2 Comments

1. Jeff says:

   May 3, 2007 at 10:12 am

   On the iinnovate podcast http://iinnovate.blogspot.com/ (Stanford) a couple of months ago there was a very interesting chat with Geoffrey Moore and he had some parallel comments to yours. Paraphrasing:
   “Innovation itself is neutral–the goal is to be more effective in economic competition. To do that, YOUR innovation must lead to a competitive advantage.” More or less the summary of your podcast.
   He went on to discuss core versus context innovation–core innovation is the vector that will strategically differentiate your products–and on this vector you want to be “proprietary”. The “context” side is the non-differentiating part of your business (supply chain, etc) and you want this “for free”. He went on to talk about open source in this context. This is what makes services innovation so difficult because you can easily borrow best practices from your consulting vendors pretty quickly (and they are forced to move on to develop new practices at great cost).
   Also, I disagree a bit with Geoffrey on the proprietary nature of innovation because I think he is still talking about discrete product development rather than a media/delivery/content model. I would argue that creating a community (i.e. Make magazine, open source, Flickr) can get you faster uptake (and better feedback). We will have a good example very soon when Apple releases the iPhone with no significant support for a developer community.
   My second comment is to echo the issues about innovating for the non-users. My specific issue is with industry analysts. I find that customers are using them less and less (in the enterprise market segments) but vendors are using them more and more. My organization has just launched a new marketing campaign that seems to be targeted at analysts rather than customers. The result is that the customer benefits as presented are pretty vague–most customers want very specific benefits.
2. David Wallace says:

   May 3, 2007 at 2:49 pm

   Innovation failures (new Coke, Iridium phones) may be hard to count because someone, somewhere, will always find a way to create a silver lining.
   My favorite example came from the Fort Wayne (IN) emergency services director who shut down the city’s airport fearing a terrorist attack in 2005 when a vial of harmless glycerin leaked from a piece of luggage. Instead of apologizing for the embarrassment and inconveniences, he said his organization would be better prepared next time. Talk about making lemonade!
   At an innovation metrics event run by Imaginatik, an executive used the “diet analogy” to ask whether, when and how you know if innovation works. It’s possible that you’re dissatisfied with a diet if the bathroom scale is your only indicator. But you may feel better, run faster, look slimmer after your fat has turned to muscle thanks to diet and workouts.
   The moral: Use more than a single measure for success and failure but don’t (innovate/consult/choose other euphemism) on my leg then tell me it’s raining.