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Innovation Important to Global CEO’s

Jun-08-11 By Aminda
The unsurprising results from a global CEO survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers indicate that innovation, along with increasing their existing business, now outstrips all other means of potential expansion, including moving into new markets, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures and other alliances. Nearly 80 percent of CEOs surveyed believe innovation will generate ‘significant’ new revenue and cost reduction opportunities over the next three years.

Taking Time to Preserve the Past

Jun-07-11 By Aminda
The world today moves and changes so quickly that sometimes it’s a luxury to get the opportunity to reflect back on the past. Realizing that it’s the past that shapes the future, a number of organizations around the globe are enlisting on-line networks to preserve history. Their goals and their methodology are diverse but all are committed to ensuring that we don’t take our past for granted.
The People of the Past
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) along with Ancestry.com has created the World Memory Project, which utilizes a crowd-sourced website to restore names and stories to those whose identities were nearly silenced during the Holocaust. The site allows people to search vital documents from World War II and add stories, context and personal histories in order to complete the full picture of this time period.

Submissions Open for Management Innovation Prize

Jun-06-11 By Aminda
Submissions are open for the M-Prize in Management Innovation competition to encourage management innovation and organizational change. Created by the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) and co-sponsored this year for the first time by Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company, the contest offers three challenges, presented in three phases, designed to surface the best practices and thinking around 21st century technology, strategy, and organizations. Winners will be selected by a panel of leaders in business and education.

Study Analyzes Social vs. Economic Incentives in Crowdsourced Work

Jun-04-11 By Aminda
A paper titled "Designing Incentives for Inexpert Human Raters," discusses an experiment which analyzed 14 different incentive structures for encouraging high-quality work from Mechanical Turk-style systems. Researchers found that workers perform most accurately when the task design credibly links payoffs to a worker’s ability to think about the answers that their peers are likely to provide.
Roughly 2,000 individuals participated in the study, resulting in over 100 subjects in each of the experimental conditions. Workers answered five questions which had been drawn from a study for which validated data existed

Microsoft First Member of Litigation Avoidance Program

Jun-02-11 By Aminda
Patent research provider Article One Partners, has announced a new Litigation Avoidance program, which utilizes crowdsourcing to challenge and invalidate specious software patents sometimes used in expensive lawsuits brought by so-called patent trolls.                               
Microsoft has been announced as the charter member of the paid service, which identifies pre-litigation patents and distributes requests to Article One’s global online community of 1 million scientists and technologists to research the validity of the patents. Article One uses that collected research, where appropriate, to file reexamination requests with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Drug Companies Changing to Stay Competitive

Jun-01-11 By Aminda
Whether or not the world’s major drug companies know the name Henry Chesbrough or know of his grim assessment of the future of drug development, they seem to be responding and changing the way they do R&D.
Facing looming patent expirations, Pfizer, is establishing a new network of academic centers designed to refill Pfizer’s pipeline with company-academic teams that will work side-by-side to speed drug discovery efforts. The first two centers are U.S. based and Pfizer has plans to expand to Europe and Asia next year.

Join Jeff Howe and the World’s Largest Book Club

May-31-11 By Aminda
The book publishing industry, just like the news industry, has struggled to find an identity over the past couple decades with large box stores taking over small corner bookstores only to soon be replaced by online retailers. Now, just as it looked like the pastime of reading was experiencing a complete decline, technologies and innovations look to revive and transform the industry. ebook readers are making books cool again, independent publishing is making it irresistibly affordable and new formats— falling somewhere between a short book or a long magazine article— offer something for everyone.

UK Study of Intellectual Property and Growth

May-30-11 By Aminda
A UK Study of Intellectual Property and Growth resulted in a recently published report making recommendations for improving the UK’s copyright system. The report is the result of an intensive 6 month independent review commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron on the basis of a ministerial concern that in a digital age the country’s intellectual property framework was not keeping pace with new innovation and growth models. The results substanciated this theory, finding that the UK’s intellectual property framework, especially with regard to copyright, is falling behind what is needed. The report made 10 key recommendations, which are summed up here.
1. Evidence. Government should ensure that development of the IP System is driven as far as possible by objective evidence.

The Impact of Business on Education

May-28-11 By Aminda
Social media and public crowdsourcing of ideas has become the norm for tasks from deciding if you’re ready to have children, to making decisions on business strategies. We're not only used to asking input from others but also to being able to give our opinion on just about anything. Given this shift, it’s interesting to ask what the impact will be on future generations and the education system.

Recruiting the Next Generation of Innovators

May-27-11 By Aminda
For graduating American university students, the good news is that many companies plan to hire more entry-level workers this year than last. Unfortunately, while the job market is improving, many grads are still finding it tough to get work. Creativity, connections and hard work are imperative to standing out from the competition.
Businesses are also recognizing that recruiting the best from the next generation requires a different approach. Ketchum, a global communications firm, created a unique open innovation community for college students that has proven to not only be a valuable service for their clients but a valuable recruiting tool as well.