Innovating To Win

Innovation Brewing

Looking at the blog of Invention Machine’s CEO Mark Atkins, I am reminded that June is Innovation Month in New England.  There will be many fun and interesting innovation happenings throughout the region.  One of these is InnoBeer (short for Innovation Beer Summit).  When I organized the first InnoBeer event, I had no idea that it would become so popular.  Yet there have now been InnoBeer events in several locations in both the U.S. and Europe.

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn to make beer.  I joined a group of friends and together we brewed six varieties of beer.  There are innovation lessons to be learned from most things.  Here are some innovation lessons I took away from my beer making debut.

Science
There is science behind making beer.  Understanding what is happening in the process helps you achieve the desired results.  This is true for every domain in which I see people working in the trenches of innovation.  No matter what you are doing, there is a body of knowledge that precedes your efforts.  If you don’t have good access to this knowledge, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel.  High performance innovation organizations understand the need to knowledge enable their innovation workers by providing them with the best, purposeful knowledge research and delivery systems.

Team
During our little beer making party, we brewed 6 varieties of beer in one evening (90 minute IPA, Summer Ale, Belgian Blonde, Vanilla Honey Porter, Oatmeal Stout, and Scottish Ale).  Getting it all done required teamwork and collaboration.  In business innovation practice this pressure to achieve high-value innovation outcomes with limited resources and time is de rigueur.   To achieve results requires the same type of committed and connected teamwork for innovation workers.  Companies seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their innovation workforce must employ innovation frameworks that connect people to one another when they need based on what they know.

Tools
Making our beer, we have at our disposal the right equipment to make the job easy and efficient: steam controlled boiling vats, wort cooling filters, automatic bottle sanitizers, etc.  Listening to others in our group recount the horror stories of making beer in their kitchens without these tools reminded me of what I see all too often walking into companies that have not begun to deploy state of the art innovation platform technology.  Innovation workers struggle to make sense of problems and find the fit between problem states and solution spaces.  Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right tools and skills for innovation success.  Sure, you can start a fire rubbing sticks together; but why not give your teams modern torches and set them loose to burn up the competition.

Experience
Having the brew master watching over us made a huge difference.  He was able to tell us in advance what to pay attention to and how to ensure the quality of the final product we were producing.  Preserving, tapping into, and leveraging grey beard knowledge is a huge problem for many companies.  Make sure you have systems in place to harvest and disseminate this knowledge to empower your entire innovation workforce and enable the generational transference of your corporate tribal wisdom.

Immersion
My beer making experience was great.  One of the best aspects of the experience was its immersive nature.  While we were engaged in brewing or bottling, that was the focus of our activity.  There were no interruptions, no need to divert our attention and focus, no co-opting of resources by some other urgency.  Of course, we all have to deal with the realities of the real world when we are working in the trenches of innovation.  But, managers need to find the way to carve out protected time for innovation workers to focus on what’s important, not merely what seems urgent.  You have to willing to invest in your people, giving them the time to master and apply innovation best practices to their innovation tasks.  You will find this is an investment that will pay big dividends by both delivering the benefits of accelerated innovation and product delivery, but also greater per worker productivity.

The next InnoBeer tweetup is schedule for Tuesday, June 15th.  If you are in Boston, stop on by and join in the innovation conversation.  You can get details and sign up (free) here.

Field Notes – April 2010

It’s good to have a bit of time back in the office to catch up on things.  In April, I was travelling for over half of the month; visiting with innovation teams at companies in France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and South Korea kept me away.  Meanwhile, we have some great innovation projects in our pipeline that I’m particularly anxious to dig into.

Yet, visiting with innovation practitioners from around the globe is a terrific way to gain insights and take a pulse on what is going on in the broader world of innovation.  Here are a few of my takeaways from my April travels.

Innovation momentum is growing.
As the global economic climate stabilizes, more and more companies are starting to look beyond the survival mode mentality that took hold in the fall of ’08.  These companies see that they now need to refuel their revenue generation engines with new and differentiated offerings to the market.  New products for existing and new audiences are viewed as key to building market share and driving top line growth.  Companies need innovation now, and they understand with the ever increasing pace of market change, they need continuous innovation.  There is broad consensus that innovation capability is one of the key competencies that will distinguish winners from losers in the years ahead.

