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The Innovation Managers Toolkit – Best Books

Dec-16-10 By Aminda
Is your family looking for perfect gift to get you?  Are you in need of some distraction on an upcoming holiday flight?  Maybe you’re developing your 2011 reading list. Look no further. An unscientific study of booksellers and innovation blogs has provided the following list of five bestselling innovation books. Some are new, some are classics, all are inspiring. Your own comments and suggestions are welcome.

 
Happy reading!




 



 

Nurturing Creative Environments

Dec-15-10 By Aminda
Innovators won’t want to miss this fascinating presentation on TED.com by writer and entrepreneur Steven Johnson. It’s a journey from 17th century British coffee houses to the cold war and ending at Starbucks.

Capitalizing on Internal Crowdsourcing Part 3

Dec-14-10 By Aminda
 
Previous posts have provided some simple tips to help managers start and facilitate an internally crowdsourced project. Leaders embarking on this initiative may find themselves full of nervousness and excitement as they watch the ideas flow. But once the deadline has passed and the submissions are in, what is management to do? It can be overwhelming to be faced, potentially, with hundreds of ideas and thousands of comments that need to be sorted and reviewed. Here are some tips for maximizing the results of a crowdsourced project.

Crowdsourcing Undefined

Dec-13-10 By Aminda
As the term crowdsourcing gains more attention and buzz, a phenomenon has occured. While the term becomes familiar to a larger number of people it actually starts to lose meaning as more people apply it to more activities. So now the blogosphere is full of crowdsourcing experts debating and defining the rules of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is not social media. It’s not market research. It must involve experts. The lists go on.

Open Innovation Aiding Developing Countries

Dec-10-10 By Aminda
A recent post covered an Open Innovation Summit in Africa and how modern technology is poised to help spur economic growth in African nations through communication and creativity.  Another interesting example of how open innovation is aiding African and other developing countries is the rise of Ushahidi.  Swahili for “testimony”, Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company specializing in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

Fujitsu Launches Open Innovation Service

Dec-09-10 By Aminda
Fujitsu is inviting customers, partners and academic institutions to join its worldwide network of R&D facilities to develop new solutions. Use of the service isn’t limited to Fijitsu-specific problems but is open to all. The announcement from the global provider of ICT-based business solutions says:
What this means for you will depend entirely on the needs of your business. Perhaps you have a major, ongoing business challenge but don’t have the resources to tackle it alone, perhaps you’ve solved a problem with an innovative solution and want to exploit this solution further or maybe you just want a clearer understanding of the road ahead and how changes in technological capabilities and how those capabilities are delivered might impact your business, your suppliers and partners, and your customers.

African Countries Embrace Innovation

Dec-08-10 By Aminda
Last week 200 leaders from 25 countries around the world gathered in Kenya to discuss the role of innovation in sustainable socio-economic development in African nations.
 
Attendees of the first-ever Open Innovation Africa Summit included public policy specialists, researchers, entrepreneurs, Information Communication Technology (ICT) experts and financiers. With Nokia as the event sponsor, the discussion also centered on mobile technology and its role in building an information ecosystem.
 

Cultural Shift to Openness

Dec-07-10 By Aminda
A notable study is being launched out of  Spain’s National Research Council. Titled, “The Cultural Economy of Innovation”, the three-year research project aims to study from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective the current emergence of openness as a figure of, and configurative framework for, the socio-economic structure of our contemporary. It will study the cultural economy of openness as a new sociological paradigm: What contexts and processes legitimate and enable the circulation of openness as a cultural category across organisations, institutions and communities?

The Next Generation of Openness

Dec-06-10 By Aminda
In contemplating the societal shift that the practice of openness has created over the past two decades, it’s hard not to think about what this means for the future. Two current generations, “The Millennials” (born somewhere between the late 70’s and late 90’s) and “The Net Generation” (born since then) will have been raised completely in this increasingly open, innovative society. They haven’t had to purchase anything from a camera to a car without the aid of hundreds of user reviews and opinions. They don’t know life without mass product customization from retailers from Nike to Café Press. And if they’re not designing the product themselves, it’s completely normal for them to be fully engaged in providing input into retailers’ product inventory thanks to online stores such as Threadless and ModCloth.
Here are some other examples of how life is different for these generations.

Capitalizing on Internal Crowdsourcing Part 2

Dec-05-10 By Aminda
Business leaders are making a shift in employee communication. While the traditional survey, task force and town hall meetings may still have their place, sophisticated intranet systems are offering a new way for employees to participate in making decisions on issues that affect them. Internal crowdsourcing presents an intriguing new way to efficiently bring together employees from across functions to provide input on how an employer can most effectively boost employee satisfaction levels.
 
In a previous post we discussed some tips to help start building the foundation for an effective crowdsourcing initiative. Key to getting off to a great start is timing and project selection. Once the project is underway, here are some tips for helping it run smoothly and generate the desired results.