From HBS Working Knowledge, I found the very interesting When Bad Ideas Won’t Die by Isabelle Royer (see also a Computerworld Q&A with Royer on this subject). Royer researched what surely is the dark side of innovation: Why companies can’t kill projects and products that are doomed to fail.

This concept is vastly important in creativity and innovation. As much as we talk about developing corporate environments for creativity and innovation where no criticism is allowed to snuff out promising, tender young ideas, there does need to be some point in the innovation process where some kind of reality testing is allowed to take place. If innovation is the fuel in your company’s growth engine, innovation gone bad can derail the whole train before it ever gets to the hill, much less up it.

Royer describes how “collective belief” can set in, as the project’s champion spreads the success gospel throughout the organization until “faith blinds you to increasingly negative feedback from the lab, from vendors and partners, from customers,” a phenomenon many in the tech world recognize as drinking the Koolaid.

The dangers: Problems won’t be seen as signs of failure, or even as issues that should be resolved before moving on to the next stage of development; misplaced enthusiasm can lead to an unrealistically tight development timetable; and lenient review procedures.

Some antidotes to collective belief: Don’t let teams self-select; include skeptics among the true believers on a team; replace team members with “fresh eyes” as development proceeds; and bring in an “exit champion” directly involved in the project to counteract the force of the project champion. And though Royer doesn’t say this, the presence of an exit champion can also free the project champion to give the effort his or her total creative devotion without having to worry about objectivity.

This exit champion needs to be fearless and determined to be objective, but also needs corporate support. Says Royer: “Just as companies celebrate and recount stories of the great successes of product champions, they could perhaps identify and spread tales of courageous exit champions who saved their organizations million of dollars.”

Please note that Royer specifically says that the exit champion isn’t a project-killer or a naysayer. He or she is simply charged with objectivity.

We can all think of projects that could (or could have) used an exit champion. In fact, we’ve got a great example in front of us right now: The war in Iraq. I don’t know much about war strategy, but it’s hard to believe there’s not something like an exit champion in Central Command offering an objective look at the various potential maneuvers and at the war as a whole. We’ll probably never see or hear this person, but I hope he or she exists.

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.

IBM announced its new “innovation on demand” services last fall. Today Dean Takahashi writes (emphasis mine): “Rivals dismiss the effort as a way for IBM to use researchers to close deals with customers who will eventually be overwhelmed by armies of overpriced consultants. But Robert Morris, director of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose says, '...More often than not, the contact changes the nature of the research being done so it's more on target.' … Guy Lohman, a database expert and Almaden lab researcher, said 'The interesting part is we get to see problems first hand. It's a great way to drive where our next generation of software should be going.' ''

In a story about Amazon’s bid for a Web-ad patent to cover a type of ad offering the company has never made available to its customers, I found this quote of interest from Internet analyst David Halprin (emphasis mine): "Now when people come up with new ideas, they're more apt to try to create a patent and wait for things to evolve. It may be something that they want to do or (that they want to) sell later." Hmmm.

Peer into the future of tomorrow’s workday technologies via ZDNet.

Thanks Hylton! for sending me the link to this terrific profile (from NYT mag; reg reqd) of inventor Woody Norris, whose HyperSonic Sound (HSS) technology won Popular Science’s grand prize for best new invention of 2002:

His first invention was a medical product, simply because he was approached by a few friends who wanted to form a company but had nothing to sell -- and the man with the most money to invest was a doctor. So Norris went and bought a flashlight at Radio Shack (evidently his spiritual home), then picked up a piezoelectric crystal and fine-tuned his knowledge of the Doppler effect until he puzzled out a way to detect clots in blood vessels. This entire process took a Friday night and most of a Saturday. ''It was called 'Transcutaneous Doppler,' '' he recalls wistfully -- before adding, as a throwaway, ''Eventually, it evolved into the sonogram.''

Cory Doctorow's been blogging from the PC Forum, including these interesting notes from the Social Software panel. I've been following social software development because it offers so much promise for creating the kinds of environments that enable creativity.

From Cory's notes, here's Meg Hourihan on the accidental way in which Blogger was created:

When Pyra started, there were only two of us in my living room, but we still couldn't communicate, because we would have ideas at different times, and email just went into a black hole. So we came up with a weblog, and we used to communicate internally, and we called it "Stuff." Quickly it became special. Our next employees became embedded in that space. We got a feeling that others would like it, and we thought we could release it as a product to get people interested in our real software, a project-management app.

Ross Mayfield of SocialText on wikis:

Wikis enable happy accidents through forward links -- if we use the same term to describe "presentation" the wiki will merge our pages about "presentations," creating emergent vocabularies. The best experts rise organically to the top through lightweight collaboration.

A terrific demonstration on the creative value of social software can be seen on SocialText's site, where there's a PC Forum wiki and a trackback metablog that compiles all the blog posts that have been made on the PC Forum.