Many companies are still just arriving to the innovation party.
The number of companies that have taken a serious look at innovation and taken concrete steps to build innovation as a value driving core competence is still small.  Most companies are just beginning to question whether there is a better way than relying on serendipity for their innovation.  This means that there is a big opportunity for companies to take the high ground and drive their organization forward through innovation while the competition is still trying to figure out which end is up.

Companies are acting on, not just thinking about, innovation deployment.
Those companies that have internalized the importance and high-value of repeatable innovation best practices are not sitting on their hands.  They are seriously pushing awareness, innovation skills development, and IT infrastructure to support their innovation mandates.  These companies also realize that while grassroots acceptance is important, a corporate innovation initiative will never deliver to its potential if it isn’t backed by a top-down mandate tied back to corporate objectives.  Innovation is about change.  Developing a sustainable innovation culture requires a change in the corporate psyche and hence requires serious attention and management focus.

Innovation delivers value to companies that take it seriously.
Innovation takes many forms, but it always creates value.  Everywhere I went, I heard stories of how using repeatable innovation methods had overcome challenges, expedited time to market, and raised the value of key projects within organizations.  At Samsung for example, I was shown a new model of refrigerator.  The manager showing me this refrigerator pointed out a key feature in the product that was blocked by a competitor’s patent.  Using the innovation skills they have mastered over the years, Samsung was able to create an alternative non-infringing design that allowed them to find freedom to operate and with it a fast path to market.

So, what does all this mean to you?  The bottom line is that now is the time to get moving when it comes to getting your innovation engine firing on all cylinders.  The companies that invest in innovation today will emerge as the leaders with new revenue driving products in the future and create new market differentiation.  While those companies that choose to wait on innovation will be left behind as the laggards in the new economy, never regaining the luster they lost in this most recent recession.

Which will you be: leader or laggard?

Finding Sense ( and Dollars) In The White Space

Spring is a time of change and transition, just right for reading a new book on innovation.  “Seizing The White Space” by Mark W. Johnson is the latest volume to come from Innosight, and seems to be right the right thing for spring reading.  It’s a highly readable and very quick to get through if your mind has already made the transition to summer; yet, it is has enough chewy content for those of us who are still want to curl up hearthside with an interesting book.

Johnson puts forth what he calls the four box business model to capture the dynamic tension between three key aspects of the value system underlying a business.  Yes, that’s right – four boxes to capture three key aspects.  These are:

Customer Value Proposition – What is it that customer derives value from when your offering is selected.  Of course, given the Christensen heritage of Innosight it comes as no surprise that Johnson returns to the job to be done jargon to talk about the value proposition.  Personally, I was just happy to see the value-prop called simply and directly what it is.  (Okay, I’m just weary of some authors who feel compelled to try and coin new jargon for what is already a well understood concept.)

Profit Formula – The strategy for monetization of the Customer Value Proposition.

Key Resources and Process – The things, people, and processes that are needed to deliver the Customer Value Proposition.  Johnson separates the concepts of resources and process in his representation.  Hence, the four boxes to represent three key aspects.

While these concepts may seem pretty basic, there are far too many companies that seem to forget that this system, and more importantly, the need to harmonize and balance these elements of the system exist.  Ignoring some of Clayton Christensen’s best advice (be patient on revenues, but impatient about profit) many companies attempting to claim a white space opportunity as their territory burn through loads of capital to try and drive the revenue engine only to dilute the share value so much that no one can hope to extract value from the venture.

Throughout “Seizing The White Space,”  Johnson uses many examples and comparisons of how these various elements interact in both successful and failed business models.  The examples help to bring to life what could otherwise be a very dry and boring domain of study.  You will need to filter some of the discussion through your analysis.  Some of the issues around the cases studies are open to interpretation.

After addressing the questions of when and how to look at business model innovation, Johnson reminds us of how existing demands and practice of a going concern can block the organizations ability to define and implement a new system to attack a white space opportunity.

I enjoyed “Seizing The White Space” and certainly recommend it as a worthwhile read for innovation practitioners or managers responsible for considering, planning for, or executing on new business platform opportunities.

This is the fifth stop on a virtual book tour for “Seizing The White Space.”  Earlier stops on the tour can be visited at:

Working Knowledge – Andrea Meyer’s excellent blog

Blogging Innovation – A multi-author innovation blog maintained by Braden Kelley

Innovate on Purpose – Jeffrey Phillips thoughtful blog on innovation strategy and practice

FastForward Blog – An Enterprise 2.0 blog where Jim McGee review the book 
 
Yet to come on the virtual book tour is Dan Keldsen’s interview with Mark Johnson which will appear on the  Information Architected blog.

