I mentioned recently that Gartner last week released study results that indicated CIOs are feeling “pressure to accelerate innovation” and that bringing fresh ideas to market is now the third-biggest issue on the CIO’s agenda, up from fifth-biggest last year (no surprise, cost pressures are at the top of the agenda).

I dug around for awhile today on Gartner’s site looking for a way to access the full study results for free (no luck!), but I found something else that was actually a little more interesting: A January 2002 article, Innovation: Management Process of Unmanageable Events?, made this prediction (emphasis mine): “Though early in its Hype Cycle, active management of innovation will become a required competency for all enterprises during the 2002 to 2007 planning horizon.”

Hmmm. Then I got an email from Harvard Business Online telling me that they were launching a new Strategy & Innovation Newsletter (you have to scroll down a little on the page for the blurb on it). This newsletter will cover “how to build an ‘innovation engine’ in your organization, how the structures through which you fund innovation affect your chances of success, and how to best place your innovation bets.”

People familiar with HBS publications probably know that when you get one of these newsletters, it’s really just some enticingly written summaries of articles, CD-ROMS, and books, and links to the opportunity to buy them for anywhere from $3 to $125 a pop.

Not that this diminishes the value of Harvard’s offering. Just reading the summaries offers great insight into what the American business establishment thinks about innovation. And as I said earlier, innovation appears at the moment to be at or near the top of a lot of corporate to-do lists.

I just received the premier issue of the Strategy & Innovation Newsletter yet another HBOnline innovation-related pub, the Innovation & Entreneurship alert newsletter, and I’ve already bought one article and one book mentioned there (tip: most of the books are also available for less on Amazon). So sometime in the next few weeks I’ll be reporting on Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting From Technology by Henry Chesbrough, which was just published March 1. Chesbrough’s thesis: “The traditional model for innovation--which has been largely internally focused, closed off from outside ideas and technologies--is becoming obsolete. Emerging in its place is a new paradigm, 'open innovation,' which strategically leverages internal and external sources of ideas and takes them to market through multiple paths.”

In other words, companies have to feed new fuel into the little innovation engine that could--on which they're depending to get their businesses up the hill.