10 innovative patents that could give us a look into the future of augmented reality

1. Augmented reality display integrated with self-contained breathing apparatus, 2006
2. Augmented reality data center visualization, 2012
3. Augmented reality language translation system and method, 2011
4. Novel Augmented reality kiosks, 2014
5. Augmented reality worksite, 2014
6. Touch screen augmented reality system and method, 2009
7. Augmented reality building operations tool, 2011
8. Augmented reality maps, 2011
9. Augmented reality panorama supporting visually impaired individuals, 2013
10. Augmented reality enhanced triage systems and methods for emergency medical services, 2013

See the slide show

Making Artificial Organs with a Cotton Candy Machine

The mechanics of a cotton candy machine are proving useful to the quest to build life-sized artificial organs.

Capillaries are the body’s most narrow blood vessels. The thin-walled tubes are essential to organs, delivering oxygen and nutrients and carrying away waste. They also serve is a kind of scaffolding, their woven structure organizing the collection of liver or kidney cells.

Engineers at Vanderbilt University have been experimenting with cotton candy machines as a means to weave capillary-like structures using hydrogels. Unlike solid polymers, water-based gels allow vital fluids to flow through the structure more easily, mimicking the role of the tiny vessels.

It’s possible to build capillary scaffolding from the bottom up by culturing cells in a thin film of gel and allowing vessels to began forming on their own, but the process is slow and delicate.

Spinning hydrogel channels from a cotton candy machine — the top-down approach — is much faster.

Read the post

The chips are down for Moore’s law

The semiconductor industry will soon abandon its pursuit of Moore's law. Now things could get a lot more interesting.

Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.

A rule of thumb that has come to dominate computing, Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every two years or so — which has generally meant that the chip's performance will, too. The exponential improvement that the law describes transformed the first crude home computers of the 1970s into the sophisticated machines of the 1980s and 1990s, and from there gave rise to high-speed Internet, smartphones and the wired-up cars, refrigerators and thermostats that are becoming prevalent today.

None of this was inevitable: chipmakers deliberately chose to stay on the Moore's law track. At every stage, software developers came up with applications that strained the capabilities of existing chips; consumers asked more of their devices; and manufacturers rushed to meet that demand with next-generation chips. Since the 1990s, in fact, the semiconductor industry has released a research road map every two years to coordinate what its hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers are doing to stay in step with the law — a strategy sometimes called More Moore. It has been largely thanks to this road map that computers have followed the law's exponential demands.

Not for much longer. The doubling has already started to falter, thanks to the heat that is unavoidably generated when more and more silicon circuitry is jammed into the same small area. And some even more fundamental limits loom less than a decade away. Top-of-the-line microprocessors currently have circuit features that are around 14 nanometres across, smaller than most viruses. But by the early 2020s, says Paolo Gargini, chair of the road-mapping organization, “even with super-aggressive efforts, we'll get to the 2–3-nanometre limit, where features are just 10 atoms across. Is that a device at all?” Probably not — if only because at that scale, electron behaviour will be governed by quantum uncertainties that will make transistors hopelessly unreliable. And despite vigorous research efforts, there is no obvious successor to today's silicon technology.

The industry road map released next month will for the first time lay out a research and development plan that is not centred on Moore's law. Instead, it will follow what might be called the More than Moore strategy: rather than making the chips better and letting the applications follow, it will start with applications — from smartphones and supercomputers to data centres in the cloud — and work downwards to see what chips are needed to support them. Among those chips will be new generations of sensors, power-management circuits and other silicon devices required by a world in which computing is increasingly mobile.

The changing landscape, in turn, could splinter the industry's long tradition of unity in pursuit of Moore's law. “Everybody is struggling with what the road map actually means,” says Daniel Reed, a computer scientist and vice-president for research at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) in Washington DC, which represents all the major US firms, has already said that it will cease its participation in the road-mapping effort once the report is out, and will instead pursue its own research and development agenda.

Everyone agrees that the twilight of Moore's law will not mean the end of progress. “Think about what happened to airplanes,” says Reed. “A Boeing 787 doesn't go any faster than a 707 did in the 1950s — but they are very different airplanes”, with innovations ranging from fully electronic controls to a carbon-fibre fuselage. That's what will happen with computers, he says: “Innovation will absolutely continue — but it will be more nuanced and complicated.”

