innovation

Red Hat's CEO at OSBC: The nature of true open-source innovation

Jim Whitehurst is a quick study. Matthew Szulik delivered the opening keynote at the Open Source Business Conference 2007, while his successor, Jim Whitehurst, will be opening up OSBC 2008 (March 25-26, San Francisco).

Like Matthew before him, Jim's keynote promises to spark some fireworks. Here's the abstract I just received:

Open Source and True Innovation

Open Source is the driving force behind the true innovation that happens daily in the community. True open source innovation is what drives value. Hybrid open source strategies cause confusion and sub-par customer experiences.… Read more

Rivet Logic earns the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award with Kaplan Test

Sometimes the good guys win.

I was really happy to see Red Hat announce that Rivet Logic won the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award for 2008. I'm biased in this one (see below), but it's an exceptional award for an exceptional piece of work by (you guessed it) an exceptional group of people.

What was the winning application?

...a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a "fresher" web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

100% open source. I know the Kaplan team well, as well as the Rivet Logic team. This award couldn't have happened to a better group of people. Congratulations!… Read more

Collaborative competition: sport for a better world

Here's an innovative approach to facilitating social innovation: a "collaborative competition" leveraging sports.

Ashoka's Changemakers and Nike have partnered to open a worldwide search for projects that use the transformative power of sport to promote social change. Ashoka is a citizen-sector support system for social entrepreneurs. Changemakers is building the world's first global online "open source" community competing to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborating to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions.

Changemakers invited users worldwide to submit innovations to what it calls a "collaborative competition" -- an "… Read more

Innovation 1-on-1: Willem Boijens

In this series of interviews with innovation thought leaders we reach out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

In this installment, Willem Boijens, Senior User Experience Manager at Vodafone in Dusseldorf, Germany, takes on the questions. Willem has had a wide variety of roles at Vodafone and has seen the large wireless services company from many angles. In his current role he aims to make experiential design a catalyst for innovation, ensuring that customer needs … Read more

Workshopping innovation

This last week at frog design we hosted a group of almost 40 global executive MBA's from IESE, the renowned business school in Barcelona. It was an intensive and stimulating day looking at issues of innovation - what methods are successful, what mindsets are required, and how do you bring insights from customers into the picture?

The participants were from all over the world, and many of them were working in countries other than where they grew up. Their industries ran the gamut from tech and software to oil and gas and mining, with everything in between, so it … Read more

Innovation 1-on-1: Manoj Kothari, Onio Design

This is the first in a series of interviews with innovation thought leaders. We've reached out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

We're kicking the series off with Manoj Kothari, founder and managing director of Onio Design, one of the leading design and innovation consultancies in India. A graduate of IIT Bombay and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Manoj orchestrates trend research, strategic consulting, and design management practice at Onio. Manoj … Read more

Next president needs national 'innovation strategy,' author says

BOSTON--The United States needs to take a cue from Finland and Singapore to revive a flagging innovation economy, says author John Kao.

Kao spoke here at the MIT Enterprise Forum conference titled "Power, Drugs, and Money" on Thursday. Kao used his speech to make the case that the U.S. has a problem when it comes to generating technical innovation. This is the same theme he asserts in his book Innovation Nation, which was published in October. Though it's an admittedly over-used term, innovation is what leads to new technologies that drive economic growth and power, the … Read more

Smaller, further, faster: the viral power of mini-objects

Jan Chipchase, a researcher for Nokia, observes how small things are likely to spread more rapidly than big ones, resembling ideas rather than things:

"Today we're comfortable with the rapid dissemination of information and ideas from one side of the globe to the other. What's in Tokyo today can be in Tehran tomorrow and vice versa. When physical things reach a certain size -- being pocketable seems about right, their ability to be picked up and moved around increases considerably. All things being equal small objects much like ideas, travel further, travel faster. They are put into … Read more

Yahoo, Microsoft, and drowning puppies

On a radio program this morning about the possible Microsoft/Yahoo merger, CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos argued that one of Yahoo's problems has been its inability to kill off unsuccessful properties.

Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social-networking tool and Google Video. (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well.)

To be fair to Yahoo, it recently yanked Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just announced it is dropping its music service and transferring subscribers to Rhapsody.

But it'… Read more