Roger Smith shared an interesting post a number of years ago in Fast Company: Can Innovation be Bought?. His was an interesting angle to consider that senior management's lack of familiarity or confidence with external innovations may be a barrier to their implementation. Though I see this sort of thing all of the time.
But is it possible that the managers citing this lack of confidence are putting a new face on the old "not invented here" mentality? Many companies using "closed" models for innovation have long used it as a defense to maintaining their internal staffs and large R&D budgets. P&G and others are showing the true power of open innovation models in the market today.
So what are the other potential barriers to innovation? Strategos, Gary Hamel's consulting firm, released a survey with senior executives in 2004 on the key barriers to effective innovation. Some interesting statistics in that study regarding the top factors cited as barriers...
Short term focus/ focus on operations (63%)
Lack of time, resources or staff (52%)
Lack of systematic innovation process (33%)
Leadership expects payoff sooner than is expected (31%)
Management incentives not structured to reward innovation (31%)
Also interesting that only 15% cited "we don't know how to think out of the box" as a barrier to innovation. Now because managers think its so doesn't make it so. This survey reflects beliefs not necessarily realities - a case in point being the excuse of having inadequate resources to innovate. That is as much a reflection of folks not really doing what they should be doing.
Truth is there's a direct relationship between innovation and failure. The key killer of innovation is the lack of tolerance for failing - a necessity for innovation which directly reflects an organization's culture. Watch no risk no innovation.
Reading Harvard Business Review's blog "Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine" I am reminded of the continual challenge of quality managers and entrepreneurs : the need to balance the near and long term. In fact most, if not all, of the significant challenges facing organizations today result from the failing of leadership to convey the value of long term goals to stakeholders for fear of the near. The "Tyranny of the Ugent" as Hummel wrote.
Its easy for people to "demand" results: particularly when there is so little understanding as to how those "results" might be achieved. Sadly many believe such demands are a sign of leadership: funny as that is. This is faulty thinking that is at the center of huge failings ( think GM and the recent Wall Street debacle as examples).
The principal role of intelligent leaders is to illuminate their organization's and industries about the need to choose between the status quo and a future of greater potential. As the article, "Pleasing Wall Street is a Poor Excuse for Bad Decisions" put it: good decisions rarely have much to do with the near term. No matter if you are a public or private enterprise, for profit or not for profit, the near term result should never be driven at the cost of the big picture. Dr. Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, who wrote the article notes, among other things:
Managers who focus on maximizing short-term profits end up driving out things that generate long-term value — like R&D. They use all sorts of excuses when they make those decisions, including the need to please Wall Street and create shareholder value. But they're just excuses for poor thinking.
We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues. But we live in a technical society; technology is just fundamental to our way of life. Technical understanding should be a core competency of any company.
Watch Ed's description about how his firm, Pixar, was and is able to innovate. He is a smart man and I concur with his views. Near term results by the way are NOT at the center of their success but other more important things are. What do you think about that ?
Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance recently wrote in the NYT that companies are "Slowly" Joining the Cloud. They're joining alright, but probably more quickly than people might realize. This is particularly true when one realizes how fast startups and smaller more agile firms are jumping onto the Cloud bandwagon because it just doesn't make any sense not to. Here is a direct quote from the article.
When given a clean slate, many new companies have chosen a full embrace of the cloud model, figuring the technology industry has matured to the point were these types of services make basic business sense. For example, Arista Networks, a five-year-old company that makes networking equipment, runs its sales software with a cloud software company called NetSuite, its corporate e-mail on Google Apps, and other Web infrastructure with Amazon.com.
“It’s so much easier,” said Andreas von Bechtolsheim, the co-founder Arista and Sun Microsystems and one of earliest investors in Google and VMware. “For a new company like us, you would just never build a traditional data center anymore.”
And this is where the real story lies. You see while larger organizations might be wary of the Cloud, each day they fail to shift their IT infrastructure to the Cloud is a day the competition is gaining a leg. Ironically, the ROI for larger corporations adopting the cloud is much higher than for smaller ones from a strictly cost benefit standpoint. From a strategic point of view the ROI is even higher.
Yes companies are adopting the Cloud and for the ones doing it slowly or not doing it at all, they best reconsider their long term viability.