Read the feature published in Nature

Boosting Innovation: Murthy’s Idea Of Funding Indian PhDs In US Is A Non-Starter

Murthy’s idea will cost Indian Government in the tune of $25 bn over five years, an investment that can be better used to set up several top-notch universities and research institutions where Indians currently working abroad can be lured back.

NR Narayana Murthy suggested that India should spend an annual $5 billion to create 10,000 PhDs in American universities with the explicit proviso that none of them will be employed in the US. They have to return home to work on innovative projects and products right here.

While prima facie this seems like a bold idea to unleash thousands of innovators in India, giving a quantum jump the creation of intellectual property, a closer examination shows that this is actually a defeatist solution. Among other things, it concludes that India cannot produce world class PhDs, that the ones produced in the US will become innovative in India merely because they did their stuff under western masters, and that all this expense is worth it for ensuring high quality PhDs.

This is a typical Indian non-solution that essentially says India can’t be reformed, and that we need ideas that bypass our institutional limitations rather than improve them. This is the kind of thinking that got us a Right to Education Act, which essentially forces the 10 percent of reasonably competent privately-run schools to provide education to the underprivileged, instead of focusing on the real issue: how to make state schools deliver by making them accountable.

Full post

How should you tap into Silicon Valley?

The roughly 1,800-square-mile area commonly known as Silicon Valley, southeast of San Francisco Bay, is home to just three million people—slightly less than 1 percent of the US population. Yet the Valley, seat of several world-class universities and numerous cutting-edge enterprises, has become an economic and innovation powerhouse whose importance is hugely disproportionate to its small physical size. If it were a country, it would rank among the world’s 50 largest economies, larger than those of Hungary, Vietnam, and New Zealand, among others. In 2013, Silicon Valley generated over 12 percent of US patent registrations and produced about 11 percent of new US-company IPOs, and the greater Bay Area attracted almost 40 percent of US venture-capital (VC) investment.1 More than a few ideas hatched in the Bay Area have paid off handsomely. Thirty-two of the 50 private start-ups with valuations at or exceeding $1 billion are based there. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Bay Area enterprises have been creating new markets and disrupting a wide swath of industries for decades.

As companies everywhere strive to stay ahead of the digital revolution, the payoff from engaging with Silicon Valley can be substantial. BMW, which first arrived there almost 20 years ago, linked up with Apple to become the first carmaker to integrate the iPod into its vehicles—an initiative that likely would not have been possible without a physical presence in the area. BMW’s development of its i3 electric vehicle also benefited from collaboration with other Valley companies.

No silver bullet

But for every success, companies launch many haphazard “Valley initiatives” that yield little and end in disappointment. Consider, for example, the Bay Area networking offices beloved of many outsiders. These attempts to get a foot in the door typically involve establishing a small outpost charged with responsibility for networking with VC funds, leading area businesses, and promising Valley start-ups. Many companies find it difficult to make this model work. Even if employees in these offices can identify winning ideas—no sure thing, of course—their potential tends to get watered down or lost as the news is passed back to corporate headquarters and up the chain of command. Often, opportunities are squandered, and frustrated employees at the satellite office leave to join some fast-growing Valley employer.

Companies that set up their own venture-capital funds or corporate investment arms often report disappointing results, too. In the Bay Area, after all, money is generally less important than good connections; well-established entrepreneurs and VCs there tend to stick together and pick winners cooperatively. Even corporate-backed entities flush with money struggle to embed themselves in the local network. Intel Capital—launched by one of the Valley’s original corporate pillars—is a notable exception, but many more fail to make meaningful contributions to their corporate parents or don’t follow a coherent corporate strategy in training their sights on target companies. For many big businesses looking in from the outside, creating a venture fund is a difficult way to channel the Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit and generate fresh ideas.

A practical playbook

In our experience, there are three proven ways to engage with Silicon Valley and tap into its zeitgeist.

Read the article published in McKinsey Quarterly

The simple rules of disciplined innovation

Constraints aren’t the enemy of creativity—they make it more effective.