Innovation Without Representation

As I was pulling out of the Government Center Garage the other night, I noticed an interesting license plate on the car ahead of me.  The Washington, D.C. plate sported the phrase, “Taxation Without Representation.”  This is a phrase that has a great deal of meaning in the United States.  It was an early call to action in revolutionary times, and it is still called upon from time to time to remind us of one of the fundamental values upon which this country was founded.

At first, seeing that license plate made me think of the current political climate we are experiencing, and I couldn’t help but think of the brazen irony of some of our legislators driving around with this declaration affixed to their automobiles.  But, then my thoughts drifted back to the world of innovation and the wisdom this expression holds for innovation practitioner and leaders.

How many times have you heard a colleague complain that management won’t listen to their great idea?  How many times have you seen a product launched that was greeted with a great collective yawn by the targeted customers?  How is that these think headed managers and customers don’t get it?  Or, does the fault lie in the failure of the innovator to listen to will of the people?

Anyone who is an innovation professional must recognize that they serve constituencies too.  The goal of innovation is to deliver value to customers.  More broadly, innovation must deliver value to all constituencies involved in the value creation and delivery chain.  This value must be perceived as significantly greater than the tax we extract from our constituencies.  Yes, that’s right.  By engaging in the pursuit of innovation, we are taxing our constituencies.

For management, the tax come in the form of funding of initiatives, resource costs, assumption of risks, and opportunity cost.  These can be very high hurdles for the innovator to get over.  If you try to run this gauntlet armed only with an idea, you will most like find yourself in a very uncomfortable position as you topple over one of the many hurdles.  Approach management with a full complement of data addressing these concerns and showing the value generation for the company and you are much more likely to find executive sponsorship.

For customers, the tax is the need to change to what they are used to doing.  This need to change is often accompanied by an uplift in price as we try to monetize the value of the innovation.  Needless to say, these taxes can be an impediment to the adoption of innovation.  Yet, there are countless times that I have seen companies forging ahead with new products, services, or business paradigms without really understanding what the people who vote with their pocketbooks need and want.

It’s not hard to see how these examples can be extended to all the groups involved in and with our efforts to innovate.  Setting aside our own belief in the brilliance of our concepts, it is not difficult to understand how we are destined to fail in our attempts to open new possibilities through our innovations if we don’t first understand all the constituencies that we touch along the way.  Understanding these constraints should be among our first tasks in planning for innovation.

To reframe that famous statement of James Otis, innovation without representation is tyranny.

Innovation - Getting It and Getting It Done

As with most things, when it comes to innovation there is a huge difference between getting it and getting it done.  Everyone wants to get it; but the rewards of innovation are only enjoyed by those who get it done.

There is a great confluence of pressures today that are raising both awareness and understanding of need to drive product and service development through innovation.  Executives are talking about innovation more than ever before.  When they talk, they convey an understanding of innovation’s value, and they certainly look ready to act.  But the gulf between words and action is as wide as ever.

Recently, I saw a bit of interview footage in which Martina Navratilova was talking about her dominance of women’s tennis in the ‘80s.  She remarked that the big secret to her success was that she was the only woman player at the time who was putting the level of effort into training that she was doing.  What a powerful statement that is.  One that is also relevant to the business of innovation.

It is not enough to get innovation; you have to get it done.  Whether you are in management or you are an innovation practitioner, you need to be doing the things every day that drive innovation success.  Stop worrying about if you are talking about innovation enough, and focus instead on innovation execution.  How do you know if you are on the road to closing the gap between innovation thought and action?  Here are some simple question to ask yourself about your contribution to making repeatable, high-value innovation a reality for your company.

For practitioners:

• Are you integrating innovation practices into your daily routine?
• Are you using technology to harness internal & external knowledge resources to expand your box?
• Are you collaborating with all constituencies in your innovation environment?
• Are you consistently creating value through your innovation efforts?
• Are you effectively communicating the ROI on innovation to management?

