Innovation

In his book Remix, Stanford"s Lawrence Lessig argues for a new approach.

The IBM Innovation Jam was the largest-ever event to promote networked idea generation. More than 150,000 IBM employees, stakeholders and vendors participated in two three-day online events to foster innovation and help IBM bring products to market faster. Using Web sites, wikis, forums and other online tools, Jam participants generated literally hundreds of thousands of new business ideas. From those ideas, IBM focused on several major topics for the second part of the Jam and invited its employees to build on the ideas within those topics. As a result of this process, 10 distinct businesses were funded. However, it wasn’t these successes that make the Jam interesting, argue the authors; it was the difficulties that IBM faced in implementing the Jam. Given unique access to the Jam, the authors discuss the complications inherent in collaborating with so many people. In particular, it was hard to sustain individual “conversations” in the collaborative process. Rather than building on each other’s ideas, many participants & #8212; because of excitement about their own ideas & #8212; would “hijack” a thread or take it in an unintended direction. Some great ideas were left to wither on the vine. The authors discuss other attempts at large-scale collaboration, including some by Dell and Starbucks. These include the use of promotion tools to ensure that “good” ideas are seen and captured by as many eyes as possible. The pros and cons of these methods are discussed as well, and the authors provide a framework for thinking about how an organization can collaborate with its stakeholders.

Innovators are more likely to achieve commercial success if they have strong networks.

Group brainstorming excels at generating both very good and very bad ideas.

Project managers need a systematic, disciplined framework for turning uncertainty into useful learning.

Urban environments can substitute for internal resources in driving process innovation.

Recent Supreme Court rulings have changed IP protections.

To understand how breakthroughs in creativity occur, managers must understand how most collaborations work.

How can companies design products and product lines to maximize profits? Out of all the potential configurations available to them, how should they decide which ones to offer? The authors have developed a framework for balancing the costs of developing and offering a rich line of products and services against customer demand for additional choice. Their methodology helps managers make informed decisions about which features to include in the product; which variations to include in a product line; and how the offerings should evolve with technology and competition. Using examples from the music, software and media industries and citing companies including Apple, Dell, Microsoft, The New York Times, and ESPN, the authors describe five basic types of product offerings: the _ la carte offering, the specialization offering, the all-in-one offering, the basic/premium offering, and the have-it-your-way offering. By highlighting how costs influence product design, they depart from the standard product-success metrics, such as revenue and market share, which are the main focus of most of the work on product bundling. The authors note that the decision to offer a product and how it is designed generally affects both the fixed costs and the marginal costs. They argue that product architects need to expand their definition of fixed and marginal costs beyond those that they typically track and account for to cover costs across the entire supply chain. Although some of these costs may be hard to quantify, they are often too significant to ignore.