Innovation is alive and well in technology. Kevin Werbach, formerly
editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, recently finished his annual
conference, Supernova.
Tony Perkins, founder of Red Herring magazine, is hosting his AlwaysOn Innovation Summit next
week. MR's SandHill Group Enterprise 2005
comes up in a couple of weeks and always attracts a number of VCs, technology
CEOs and a number of fresh ideas. As you scan the agendas, compared to a year
or two ago the discussions have evolved to facilitate "social
networking" and
As I wrote in The
Giant Crunching Sound, CIOs are crunching incumbent, utility technology
spend and freeing up dollars for innovations. And I have started a series of
posts on Innovative Business uses of Technology, as at Starbucks or at the McDonald's franchisee.
But the definition of innovation is quite different on
The technology industry is often
not focused on practical applications of their stuff, and minimizing execution
risk. Two professors, W. Chan Kim and Reneé Mauborgne, at the
B-School at Insead
in this NY Times interview summarize it pretty well "We should never see
innovation as a random process. That's not the way to do it.
The message is clear. Keep bringing out cool stuff. But cool, workable,
usable stuff is much better. Listen, then innovate. Which means Kevin's and Tony's and MR's conferences will hopefully, in future, have as many corporate CIOs and CTOs as they do VCs and tech CEOs.