For management:

• Are you actively engaged in supporting and promoting innovation in the enterprise?
• Are you making the needed investments in people and tools to build innovation competence?
• Are you ensuring the alignment of corporate objectives and innovation strategy?
• Recognizing and rewarding innovation contributors?
• Encouraging people to practice innovation techniques in all they do, every day?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, you are on your way.  If not, you need to ask one more vital question: “Why am I not committed to driving corporate value through innovation?”

Close the gulf between desire and outcome.  Turn you innovation dream into action.

Boyd on Linking Strategy and Innovation

I read a nice post on Drew Boyd’s blog, Innovation in Practice, discussion the idea of linking innovation with company strategy.  In it, Drew discusses two models of interaction between company strategy and innovation:

Strategy informs innovation – in this model the company defines a strategy, then innovation efforts are pursued to find way to deliver on and enhance the value of the strategy;

Innovation informs strategy – in this model, innovation activity first generates scads of potential concepts which are subsequently mapped to a strategic evaluation model to select the innovation path that builds the optimal strategy.

Whichever approach you select, it is critical that your corporate strategy and innovation efforts are aligned.  Without alignment, you have no chance of achieving the level of execution required for successful innovation delivery.

However, I would like to highlight a third model: Innovation and Strategy inform each other.  In other words, you are only looking at half of the picture if the dialogue between strategy and innovation is a one way exchange. 

If you are responsible for strategy, you don’t want to lament “Gee, if I’d only known that was an option I would have set that as a strategic goal.”  As an innovation practitioner, you hate saying “Gee, if I had only known that was important, I could have helped achieve that objective.”

Optimal value is achieved through an on-going dialogue between these two drivers of corporate value.

Looking For The Innovation Silver Lining In 2010

As we begin 2010, I think it’s a great time to mention “The Silver Lining” by Scott D. Anthony.  The book which bills itself as “An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times,” touches on some very important themes that we should all keep in the forefront of our thinking if we are to maximize the potential of the innovation opportunity that are ahead.

This is a nicely written and very readable book in which Anthony reviews key innovation concepts that are always important, but especially so as companies find themselves challenged by a difficult environment.  Although some signs suggest improvements in the general business climate, we aren’t out of the woods yet, and the moves made by companies during transitional periods like this are particularly important.  So, the lessons of “The Silver Lining” are even more on point now than they were six or nine months ago.

Some of the key concepts addressed by Anthony include:

Focus – Or as Anthony puts it, pruning prudently.  He discussed how to identify what’s not going to be a winner and also how to identify where to invest in strategic experiments.

Using innovation to improve margin – This is a major area as companies need to continue to find ways to deliver bottom line performance in top line challenged times.  The techniques of simple tuning that yield incremental saving are no longer adequate.  For today’s needs, you need innovations that will drive new cost profiles.

Improving innovation productivity – Let’s face it.  Most organizations have a pretty bleak track record when it comes to innovation.  The generally poor state of innovation productivity is captured in the commonly cited statistic that it requires 3000 ideas to generate a single successful product launch.  Companies can and should do much better than this.  Anthony explores some strategies to begin moving down a path of higher innovation productivity.  He also makes a case for making innovation repeatable & sustainable in the enterprise.  This is essential for an organization to reach its potential.

Sharing the load – The need to open up the innovation process and integrate all of a company’s innovation constituencies into the process is presented.

Emerging markets – There is no arguing the dominance of emerging economies when we consider growth opportunities.  But, products developed for established primary economies don’t align with the new math of global economics.  Companies need must redefine products to fit a different economic paradigm.

My only complaint is Scott’s annoying attempt to coin the phrase “The Great Disruption” to describe the challenging business climate.  It really has no relevance in the discussion and has no real tie back to the terminology of disruptive innovation, so it just leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

But, that is a minor discordant note in a book that otherwise keeps true to an important melody.  I highly recommend the “The Silver Lining.”

Finding New Market Opportunities Through Systematic Innovation

It has been more than a year since the bottom fell out of the financial markets, and companies around the globe are still struggle to figure out which way is up.  There are some early signs of hope, but the future is still is still masked by the murky cloud of uncertainty.  Companies must find ways to not just survive but thrive.  A return to growth is demanded by shareholders who feel the pain of depressed share prices.  But where to turn for growth remains the question of the day.

I have recently heard more companies than ever asking about ways to improve the health and effectiveness of their innovation programs.  This is a direct consequence of global market trends.  These companies understand that growth will not come from doing more of the same.  The engine of growth is change through innovation.

