About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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Monthly Archives
December 30, 2003
Posted by Leslie Martinich
Bob Edwards (NPR's Morning Edition) interviewed Randall Rothenberg, editor-in-chief of strategy+business this morning. Rothenberg said that he considered fellow blogger Henry Chesbrough's book Open Innovation to be the top book of the year in the field of innovation.
Congratulations, Hank!
I agree with Rothenberg's assessment, and thinking about some of the insights in Open Innovation prompts me to come up with a few insights of my own. I'll post them when I've constructed a coherent formulation!
Comments (0)
| Category: Books | Open Innovation
December 19, 2003
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
I agree with Renee’s point that innovation is a mindset and a process. As a matter of fact, I think it’s one of the reasons this field is so interesting … and challenging. It requires a holding of the tensionbetween two opposites in several ways … we have to be committed to measuring results while also understanding that innovation, by definition, means doing something new that could fail and, if it’s new enough, has an outcome that probably cannot be accurately predicted. It means being able to hold the integrity of the entire system while exploring the pieces and parts. It requires high touch as much as high tech and the engagement of the imagination and possibility thinking as much as it does the practical, analytical evaluation of concepts.
Even thinking about innovation is an exercise in opposites: Innovation is new. It requires new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and measuring and monitoring progress. Innovation is old. Humans, and arguably other species also, have been doing it for millions of years. The interesting thing about innovation is it is seldom "either/or” and almost always "both/and."
So it is new, while at the same time, it is old. It is imaginative and intuitive while also practical and analytical. It is science and art, mindset and process.
Dontcha just love it!? Actually that’s part of the dichotomy also … some of us love it … and it makes some of us crazy! Perhaps it’s a hologram of the world at large and that rich complexity draws us and repels all in the same moment.
Comments (0)
| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Chuck Frey of the Innovation Tools blog has joined in the discussion of whether innovation is a process or a religion, or both. He tossed a good question into the conversation (emphasis mine):
The former approach [innovation as religion] is typified by Apple Computer, which seems to worship product innovation above all else (at the expense of bottom-line margins), while the latter approach [innovation as process] is typified by Dell Computer, which has elevated business process innovation to almost an art form. It's very hard, however, to find companies that embrace both kinds of thinking about innovation. 3M, perhaps? Disney?
Anybody have any ideas?
While you're thinking, I want to point out that the "religion of innovation" does not only mean product innovation, nor does the "process of innovation" only mean business process innovation. The distinction I had in mind (and what I think John meant when he originally said this) was more along the lines of what Joyce clarified: innovation as a mindset (that would be the religion) vs. innovation as a predictable, measurable process. A company could approach business processes with an innovative-religion mindset, and could take an innovation-process approach to new products.
That said, to answer Chuck's question, I think Southwest Airlines is a good example of a company that approaches innovation as both a religion and a process. The company culture has been steeped in innovation from its inception as a map on a cocktail napkin. Southwest has also applied a process approach to its innovations in business processes and new products (in this case, think of new routes and new cities served as "new products").
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| Category: Innovation, General
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
John Wolpert shared this quote at the ROI Conference:
"As a student of innovation for some twenty odd years, I still find it amazing just how hard innovation continues to be."
-- John Seely Brown
I figure if JSB thinks this stuff is hard, the rest of us have a right to be overwhelmed at times.
Comments (0)
| Category: Conferences
December 17, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Sorry for the recent quiet...a weeklong business trip with bad connectivity plus some difficult personal issues plus the holidays equals blog silence. Catch-up mode starts now!
First -- Here's an interesting story from Technology Review via Corante’s Venture Capital news section:
The problem in the tech sector is not a lack of innovation -- it is the inability to commercialize innovative new ideas, according to Kenan Sahin, a successful entrepreneur and alumnus of MIT and Bell Labs. In other words, "The flow of new innovations has remained strong and unabated over the past few years. It's the mechanisms for implementing them that have eroded." The article analyzes the so-called 'innovation backlog,' warning that "vast numbers of potentially important advances [are] being warehoused or shelved." As long as the "innovation-to-implementation flow is out of sync, the consequences for our work force, our wages, and our standard of living are serious. Unless we act decisively, it could be very difficult and costly to restart and resynchronize the flow."
My take -- sounds to me like this is a very strong argument for the kind of open innovation espoused by IdeaFlow bloggers Henry Chesbrough of Haas School of Business' Center for Technology Strategy and Management and John Wolpert of IBM.
My experiences this fall at two innovation conferences and one PDMA-sponsored new product development conference have indicated that not everyone involved in corporate innovation is signed on to this agenda, however. In general, I've found that the people who go to conferences organized around a theme of "innovation" seem more open to this idea than people who go to conferences organized around a theme of "new product development."
This could be due to differences in seniority -- more top-level managers at the innovation conferences and more product-level managers and R&D folks at the new product conferences. But that shouldn't matter, if you believe as I do that the push for innovation needs to be company-wide.
John Wolpert made a very good point at the recent Return On Innovation conference: There seem to be two camps regarding innovation -- those who view it as something of a religion, a state of mind, a way of thinking that can't really be measured very well, and those who view it as a process that can be predicted, managed, and measured in order to result in new business models, business processes and products that will increase growth. The truly successful innovators, I believe, will be those who can embrace both of these kinds of thinking about innovation.
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| Category: Conferences | Open Innovation | Technology
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