Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) by Thomas M. Koulopoulos

Author:Thomas M. Koulopoulos [Koulopoulos, Thomas M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BUS090000
ISBN: 9781937134105
Publisher: INgrooves
Published: 2012-05-21T14:00:00+00:00

For example, NineSigma recently worked on a number of projects for a large industrial conglomerate, which has thirty-five thousand or so engineers and scientists on its staff, yet more than half of the proposals they received for new innovations came from people and places that they had never heard of before. That’s always an enlightening moment for management at a company like Siemens. But it’s not atypical. You can be the best in your field, go to all the conferences in your industry, and convince yourself that there isn’t anyone else out there better at what you do. But in reality there almost always is.

Beyond Open

While OpenIDEO and NineSigma both provide a glimpse into the power of innovation in the cloud, they only tell part of the story. One of the most significant changes that innovation will undergo as the cloud becomes more of a factor is the degree to which we will be able to go beyond the past and current models of innovation. Discrete tasks that were formerly worked on by experts and a few highly trained individuals will be transformed into a process of continuous adaptation, much of which will be done without human intervention. That’s not to say that innovation should be thought of as a process that can exist in the absence of conscious human thought, insight, and vision. Innovation is and always will be subject to the commitment of inspiring leaders and visionaries who are able to see beyond the moment and lead us into the future, despite our tenacity in clinging to the past.

However, there are aspects of innovation that can be made much more systemic and that can be integrated more readily into the fabric of an organization or society. To understand how this can be done, we need to provide a new structure for the way we talk about and define innovation. We have to recognize it as more than the process of inventing new products or services.

I explored the idea behind this new definition of innovation in my last book, The Innovation Zone, where I outlined a framework I call Innovation 2.0. Innovation 2.0 was intended to illustrate how all innovation has value, from incremental to radical, component to systemic. That framework works well inside or outside of the cloud. But what it does not fully address is the way in which innovation is spurred by the connections that we have talked about in this book.

Connections drive innovation by creating opportunities to couple existing inventions and ideas, but also to use the cloud’s understanding of these connections, their trends, and their applications to infer derivative innovations that the market and providers may never have considered otherwise. I call this process derivative innovation, and it has four distinct levels.

Derivative Innovation

When we think of innovation, what most often comes to mind are breakthroughs that seem to take the market by storm. Historically, at least, this is the way we think of innovation, whether it is Ford’s Model T or Apple’s iPod. Yet this is not the reality of how innovation evolves.

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