Comments on: Live from Forrester - Don’t Wait to Innovate

By: Bobby Cameron

Bobby Cameron — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:05:48 +0000

Let me begin by agreeing with several of the comments in the two earlier posting. First, creating a blue-sky environment can yield very good results (although it isn’t much different from traditional R&D). And second, giving people time away from the every day work will help them be more creative.But let me add two different perspectives that are part of what James wrote about in my original talk.The first is that in our everyday work, we all come up with excellent ideas about new ways to do things — we don’t have to have bluesky time to have new ideas. But in most firms there is nothing we can do with these ideas without expending a lot of energy. So one thing IT shops are doing is using collaboration technology to help their firms find these ideas that are continuously being generated and fund the best of them so that they are transformed from ideas into business results.The second perspective is that ideas that can help our firms are also continuously being generated — without bluesky time — by our customers, suppliers, and partners. So we need to find ways to include them in our idea collection and funding cycles. Forrester calls this an Innovation Network, where key roles are played different functions and firms across a value network. These roles include inventing new ideas; transforming these inventions into new products/services, business operations and/or business models; funding the invention and transformation activities; and brokering/coordinating the collaborating functions and firms. And each of us can play one-or-more roles in these innovation networks.So IT organizations can help accelerate business innovation by brokering the innovation collaboration among functions within our firms, our technology vendors, and our customers and partners.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:11:14 +0000

Completely agree and a lot of the sessions this week focused on this cross-functional collaborative team idea and at least one speaker made an explicit point of the need to give people time away from the grind too.

By: Dave Wright

Dave Wright — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:12:31 +0000

I agree with the ‘blue sky’ approach, a unit outside of the usual grind that develops the next big thing… but is that different than traditional R&D? Whatever it is, it does need to have an info tech aspect to it, independent of the operational IT department that runs production systems. Asking people who do that everyday to be ‘innovative’ is just the same as asking any other operational area. I would say, don’t look to your standard IT department for innovation, build that cross-functional, multi-skilled innovation area with the necessary info tech skills.,
…but avoid the white tower too; rotate people in and out from operational areas. Just because they do everyday work doesn’t mean such people can’t be innovative, but they need to escape the grind as well.