One common question I hear is: “How can we find new markets more effectively?”  Fortunately, there are some straight forward answers that can help these companies get on the right track.  There are a few basic approaches to driving revenue growth:

• Finding new markets for existing products
• Extending the revenue life of products in their current markets
• Finding new applications for technologies or methods
• Entering adjacent markets

For each of these basic approaches, there are a number of systematic innovation methods that support the approach.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to show a company how to apply one such method using repeatable innovation best practices to find candidate new markets to drive revenue growth.  The method I demonstrated is aimed at identifying a set of key technical capabilities, understanding the core value benefits delivered through the capabilities, isolating customer pain in new markets that represent need for the value benefits, and defining the market opportunities that exist at the intersection of the customer pain and the value benefit.

Showing how the theory of high performance innovation practices can be put into practice is always an enlightening experience.  For the people observing the demonstration, it provides a tangible proof point of what is possible through sustainable innovation practice.  For me, it is always a reaffirming exercise.  So it was yesterday as I showed how the voice of this company’s technology, the voice of the customer, and the voice of regulation were speaking in unison and suggesting a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity--an epiphany that had only taken me 30 minutes to identify by following the path of sustainable innovation, leveraging innovation best practices and technology to amplify the voices of innovation and hear what they have to say.

Understanding how to develop strategic innovation competence is a critical success factor for companies.  Whether it is the every day innovation needs of the enterprise in finding new ways to define and execute on operational excellence or the strategic Big I initiatives around developing new products and markets, innovation is the elixir to drive the health and success of the company.  Globally, companies are critically reexamining what they are doing to establish sustainable, high performance innovation as a value-driving core competence of the organization.  Are you?

Deloitte Poll Highlights Weak State of Innovation Practice

In case you missed it, a recent on-line poll conducted by Deloitte confirms the dismal state of innovation practice in companies.  At a time when companies need to produce more vehicles for value delivery to climb out the financial doldrums, innovation is a vital force that can be brought to bear on the challenge.  Yet, most companies are not prepared to meet the challenge.  In the Deloitte poll, 31% of the executives surveyed indicated that innovation happens by accident in their company, and only 14% said that innovation is clearly defined within their company.

It is no wonder that many companies are struggling to get their arms around this innovation thing.  Just last week, I visited with several leading companies, and questions around innovation, establishing repeatable innovation as a value-driving core competence, and building a sustainable, high-performance innovation culture were the key topics these companies wanted help with.  Fortunately for these companies, they recognize that fundamental change is need if they are to emerge from the quagmire of accident innovation.  Yet, many companies aren’t even aware that there is a problem in the organization and that there is a path to innovation success.

A couple years ago, an Innovation Practice Maturity Model was described in a post on Innovating To Win.  This model has withstood the scrutiny of practice, so it seems timely to review the characteristics of each of the four stages of the model.  Ask yourself, “Where does my organization fit in this model, and what should we be doing to advance our innovation capabilities?”

Stage I: Accidental Innovation
At this first stage, the organization has not begun implementing structured innovation.  Companies are generally unaware that there exist approaches to achieve repeatable, on-demand innovation.  Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood.  Because these organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices.  As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.

Stage II: Situational Innovation
Organizations evolve to the second stage when awareness of structured innovation methods lead the organizations to test these methods.  Limited investments in tools and methods are made to support a specific test case.  A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the context of a highly visible project.  Narrowly focused knowledge asset mining may also be done in support of the project as well.  While these initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out of these projects is rarely leveraged because the organization is not yet committed to the path of innovation excellence.  As a result, innovation skills are often not retained and must be rebuilt with each new iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.

Stage III: Repeatable Innovation
In this stage of innovation process maturity, the successes with early trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of innovation best practices.  The organization develops innovation specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are assigned to projects on an as-needed basis.  Investment in innovation infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is given access to innovation tools and knowledge research technologies.  While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the organization. 

Stage IV: High-Performance Innovation
In this final phase of innovation practice development, an organization is committed to establishing innovation a core competency.  Formal corporate programs for innovation best practices are created.  These programs help to integrate innovation as a key part of the corporate culture and the organizations established product development processes, providing an operational framework to unify strategy, communities, knowledge assets, and process.  A hierarchy of innovation practitioners is developed to optimize the availability and leveragability of innovation skills within the enterprise.  Innovation skills are widely deployed within the entire innovation worker population, with basic innovation practice training becoming an integral part of team and individual employee development.  In this stage of innovation practice development, corporations begin to broadly leverage knowledge assets.  Innovation best practices, supported by precise knowledge retrieval, become integrated into the organizational fabric.

