology spaces mobile, temporary, open and accessible. Why should incubators only be for startups and not students? Be flexible, even if that means not being permanent.
Be Bold With Universities. Universities are likely to remain the hub of all successful regions, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be equal partners. As their importance in economic development grows over the nextdecade and beyond, they have the potential to place their interests above your community’s.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