When it comes to innovation, the single most common piece of advice may be to “think outside the box.” Constraints, according to this view, are the enemy of creativity because they sap intrinsic motivation and limit possibilities.

Sophisticated innovators, however, have long recognized that constraints spur and guide innovation. Attempting to innovate without boundaries overwhelms people with options and ignores established practices, such as agile programming, that have been shown to enhance innovation. Without guidelines to structure the interactions, members of a complex organization or ecosystem struggle to coordinate their innovative activities.

How, then, can organizations embrace a more disciplined approach to innovation? One productive approach is to apply a few simple rules to key steps in the innovation process. Simple rules add just enough structure to help organizations avoid the stifling bureaucracy of too many rules and the chaos of none at all. By imposing constraints on themselves, individuals, teams, and organizations can spark creativity and channel it along the desired trajectory. Instead of trying to think outside the wrong box, you can use simple rules to draw the right box and innovate within it.

Simple rules cannot, of course, guarantee successful innovation—no tool can. Innovation creates novel products, processes, or business models that generate economic value. Trying anything new inevitably entails experimentation and failure. Simple rules, however, add discipline to the process to boost efficiency and increase the odds that the resulting innovations will create value.

Simple rules are most commonly applied to the sustaining kind of innovation, often viewed as less important than major breakthroughs. The current fascination with disruption obscures an important reality. For many established companies, incremental product improvements, advances in existing business models, and moves into adjacent markets remain critical sources of value-creating innovation. The turnaround of Danish toymaker LEGO over the past decade, for example, has depended at least as much on rejuvenating the core business through the injection of discipline into the company’s new-product development engine as it has on radical innovation.

Simple rules can also be used to guide a company’s major innovations. In the early 2000s, for example, Corning set out to double the number of major new businesses it launched each decade. A team evaluated the company’s historical breakthrough products, including the television tube, optical fiber, and substrates for catalytic converters. By identifying the commonalities across these past advances, the team articulated a set of simple rules to evaluate major innovations: they should address new markets with more than $500 million in potential revenue, leverage the company’s expertise in materials science, represent a critical component in a complex system, and be protected from competition by patents and proprietary process expertise.

Read the article from McKinsey Quarterly

How Will Startup India Help You?

In order to give a boost to the culture of entrepreneurship at a mass scale, Prime Minister launched the Startup India program on 16 January with a number of initiatives and perks for startups.

In last few years, India has witnessed boom in the etail or ecommerce sector. Thanks to the startups which manifested risk-taking ability and defied the tradition by adopting innovative ways to run business. Because of their unprecedented feat, India could surpass China for the first time in the race to garner the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Ecommerce is one part of the story which certainly boosted the morale of several individuals to experiment. As a result India has seen a wave of startups in many areas. Until now startups took the risk on their own, with little help from the government. Of course, venture capitalist have begun to invest and promote Indian startups. Largely young entrepreneurs have embarked upon the entrepreneurship on their own. However, it is important that this culture is preserved, prevailed and promoted. There is no one better than the government to do so.

The Startup India – a visionary program of the Narendra Modi government – can succeed in giving the much-needed boost. The Startup India includes new policies and initiatives that are aimed at making it easier for investors and startup founders to incubate their venture in the country. It is expected that the initiatives can bring a wave of innovative startups in the country.

Startup India: 12 Big Announcements

1. Rs. 10,000 crore fund for startups 
2. single point of registration for startups
3. simplified regulatory regime based on self-certification
4. fast-track mechanism filing patent applications
5. credit guarantee fund for startups
6. Three year tax exemption
7. Startup India Hub
8. Relaxed norms of public-procurement
9. Faster exits for startups
10. Atal Innovation Mission – Sector specific Incubators
11. Encouraging Innovation among students
12. An annual incubator grand challenge

Read the full article

Wearable Technology and Customer Service: 10 Innovative Examples

Remember watching cartoons and movies as a kid and seeing all of those awesome tech devices and wishing you could have one (or two, or all of them)? Well, the future is now, as wearables are becoming more mainstream and technology advancements are made every day. And, consumers are paying attention, as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) reported in their Consumer Intelligence Series, The Wearable Future report: 53% of millennials and 54% of early wearables adopters say they are excited about the future of wearable tech, including the potential benefits of improved safety, healthier living, and simplicity and ease of use. PwC also found that 72% of people find it very important for wearable technology to improve customer service, and 76% of busy parents want wearable tech to make shopping a more pleasant, efficient experience. Similarly, 50% of millennials say they would be strongly motivated to don a wearable if it “has apps/features that reward those who frequently use it.”