….I’ve gotten myself into with work overload…I’ll quick-hit much of the stuff I’ve missed until I get back on track. Here’s one batch:

• Mind-Mapping Resource Center: Links to articles, tutorials, and more than a dozen different software applications for the visual brainstorming technique of mind-mapping, on Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools site.
• You probably saw the article last January in which Julia Keller asked Is PowerPoint the devil? and answered her own question with a resounding Yes! Now creativity consultant Joyce Wycoff says “ PowerPoint doesn't kill creativity; people kill creativity.”
• Here’s a quick explanation of how to use prompts (also called “points of departure) to aid creativity at work.
• What to do when the boss steals your idea, from Business 2.0.
• Bringing fresh ideas to the market faster than competitors is increasingly important, say more than 600 CIOs who responded to Gartner's annual EXP study. Faster innovation is now the third biggest issue on the agenda, up from fifth last year.

I apologize for being quiet lately, but I have to confess I’ve been both sulking because I couldn’t go to SXSW Interactive, and busy actually doing the work- and kid-related stuff that kept me from going to Austin. By today I had gotten caught up with other stuff and came out of my sulk to take a blog tour of the SXSW proceedings.

You don’t have to go far on this tour: Heath Row is down in Austin blogging his little fingers to the bone, offering very nearly one-stop shopping for those wanting to connect with SXSW happenings. Heath, you deserve a whole six-pack of Shiner!

Here are links to some of the specific panels he’s blogged, and a quote or two of interest from each:

Paul Bausch, Anil Dash, Justin Hall, Ben Trott, and Mena Trott, Beyond the Blog - Bausch: “We need a way to get a sense of how ideas evolve and how memes move throughout communities. Before Web logs put that structure into the Web, there was no shared time. Web logs provide that.”

Mikela Tarlow and Philip Tarlow, Future Trends And The Big Picture - Mikela: “Virtually enhanced real-life events are going to be more and more where the artistry is going to exist. … In an information dense world the unrepeatable present moment will become a highly valued event.”

Karl Deckard, Cory Doctorow, Maitresse Elise, and Jim Munroe, Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter - Jim Munroe: “When I write a science-fiction novel, I feel free. You get to write about robots, for Christ's sake. There's a fundamental fun element that draws me to it. I have a lot more freedom in terms of what I can do.”

Carrie Bickner, Ben Brown, and Kevin Smokler, Book Culture Brown: “Greg Knauss …did a 40 Web log tour. Every day he'd do a virtual reading and write a piece for all these different sites. He got a lot of press because nobody had ever done that before. It was a tremendous promotional vehicle, and Greg could stay at home with his kids. Smokler: That’s a more creative promotional effort than 90% of New York publishers have thought of."

Heather Champ, Jason Nolan, Katharine Parrish, and Ana Sisnett, Conceptual Firewalls - Sisnett: "If you're considering using Web logs as part of training programs or as a community-building tool, you need to consider whether the people you're serving are interested in using the tools. How do people stay in touch with each other? Is it the ideal form of communications?"

Larry Lessig keynote - “Our laws enable the most powerful in a way that will stifle and kill diverse, decentralized creativity.”

Doug Lenat, Understanding Common Sense - “Intelligence requires immense knowledge about the world. Why does natural-language understanding require huge amounts of common sense? … Intelligence -- even just keeping up your end of a conversation well -- requires having lots of knowledge and applying it fast.”

Josh Benton, Dan Gillmore, Matt Haughey, J.D. Lasica, and Evan Smith, Old vs New Journalism - J.D. Lasica: “If you're doing something more than blogging transcripts, adding commentary or any kind of synthesis, you're engaged in a random act of journalism.”

Brad Fitzpatrick, Scott Heiferman, and James Hong, Trends in How The Internet Connects People - Heiferman: “There's a difference in writing something and writing something for all the world to see so connections can happen.”

Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks - Lebkowsky: "If we're only going to have a democracy of clueful intelligent people who communicate well online, that's not going to work.”

David Weinberger keynote - “What does the Web remind us of? It reminds us of our selves, and of ourselves at our best.”

Richard Florida keynote - Kirk Watson, former mayor of Austin and unsuccessful 2002 candidate for Texas Attorney General (disclaimer: I voted for Watson), introducing Richard Florida: “In Austin, Texas, we debate creativity all the time.” Richard Florida: “Every single human being is creative. That's what the book says. Creativity is the great leveler. It defies race, gender, ethnicity, appearance, and sexual orientation. You can't hand creativity down to your children no matter how rich you are. If you suck at playing guitar, you suck.”

Other SXSW bloggers:

- Jon Lebkowsky, Weblogsky, on Cliff Figallo: Putting Conversations to Work -"Attention is energy. When people pay attention, the person who is getting the attention is getting energy.” Lebkowsky on Conceptual Firewalls; on David Weinberger's keynote.

