With every day, the innovation imperative grows…

The U.S. and many of the traditional “developed” economies are in one of the toughest moments economically we have ever faced.

In the U.S., the “recovery” is not increasing jobs. We continue to fight a foreign war and have yet to address the issues of climate change. Increases in fuel prices periodically remind us of the lack of progress in U.S. efforts at reducing energy use. The urgency of these problems was amplified by the fact that much of the world’s oil supply is in the hands of non-democratic governments. Healthcare costs continue to spiral.  There continue to be crises that demonstrated the vulnerability of the food supply. Education, one of the basic ways to develop a knowledge-era workforce is underperforming in the U.S. versus most other developed countries.

There is little consensus whether we have even begun to address these challenges. Read more

Innovation is the New Strategy

In the tangible economy, strategy and strategic planning typically occur within a defined market space. To form their strategy, senior managers study opportunities in the market and align the company to take advantage of the available opportunities. The path laid out for a company is usually clear and concrete. The strategy says, “We know what we need to do and here’s how we will do it.” This is often termed “deliberate” strategy.

But the other face of strategy, emergent strategy and innovation, has been getting a lot of attention lately. Read more

Why Innovation in the Knowledge Era Will Change Everything

In my recent post about innovation ecosystems, you may have noticed two of my introductory slides about the knowledge era and innovation. I’d like to expand on that here.

This graph is taken from PBS’ The First Measured Century (a fun resource if you have never seen it). It’s a snapshot of employment trends (of men only) in the 20th century, the story of which was clearly dominated by the industrial era. Read more

Five Steps to Building a Regional Innovation Ecosystem

Our firm recently participated in the Regional Innovation & Jobs Summit hosted by the Washington Economic Development Commission. Kudos to Egils Milberg and Noreen Hobin for a very full day of content and conversation. The full day was webcast, including the intro to our session.  Also thanks to our colleague from the WA-based Ingenesist Project, Dan Robles, who took great photos of our session.

Our session came at the end of the day. After a day of talking, our role was to get people engaged and active in improving specific ecosystems for the state.  Read more

Our book Intangible Capital is now available!

Here’s the text of the press release:

A Manager’s Practical Guide to Leveraging Hidden Knowledge Intangibles to Fuel Growth, Value and Innovation in Business Read more

Program Friday on Innovation from IAFS

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

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

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:

1. 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

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

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

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