I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent conference in Melbourne, Australia on August 28 and 29, 2007 called InnoFuture 2007. A fabulous selection of international luminaries from the global Innovation community were keynote speakers including Tom Kelley from IDEO, Amnon Levav from SIT, and Franz Johansson, author of The Medici Effect. A truly inspiration line-up, the kind of speakers that make you want to throw in your day job and run full force in pursuit of the next start-up you can find.
Anyway, on the second day of the conference the dubious honour of being the last delegate to ask a question to the panel fell to me (joy!). I wanted to know about radical innovation, specifically about large enterprises and radical innovation. I work in a large company, and should we just sit on our hands and wait for our younger, more nimble competitors to overtake us, or should we somehow leverage disruption to keep build better solutions for our customers? Incremental innovation is fine, but it only keeps your head above water (in my humble opinion). Whereas radical innovation, or game changing, promises double digit growth and improved margins.
The responses of the panel varied from "radical innovation is overrated and in nothing more than a collection of incremental innovations" to "every company should have a portfolio of innovations that includes safe bets and high flyers". This got me thinking about disruption, innovation, radical moves and so forth. Then I read this HBR article this week : http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5636.html.
And then I decided I probably needed a blog so I had somewhere where I could post thoughts on this topic and hopefully get some insights from others in the blogosphere who also lie awake pondering innovation and dreaming of the next BIG thing for a large enterprise... be interested to know what you think.
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3 comments:
Innovate your business model and disrupt your industy. Absolutely true aaa. The point about innovation is that it is not solely the domain of technology based solutions, but can leverage product, process, service, business model and other kinds of innovation to create value.
Interesting...Richard Watson - "Aging population is more significant than Gen Y. Targetted at 55+."
Given our aging demographic spike how many of those youngsters are there anyway? Heaven knows what technology will look like by the time they run the shop. As interfaces become more intuitive the ability to be an early adopter may become less important.
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