- David Weinberger, JOHO blog, on Effective Social Networks panel notes and comments from others.

- A BoingBoing roundup of much of the same coverage I’ve pointed to (just in case I missed something).

- Adam Greenfield, v-2 Organisation, calls Larry Lessig "preternatural master of the Powerpoint presentation" and describes "text-messaging and the space of presence. People dangling their feet in the pool at the San Jose would message friends far afield, get messages back, and despite the minimal content of the messages themselves it began to feel very much as if the population at poolside was augmented by these unseen and welcome presences."

-J.D. Lasica, J.D.'s New Media Musings, has SXSW notes posted.

Maybe I’m backward or culturally deprived, but I can’t say I ever had much exposure to the lovely little word ‘heh’ until I started reading blogs. And I haven’t used it much since I started blogging, either – it seems somehow sacred. Maybe I feel like I haven’t written anything much that was heh-worthy....!

What does ‘heh’ mean? To me, 'heh' is a three-letter commentary on the state of the world: It says 'This is funny'; 'hey, look at this'; 'isn’t the world a weird place'; 'here’s a sign of the times'. ‘Heh’ doesn’t seem to connote sidesplitting hilarity, but more of a quiet, in-joke kind of humor. ‘Heh’ is a gentle elbow-nudge, an aside with a wink, a kinder, gentler, non-sarcastic sort of irony. Heh.

As I write this, Dr Pepper’s Raging Cow blog marketing project is number one with a bullet on Blogdex, so chances are you’ve already read about it somewhere.

If not, excellent background can be found here, where Filchyboy/Chronotope masterfully deconstructs the entire campaign, including an interview with Todd Copilevitz, the marketer who created the campaign. (Small-world aside: 10 years ago Copilevitz and I were both working at The Dallas Morning News. We knew each other, but not well.)

It seems to me that it’s not really the use of the blog format for marketing that’s upsetting everyone. The real sin of the Raging Cow blog is that they’re buying link influence (even though the price – t-shirts and other merchandise – is relatively small).

The collective personality of the blogosphere lends itself to bottom-up marketing - when bloggers start a conversation about a product because they like it, and that conversation leads to more publicity and higher sales for a product. Top-down marketing, when corporations orchestrate a conversation in the blogosphere about their product, is no real conversation at all. Hence, for many bloggers, that's evil. Bottom-up = good. Top-down = bad.

What I find most fascinating is that the rage over Raging Cow has resulted in at least one (that I know of) creative solution. Some bloggers do want to be able to make money from blogging at some point. Some want to be able to refer to products in their blogs if they like them – even if they received the product for free. So Tristan Louis has introduced The Full Disclosure XML tag, which would allow a blogger to add necessary disclosure information about product placements.

Louis has added his idea to LazyWeb, which you may know (although I didn’t, before this!) as a site where people post problems on everything from tile matching to audio RSS readers, and other people come along and post possible solutions.

Any other ideas coming out of this raging controversy? Tell me.

My Corante neighbor Arnold Kling says “We need multiple metaphors” to describe IP, because of the breadth of the concept. He offers some good ones in this TCS essay.

Would be a good name for a blog, don't you think?! (Thanks to Hylton!)

The newest Corante blog launched last week, so I'm a little late with my congrats, but no less sincere for the lateness. Richard Gayle will be writing about the ways in which collaboration and openness create knowledge in the sciences:

Science is so often portrayed as a set of dull principles yet many of the scientists I know are anything but dull. They are passionate, curious and open to novelty. In short, creative human beings, and I want to make sure that those aspects come through.

According to the New York Times (reg reqd), screenwriters are using software more and more these days, not only to help them format their scripts but also to help them create:

[Roger S.H. Schulman, who shared an Oscar nomination a year ago for Shrek] suggests that there are times when resorting to software like IdeaFisher, "this helpful little guy who has a million ideas and suggestions," can be a bit like having another writer in the room.

Schulman uses a range of software, including Inspiration, Power Structure, ScriptWright (an MS Word template), and IdeaFisher. The story also mentions Dramatica, Final Draft, and Movie Magic Screenwriter.

If you’re curious about such things, Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools website has an entire section devoted to reviews and news about creativity and innovation software.

We don't currently use any idea-generation software here, but I can see the benefits. One of the reasons I've posted so little the last week wasn't because of the ice storm, but because we are in the middle of a project and I've been working/playing in the gigantic mass of ideas, idea fragments and idea possibilities - the "stuff" that is the outcome of our consumer ideation projects. West Wing writer Kevin Falls said in the NYT article, "the most important software for writers is still what's between the ears," and that's what I use to get creative, usable ideas from that pile of words.

Software might help organize the words some - and we're looking into that now - but it's hard for me to imagine there's software that could help much! We use software and the Internet to communicate with our creative panel, but often I seem to do better processing the ideas with a stack of print-outs and an array of colored highlighters!