Program Friday on Innovation from IAFS
March 1, 2010 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
I’ll be hosting a discussion on Friday at noon EST on Innovation: Hot Policy and Practice Issues. Guests will be Ken Jarboe of the Athena Alliance and Judith Giordan of Steel City Re. This is part of the on-going Mission: Intangible series for the Intangible Asset Finance Society. The call is free. Recording available later for a fee. More info and registration.
The Answer to Your Questions Is Probably Inside Your Company
January 8, 2010 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
There was a great story in the NY Times awhile back about the new co-CEO at Motorola, Sanjay Jha, Strategy of New Chief at Motorola Appears Poised to Pay Off. It explained:
Looking back, Mr. Jha said that Motorola was in worse shape than he knew when he took the job, largely because of a dysfunctional management culture that missed the shift in consumer preferences from phones intended primarily for talking to those that do nearly everything a computer can do. The company’s engineering talent, which had once developed great phones, remained intact, he said.
As luck would have it, one of those engineers, Rick Osterloh, grabbed Mr. Jha just as he stepped off the stage at that first town meeting in August 2008. Read more
Five Reasons to Focus on Optimizing Intangibles in 2010
December 16, 2009 by Mary Adams · 6 Comments
I am more and more convinced that 2010 will be the year of intangibles, intangible assets, intangible capital, intellectual capital, knowledge assets or whatever else you want to call them. There are five big reasons why:
- Intangibles already get the majority of your investment dollars. Estimates are that at least 60% of the money organizations invest in their future productive capacity is in intangibles. If you are already spending money, isn’t time you created a way to track intangibles performance? Read more
Huge Opportunities for Innovation — Corporate intangible capital is ready and waiting
November 22, 2009 by Mary Adams · 4 Comments
Although the economic recovery is slowly building up steam, there is still a lot of work to do. For one thing, we need the economic recovery to turn into a jobs recovery. To do that, we need to start doing things differently. Solve new problems. In a word, innovate.That’s why I am thankful that Ken Jarboe just revisited Business Week’s piece entitled Obama’s 25 Ways to Rebuild America. When I read this list, I get excited because it shows how many opportunities we have to fundamentally innovate and rebuild our economy: Read more
McKinsey’s New Innovation Metric
September 9, 2009 by Mary Adams · 2 Comments
I have faulted McKinsey before for suggesting simplistic metrics that can provide interesting historical data but be very dangerous as guides to management. So I read their latest suggestion on tracking innovation performance score with some skepticism.They don’t really explain how they calculate it but the sense of it is that they look at how much a company outperforms its competition over a five to seven year period and assume that this compound annual growth rate is a measure of a firm’s innovation performance. Here are a few thoughts. Read more
You Can Grow Like Google (start with a knowledge factory)
July 12, 2009 by Mary Adams · 4 Comments
In a few recent presentations that I have posted on the internet, I have included some slides that show the method that we have been using to model the knowledge side of our clients’ businesses using Lego’s. A number of people have written to me asking for a narrated version so I finally made the leap to YouTube.
You can view the You Can Grow Like Google video at YouTube and download the companion white paper Want to Grow Like Google.
Let me know if this is helpful to you. Share your own knowledge factory models. And, if it is helpful, please share this with colleagues whose companies need a boost to power out of this recession. I hope to hear some feedback on this one!
Is Sysco an Example for Sustainability?
May 22, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
One of my favorite magazines for recreational reading is Saveur. It is a food magazine that features everyday food around the world. It’s like being invited into a private home on a trip around the world. No pretension, just real people and real food. And there is an incredible variety of real people around the world so it gets pretty interesting.But I don’t read it for business information. So I was surprised to see a recent column (although I probably shouldn’t have been) on Sysco entitled Greener Giant. It asked the question, “Can an emblem of industrialized food also stand for sustainability?
Most of us think of Sysco as the giant distribution company that delivers mass quantities of food to institutional kitchens. And that’s what they do. But it was very interesting to see how they see sustainability relating to their business. Read more
Innovation in Health Care
May 15, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
There is no one solution to the challenges that face us in any industry. Health care is definitely a great case in point. This month’s Fast Company shares four stories worth telling about The Doctor of the Future.
These include:
- Dr. Jay Parkinson’s use of all the latest on line tools in the Myco Platform to be a more connected and more effective physician
- The International College of Robotic Surgery that uses on-line content to train doctors in these very effective techniques
- SimulConsult a “crowd-sourcing tool for identifying neurological disorders”
- InTouch Health, a remote access system for specialist MD’s to get fast care to patients in remote or under-served areas
Most of these are situations where existing intellectual capital is better deployed thorugh new tools. The challenge for every businessperson in the healthcare and every other industry is to find new ways to leverage what we know.
America’s Continuing Failure to Innovate
May 13, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
The very first blog post of my career was at Denise Caruso’s Hybrid Vigor that I called The Intangible Imperitive. The post was inspired by an article about how Brazil’s farmers were out-innovating those in the U.S. I felt frustrated that we were not stepping up to global competition. Since then, I have blogged about similar concerns for the automotive industry. I had the same feeling when I read a story yesterday in the New York Times entitled China Far Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants:
By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, and by building many identical power plants at the same time, China has cut costs dramatically through economies of scale. It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States. Read more
Innovation = Unbounded Ideation + Bounded Process
March 24, 2009 by Mary Adams · Leave a Comment
One the huge challenges of an innovation strategy is that is is multi-dimensional. I always focus on innovation as both a process (structural capital) and innovation as an ecosystem (the entire intellectual capital system).In a post in his Innovate on Purpose blog, Jeffry Phillips has an interesting take here on this kind of dynamic Read more