Companies that make innovation a core competence are ready to take advantage of opportunity in good times and in bad times.  Do you see your organization in the four stages of the model?  Are you ready to wield the power of innovation on demand?

Harnessing Knowledge for Innovation – What You Said

Knowledge is the raw material of innovation.  When an opportunity is recognized, when the underlying challenge is understood, we leverage our knowledge and experience to synthesize the new concepts that are the core essence of our innovations.  The knowledge we use in this process comes from a variety of sources, both internal to our community as well as external.  Many companies are facing a serious challenge to developing their innovation edge.  Some of the most valuable knowledge they have is inside the enterprise represented in inaccessible documents and undocumented worker knowhow.  As we continue to make our way through the greatest generational turnover businesses have ever experienced, it begs the question “What initiatives are your organizations using to manage the outflow of corporate knowledge cause by generational turnover?”

This was the subject of our last Innovating To Win poll question, and you can see the results to the left.  These results are interesting from a number of perspectives.  Let’s look at a few aspects of the results and consider what this means for innovation.

From our results, it appears that there is no clearly dominant strategy for dealing with the innovation knowledge crisis that many companies perceive.  No single option has crossed the 50% threshold of diffusion.  This supports the notion that there is a lot of confusion in companies as to the scope of the problem and how to best address the issue.  This lack of clarity represents a serious risk to companies.  I recently talked with one company that acknowledged that there are losing 100 subject matter experts per month to retirement.  This is not a small issue for any company.

Of the selections in the survey, access to external knowledge clearly was favored as a mechanism to enhance the corporate innovation intelligence. While in the general context of enriching the innovation intelligence ecosystem and improving your innovation capacity by redefining the box external knowledge access must be a vital part of the innovation knowledge strategy, it is not a substitute for leveraging your internal knowledge.  People who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.  This is a truism for innovation practitioners.  External knowledge provides you with fresh perspectives and new thinking.  But, your internal knowledge contains highly targeted concepts which capture both the foundational knowledge of the organization, but also the lessons learned so that you don’t keep reinventing the wheel or repeating the same costly mistakes.

This point is further highlighted by the relatively low score of traditional internal information dissemination techniques.  Not one of experience harvesting, sharing lessons learned, and internal knowledge management scored over 30%.  This is horrible testimony to the failures companies have experienced with traditional knowledge management initiatives.  But if information access is so important to the innovation process, why have these traditional methods failed?  In short, knowledge management has been a data centric, IT led initiative.  As such, it is doomed to fail from the start.  A different perspective is needed to successfully unlock the value of internal knowledge assets—a strategy that is user and purpose centric.  The communities that make up the enterprise innovation constituencies must be mapped to their roles, innovation tasks, and relevant information assets in order to define the shape of the innovation intelligence infrastructure needed so support innovation.  The innovation infrastructure must then be deployed in a way that knowledge enables every innovation worker and allows them to have knowledge seamlessly integrated into their every day innovation work.  Removal of the barriers to access of tradition knowledge management is key to successful mobilizing corporate wisdom and converting the sea of data into actionable knowledge.

It is for this reason, that the lagging take up of next generation technology as represented by internal Web 2.0 collaboration and passive collaboration frameworks is disappointing.  The future of innovation knowledge enablement is in connecting innovation workers based on what they know.  When you can get the right people engaged without taking them out of the context of what they need to get done, you have succeeded in accelerating the time to value for the enterprise.

It looks like we all have a lot of work ahead of us if we are serious about getting ahead of the looming knowledge drain issue that is already upon us.  We must do a better job of understanding where the information exists, capturing it, and then mobilizing it in an effective and timely manner.  When I was young, my parents would tell me that knowledge is power.  They were right.  Knowledge is innovation power.  Innovation power coupled with crisp execution is the secret sauce of business success.

Don’t forget, a new poll is now open.  The headlines are filled with news about the latest steps government officials are taking to turn around the economic malaise.  But are these the right steps for innovation or missteps?  This is the question for our latest Innovating To Win poll.  How do you assess the long range impact of current intervention policies?  Let us know.  You can find the poll in the left hand sidebar. Please remember to vote.