“Changing the World of Problem Solving - How Companies are using Employees, Customers and Suppliers to Innovate at Internet scale”
Summary of Key Talks
- Innovation will be decimated in the next two years, budgets will be reduced – it’s the era of return on investment.
- However the need to innovate and problem solving will stay
- Tools and capabilities needed for innovation will still be needed
- No correlation between the number of patents and success or the R&D investment and success
- Einstein – gave the same tests every year – said that these are the same questions but he is looking for new answers
- Innovation is not ideation or creativity – it’s the process that delivers value
- What is wrong with today’s world? Sub-optimal human communication and collaboration
- Now is the perfect time for a change. Ubiquitous access to internet, high bandwidth, massive storage capacity, instant access to facts and data via search tools, uptake of social software, cross-over from virtual to physical world
Key business focus areas 2009-2011:
- Cost reduction, process efficiency, doing more with less, positioning for an upturn
- We need to change the way work and change it right now
- Critical needs: no travel budgets, fewer people - more work less bandwidth, no time to delay decisions, can’t do it all yourself, major cost areas - IT and others, operating in uncertain times positioning for the upturn - it will happen, be prepared
The fundamental concepts
- Basic human needs – share, connect, be recognized, purpose
- Complex systems – two or more agents with “memory” who interact, patterns with regularity emerge
- We do this by using rules of thumb (do what everybody else does, do what you have been doing until there is a good reason to change (very senior people usually stop he company from innovating), money is good – get more money…
- Network…
- Abundance – a difference between scarcity thinking (we don’t have enough people or enough time…) and abundance thinking (take a variable that used to be scarce and make it abundant – then you get different rules)
- Co-creation – work across corporate walls (must do that – fire people who don’t do that – to show that you are serious), changing the attitude to intellectual property & not invented here, there is a pressure to cooperate coming from other companies… there will be no choice but to collaborate
- The collaborative genius – a resource that has always been there but now we can use it. The combined knowledge and insights of a diverse group of hundreds or thousands of people, when made explicit and focused around the challenge, matches or beats the wisdom of the expert of the sole genius.
What % of ideas comes in anonymously when people have the choice to be anonymous? The answer – 4%
Anonymous ideas are 3 times more likely to be implemented. Use it very rarely when they have an idea that is different or doesn’t concern their own business?
Generation X – would lead the way… they have different needs and different attitudes. The last generation of organizations is changing – the bottom generation of the pyramid is going to change the organization management system.
Challenges:
- Senior people need to realize that they are not the smartest ones around
- There is a need to establish an IT infra that works
Type of questions that rise today – start with problems – what are the problems, then ask about how we may be able to solve them….
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