A recent Pew Internet research project on the Future of the Internet included a survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders to reveal perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.
The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The report addresses thought on the following issues:
“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.” Read more...
The survey results are based on a non-random online sample of 895 internet experts and other internet users, recruited via email invitation, Twitter or Facebook from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population other than the experts in this sample.
Watch Vint Cerf of Google talk about the future of the Internet below.
At “Chirp”, Twitter’s developer conference, the company unveiled promoted tweets, new mobile apps, an enhanced geo-tagging feature, a link-shortening function, live search and the sale of its archives to the Library of Congress. That is a lot to talk about at a single event, but its not surprising given what's been going on with Twitter for the past year.
Augie Ray from Forrester shared this view, "Twitter's been under a lot of pressure to be a more transparent business. Now the company has come to a point in its maturity where it's starting to operate much more as a business and less as a startup."
The announced changes are not without skeptics. Some feel the promoted tweets are intrusive and third-party app developers are concerned Twitter is trying to put them out of business. But Twitter has also been criticized for taking too long to unveil its long term plans. Developers were unclear about where they should invest their efforts.
Here is an overview of the latest changes coming to Twitter with much of it based on David Goldman’s recent CNNMoney.com article “Twitter grows up: Take a peek inside”: Thanks David. Also, watch the video about foursquare's reaction to Twitter.
Promoted tweets: By far the most significant announcement. When users search with select keywords, a tweet from a company that bought those keywords will appear at the top of the feed. Companies that currently feature ads on the site include Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500), Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) and Sony Pictures.
Though the current model is still in the experimental phase, the company is hoping to succeed by making the promotional advertising more closely reflect individual users' interests.
Ensuring Twitter remains consumer-driven and not overly corporate is key to its survival, said Bob Pearson, president of the Social Media Business Council. "The reason Twitter is successful is because it has allowed customers to find what's relevant to them," said Pearson. "If Twitter starts deciding for people what's important, that's not going to work."
Mobile apps: Twitter recently unveiled an official BlackBerry app, and bought the most popular Twitter app for Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone, called Tweetie. The company also plans to soon release an official Android app.
Twitter had previously relied on third-party developers to allow mobile users to access their Twitter accounts on their phones. Apps like Twidroid, Tweetie and UberTwitter were some of the most popular, but there were dozens of others.
Twitter nabs top app maker
It comes as little surprise that having no official mobile app was a barrier to new customers. When people searched for a Twitter app, many were confused about which one to use. While an official Twitter app hasn't made third-party developers too happy, Twitter made it clear that those developers are still hugely important. "It's not a coup against developers," said Ray of Forrester. "It's absolutely clear that Twitter is very committed to improving its platform for the development community."
Geo-tagging: Another big announcement was the unveiling of a "Places" function that would better allow users to see where tweets were coming from. Twitter will keep a database of restaurants, bars, parks, stations and other public arenas. Developers use that data to create tools like check-in, similar to other location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Though some believe this poses a direct challenge to some of the more entrenched location-based services, Twitter argues that the new functionality is more of a complementary service.
It's more likely that Twitter would use the information to provide more relevant tweets about a specific area or place than hand out virtual points, badges or rewards like Foursquare's check-in.
Link-shortening: Since Twitter only allows users to post 140-character messages, URLs can take up a large chunk of the space for tweets. Services like bit.ly have become popular ways to shorten links to post in tweets. But using those services is cumbersome because users have to go outside Twitter's world to create those links.
Lawbreakers foiled by Facebook
Like with geo-tagging and mobile apps, the announcement made some developers nervous about the viability of their link-shortening services. But the barriers to creating link-shortening were so small (just register a two-character ending) that the business model of those services was questionable anyhow.
Archives: Twitter sold the rights to its archives to the Library of Congress, making them searchable on Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). All public tweets, dating back to the very first one on March 21, 2006, are now hosted in the government's Library of Congress. Users can access the archive by selecting the "Updates" option on Google's search page. The new feature adds a timeline at the top of the results page that shows the relative volume of tweets about that topic.
Live search: Lastly, live Twitter feeds began appearing in Bing search results pages this week. Twitter feeds have already been showing up in Google's search results for awhile, which served as the first source of revenue for the young company.
