Innovation - in Silicon and Ohio Valley

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 leverage China efficiencies, but overall the mood is  fairly upbeat about new ideas, even in the face of talk of "industry consolidation".

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 Main Street than it is in Silicon Valley.

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. Silicon Valley has a huge failure ratio. There should be a systematic, repeatable pattern that maximizes opportunities while minimizing the risks. "

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.