Catherine Shinners

Thinking About Innovation

Last week SD Forum hosted a second of their innovation series, Foundations of Innovation II.  Judy Estrin, CEO of PacketDesign and former CTO of Cisco gave the keynote.  There's been a lot of press and hype about innovation lately, but Judy gave a thoughtful analysis and commentary on the topic.  Estrin is beginning to write a book on entreprenuerialism and innovation.

Silicon Valley is considered a hotbed of innovation, but Estrin is concerned that the climate of high tech innovation has cooled from a peak era of the 1960s to the 1990s when there were major breakthroughs in computing (CPUs), PCs, networking and the basic Web.   According to Estrin that era of innovation was supported by a greater alignment of capital investment via research funding, venture and capital markets, and a greater acceptability of risk by entrepreneurs, VCs and larger companies.

The futurist, Paul Saffo, sees this transition from basic innovation in high technology as more fundamental, that the age of electronics is past,  and that we are now in an emerging 30 year cycle of innovation in biology.  Certain breakthroughs in basic research and science, such as chemisty, physics and electronics, were followed, according to Saffo by a 30-year dominance in industry.

Saffo's notion may dovetail with Estrin's classification of innovation.  Breakthrough innovation is creating  something completely new, as the transitor, or credit card.   Incremental innovation is a product manager's stock in trade - enhancements to current products or process, as in debit cards. The last type of Estrin's innovation types seems to be the one permeating the "new media" these days: orthoganol innovation; using a combination of existing innovations in a completely new way, as in the IPod and ITunes market.    It's the breakthrough and orthogonal innovations that create new markets.  Incremental innovation advances or extends markets.

Innovation, according to Estrin, is a process, and an interative one, not one "a-ha" moment.   It's about thinking differently, questioning, experimenting, learning and adapting.  The only quality I would add is that it is a collaborative process.

Office 2.0 Conference: Corner Conversations

On the stage at Office 2.0 you could find, as Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures said on the last panel, "plenty of how, but not a lot of what."   One of the early panels remarked, "it's all about collaboration," and the presenters had a lot to say about the tools of collaboration, but not the impact and process. 

In one of the side conversations with Andrew McAfee, I happened to overhear Toby Moore's comments on the use of wiki tools in an innovation project he's facilitating, and I grabbed him by the elbow; I had to hear more.

Toby is a visiting professor with the newly launched Institute of Creative Technologies, at De Montfort University, Leicester.  DMU, it turns out, is a leading university in the creative industries, (digital arts, computer science, drama, literature), and the commercial output of those creative talents are also a major market sector in the UK economy.   Toby is also head of an ideas company, Sleepy Dog, and has developed game technology for Sony.

The IOCT was created to facilitate and accelerate innovation potential across the individual disciplines at DMU, and Toby, along with Howard Rheingold, and Steve Grand OBE, are visiting faculty this year.

As Toby tell it, the use of wiki tools is one way to facilitate both collaboration among members of the unique academic disciplines, and to encourage a broader consideration of new ideas.

First, as a general rule, the IOCT wiki is to be a place of praise culture.  Most people steeped in a discipline naturally often rely on behavior of analysis and critique, but here, the practice is to support the range of contributions.

Other ways to encourage the flow of ideas and conversation, is what Toby refers to as the 20/20 rule.   Wiki members are encouraged to look at 20 ideas posted on the site and then write twenty words (not an exhaustive analysis).   In this way, a broader swatch of participants are adding a little bit to a lot of ideas, and as they "spread their footprint, they find commonality with more people."  This also builds an increasing sense of sociability and trust, and allows participants to take more risks with new ideas.

The other practice is the "3,4,5" notion.   Most people focus on their top two ideas as try to refine them as their best ideas.   At the IOCT, people  are encouraged to disseminate their third, fourth and fifth ideas, things that they, themselves, might deem "lower tier,"   or "half formed," but by putting it out to the larger IOCT community, someone might be able to help advance the idea, to see where the idea might flourish in a broader context.

In this way, as Toby says, it's "open source ideas," and while the technical open source community's mantra is "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,".   In the realm of innovation and ideas, I pointed out that it's more like, "with enough eyeballs, more ideas have legs," and are possibly richer in their potential.

 

As Peter Rip said on the VC panel at the final hour of the conference, "context is the missing piece of enterprise software."  And at next year's Office 2.0 conference, more emphasis on the context of collaboration would offer a good balance to the discussion of the tools and technologies.  Or as I said to Rod Boothby at the close of the proceedings..."where are the human beings?"