Shortly after taking office, President Obama’s CIO (Vivek Kundra) formed a “tigre” team (technology, innovation, and government reform) in order to implement IT reform within the US government The US IT budget representing an astounding $80B, representing over 2,000 data centers. 

This recent article by the Sydney Morning Herald highlights Mr. Kundra’s focus on IT transparency including an online IT dashboard with performance rankings. The result of his effort was a shift towards consolidation (to increase datacenter capacity) and virtualization (to leverage cloud-based provisioning speed and consumption based costing).

While Mr. Kundra has since moved on (he joined Salesforce.com after a brief stint at Harvard), his innovative IT dashboard lives on as an open source offering.  More importantly, he highlighted the importance and value of IT transparency.

Corporate IT department can learn a lot form Mr. Kundra’s TIGRE initiative. The most important lesson and most difficult being practices of transparency. If your IT organization is trying to figure out how to drive more value, innovation can help, but innovation without transparency will give you only average results. IT leaders can produce breakthrough value by building innovation behaviors at every level. This requires transparency between employee and their managers, and transparency between IT and the business units.

Apple vs. Google… Creativity vs. Science… Convergence and Collaboration 

If you’re curious where the world is heading and what is top of mind for global leaders, there’s few better vantage points than from Davos and the World Economic Forum. 

World-changing innovation is also discussed at Davos. 

This year, there was an interesting discussion about innovation by consultant John Kao, as reported by the New York Times (click here for the original article).

The innovation discussion and article focused on the differing strategies of Apple and Google. 

Mr. Kao compared Google and Apple’s approach to innovation, pointing out it “highlights the ‘archetypical tension in the creative process.’”  

The article notes, “The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down. When asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. ‘It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’” 

Regarding Google, the article reasons: “Google speaks to the power of data-driven decision-making, and of online experimentation and networked communication.  The same Internet-era tools enable crowd-sourced collaboration as well as the rapid testing of product ideas — the essence of the lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere…”

Importantly, the article quoted Errol B. Arkilic, program director at the National Science Foundation, on the important use of “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification.”   

While not expressly mentioning it, the article highlighted the value in collaboration. In fact, regarding the importance of collaboration, the article referenced how some of Apple’s top ideas have been sourced through collaboration. 

Consider these article highlights about Apple: 

“Apple product designs may not be determined by traditional market research, focus groups or online experiments. But its top leaders, recruited by Mr. Jobs, are tireless seekers in an information-gathering network on subjects ranging from microchip technology to popular culture. “ 

The article further notes that Apple’s early computing design included a point & click mouse and graphical, on-screen icons that came from a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto labs; and Siri, a more recent acquisition and now key iPhone feature, originated in the Pentagon’s DARPA. 

Wow! What innovation nuggets. 

Apple leaders tirelessly pursue convergences of market data and trends - and collaboration with other entities has been critical to Apple’s success.  It would be interesting to apply our Innovation Styles diagnostic across Apple leadership to see if they have a mix of complementary styles. 

Interestingly, we at The DeSai Group have been focused on two fundamental drivers to innovation:  1.) convergence of market issues/trends; 2.) collaboration.   And it looks like these strategies have been responsible for some of the world’s top innovations. 

That’s good to know, especially today as I am currently leading several innovation leadership sessions with a major India-based, multi-national conglomerate in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai, India. 

I’m guiding the innovation discussion by summarizing global trend convergences and identifying how specific collaborations can make a major impact in the world.   And we’re specifically addressing key concerns voiced at the World Economic Forum. 

What do you think about Apple vs. Google’s approach to innovation? 

-Jatin

Cathal Garvey’s home laboratory in Cork, Ireland, is filled with makeshift equipment. His incubator for bacteria is an old Styrofoam shipping box with a heating mat and thermometer that he has modified into a thermostat. He uses a pressure cooker to sterilize instead of an autoclave. Some instruments are fashioned from coffee cans.

One of the movement’s rallying points is Genspace, a nonprofit laboratory in Brooklyn that is open to members of the public, regardless of scientific background. Since it opened in 2010, on the seventh floor of an old bank building, similar labs have sprouted in Boston and San Francisco.

Genspace has roughly a dozen members, and each pays $100 a month to cover rent and what laboratory people call consumables: chemical agents, disposable tubes and other paraphernalia that need to be replaced regularly.

Read more

Source: New York Times

RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give names to everything (even things that did not need them), came up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.

Robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da Vinci Surgical System, a device that scales down a surgeon’s hand movements in order to allow him to perform operations using tiny incisions. That leads to less tissue damage, and thus a quicker recovery for patients. Thousands of da Vincis have been made, and they are reckoned to be used in over 200,000 operations a year around the world, most commonly hysterectomies and prostate removals.

Read more

Source: The Economist

Google's YouTube plans to invest $100 million in professional production companies producing YouTube-only content beginning this month. Premiering Monday, Young Hollywood takes place on the ninth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. The show's creators will produce programming for viewing on mobile devices, computers and Internet-connected TVs.

YouTube VP of Global Content Robert Kyncl announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the first wave of YouTube channels from artists like CSI creator Anthony Zuiker and Deepak Chopra.

Within a few years, online video will contribute 90% to all online traffic; and by 2020, the Web will give birth to 75% of all media channels, Kyncl said, calling the Web a vehicle for distribution.

Read more 

Source: MediaPost News - Online Media Daily

Twenty years ago, Zhongguancun was but farming fields and small houses, far from the city center of Beijing. The ‘cun’ at the end of Zhongguancun literally means “village.” As with much else in China, the change has come lightening fast.

High-tech companies in China (credit: TechCrunch)

Today, Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent to Silicon Valley. It’s host to electronics super malls, research centers, publicly-listed tech giants, and hundreds of startups. During my walk to work between twenty-story office towers, it’s hard to imagine this land was farmed but one short generation ago.

