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.