Here are three reasons why Zhongguancun (or the larger Haidian district) has grown into China’s top tech hub:

1. Academic Hub
2. Government and Media
3. A Virtuous Cycle

Read more

Source: TechCrunch

The McKinsey Institute published the results of their fifth annual survey on how organizations use social technologies, it surveyed 4,200 executives to understand the developments and progress throughout the years and benefits of these social technology applications. They are being deployed for the purpose of process enhancements and operations. Secondly they’re being used to find new growth opportunities. Surprisingly, a large percentage of organizations did not maintain the benefits of using social technologies that they had achieved earlier.

Companies use social technologies to drive innovation and knowledge-sharing, but often do not sustain the momentum, according to a McKinsey survey. "Management needs to facilitate bottom-up ownership in order to let the organization innovate on processes with the multitude of available social technologies," Gianluigi Cuccureddu writes.

Read more

Source: InnovationManagement.se (Sweden)

Attention smartphone users: the recent launch of the first two satellites for Europe’s Galileo global navigation satellite system (GNSS) could make things a lot more interesting in about four years.

Galileo global navigation satellite system (credit: ESA)

Galileo will deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to one meter range, compared to 10 meters for GPS, the European Space Agency (ESA) states, and it plans to give non-European users access.

Meanwhile, Apple’s new iPhone 4S has a chip that will be able to access Glonass (the Russian version of GPS), Engadget reports. Other manufacturers, including Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments, will also support Glonass — and Galileo as soon as it is operational — with new chipsets and software able to receive and integrate all three main GNSS systems.

And just to make it more interesting, China is developing of its own GPS equivalent, named Compass.

What do we mean by “The Box”? Is this outside or inside of us? If you think about it The Box is who we are today – made up of deep beliefs and assumptions from our life’s experiences so far. Everyone’s boxes are different and unique. We tend to associate with and hire people who have a box similar to ours: not a good practice if one wants to expand and grow. 

To help you discover your own box, here are some questions for you to think about.

1. Where is this Box? What material is it made up of? How tall is it? How big is it to others?
2. Who can come in your box? Who cannot?
3. Does everyone have a box?
4. When one is born, did the box exist? How does it get created?
5. What is the role of parents in creating the box for their children?
6. What is the role of a manager in crafting a box for new hires, especially new graduates?

The Box is one’s “context” or “point of view” about what is right and what is wrong. 

Most of us are happiest when we are at the center of the box. We don’t like to be pushed to the corner of the box. We get scared. What does that mean? 

The center of the box is where the left brain is most happy. It is where everyone around expects us to be in order to do “the work” assigned to us. Most of us work from the center of the box on a daily basis – routine patterns, nothing new, boring, etc. 

The best innovators are keenly self-aware of their own box and its characteristics. They also have trained themselves to go to the edge of the box on daily basis. They also “jump-out of the box” often to find new ideas, see what others don’t see, and are not fearful. They are “lost” (deeply loving what they do) when they are away from the center of the box. They in fact hate being stuck in the center of the box. Most people look at them as “different.” They become innovators because of their out of the box qualities along with an ability to navigate organizational systems and overcome deeply rooted orthodoxies. They can be considered corporate missionaries. 

Finally, the very best, the world-class innovation leaders are fully aware of their box and also the boxes of others around them. They also love to get outside the box. So what is the difference between the best and the world-class? The world-class innovators also know how to pull others outside of their respective boxes as well. 

Organizations must learn to create a pipeline of such leaders to deal with the complex and fast changing world. 

What is your organization doing to institutionalize out of the box environment and reward out of the box thinking?

Left Brain and Right Brain can help create balance between Performance and Innovation. 

Just like every individual, every organization, business unit, and team has a left brain and right brain. Unfortunately most organizations have not developed an eco-system to allow both to co-exist visibly as a daily practice. That is akin to hiring an employee but only using 50% of their full capacity. 

What causes this to occur? 

One answer lies in the natural “S-curve” growth cycle in every business. When organizations grow large they gravitate toward process and execution, and gravitate away from their entrepreneurial roots. Focusing on execution forces them to rely on process, structure, and measurement. This ultimately creates amnesia; where they forget how they got started and how innovative they were at the early stage as a start-up. This amnesia grows into full-fledged sickness. This sickness shows up as risk-averse organizational culture focused only on short-term success and bottom line thinking as the driving force for all activities at every level. I call this culture “left-brain” centric. 

So what to do? 

Understand both brains and encourage both.

Left brain is about management, science, structure, analytics, predictability, certainty, and guarantee.  Left brain protects you from failure and keeps you in the center of “the box”. If we don’t do this work well, the organization can die quickly. We need process and financial predictability.

The problem is we overuse the left brain and don’t develop organizational right brain behavior.  Left brain helps protect organizational norms and orthodoxies (beliefs, standards). There are many examples of how corporate beliefs limit innovation.  Why didn’t Sony invent the iPhone? Why didn’t Kodak invent digital photography? 

Right brain is about leadership, art, creativity, passion, beliefs, fun, and learning through experimentation. Right brain gives you access to what is possible because it loves freedom and exploration. 

Right brain does not require planning and operates mostly in the moment. Most people are happiest when their right brain is fully engaged (hobbies, passion, family events, holidays, etc.)  

Most cultures value only left brain and most people leave their right brain at home when they enter the workplace.  Managers should learn to “tap into” the organizational right brain to help drive innovation and activate employee passion to create.  More engaged and energetic employees ultimately lead to improved revenue and profits (as evidenced by employee engagement surveys by Gallop and Hewitt). 

What are you doing to activate the right brain of your organization?