The capabilities of wearables are just beginning to emerge for retail, enterprise, and consumers. While their sales are not expected to compete with those for smartphones and tablets for some time, their impact on technology is far greater. As Multichannel Merchant points out, wearables “will become the interface between body, apps, data, and last not but not least, services. This creates the opportunity especially for local retailers.” Wearables have the ability to collect personal information such as biometric data, location data, spending data, and more. Scott Bauer, PwC’s U.S. retail and consumer practice partner and omnichannel leader imagines wearable technology will “shift retail conventions as retails will be able to connect the dots between pre-store and in-store behavior, and reach a new level of interconnected retail. How consumers pay for purchases and interact with the retailer while in store is expected to be radically redefined by wearable technology and retailers cannot afford to ignore the impact it could have on their bottom line.”

But, wearables will not just impact retail and its customer service. We have found companies that already are utilizing wearables to impact the enterprise, as well as those that are piloting wearable programs to impact customer service, customer satisfaction, and the customer experience. These innovative examples (and possible examples) of wearable tech in customer service are inspiring, and we share them below so that you can get inspired, too. The possibilities for wearables are potentially limitless, and it’s just as exciting now as it was when we were watching those cartoons and shows all those years ago.

Read the full post

Special Series of Articles on Mass Customization from Frank Piller

The idea that consumers can customize their own products on a massive scale is having a tremendous impact on customer experience and expectations as well as the way organizations approach R&D. Following an extensive study of mass customization in the domain of consumer goods, this upcoming series of articles provides an overview on mass customization, its strategic capabilities, and the success factors that drive its implementation in business.

Mass customization aims to profit from people’s differences by enabling the creation of goods and services that best serve individual customers’ personal needs with near mass production efficiency. While the basic idea of mass customization has been described for quite some time, it is only now that we can observe a larger scale and scope of implementations in business. Forrester Research recently concluded that finally, after a number of attempts, the time has come for a large scale implementation mass customization.

Mass customization is closely related to customer co-creation, one of the core strategies that today shape a modern corporate innovation management system. In a series of articles, we want to provide an overview on mass customization, its strategic capabilities, and the success factors that drive its implementation in business. The articles build on the results of the Customization 500, the largest study of mass customization in the domain of consumer goods. Its objective was to map the current market of mass customization and to understand its drivers of success.
Mass customization series at Innovation Management

Introduction: A special series of articles on mass customization and customer co-design

Part 1: Competing in the Age of Mass Customization

Part 2: The market for mass customization today

Part 3: Solution Space Development: Understanding where customers are different

Part 4: Robust Process Design: Fulfilling individual customer needs without compromising performance

Part 5: Choice Navigation: Turning burden of choice into an experience

Part 6: Choice Navigation in Reality: A closer look into the Customization500

Part 7: Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing Mass Customization

Part 8: A Balanced View: Conclusions and Key Learnings

Pl. visit the IM site

Article series: The Innovation Formula: the guidebook to innovation for small business leaders and entrepreneurs

Innovation is as important for small business as for large ones, but most of the books and other writings available focus on the big firms. In his new book The Innovation Formula, Langdon Morris provides insights for the small business leader or entrepreneur about how to be fantastically successful at innovation even with very limited time and capital to invest.

The article series covers the following:

1. Innovation in the SME and Entrepreneurial Context
2. Elements of The Innovation Formula
3. Five Forces of Complexity and Change
4. Market Mapping for Sustainable Growth
5. Risk, Great Ideas, and Your Business Model
6. Risk and Your Innovation Portfolio
7. Designing Your Innovation Portfolio
8. Build a Fast and Efficient Innovation Team
9. Speed of Innovation – How to Master Rapid Prototyping
10. Full Team Engagement in the Innovation Culture
11. To be a Good Leader, Be a Good Learner
12. Key Abilities of Effective Innovation Leaders
13. Four Tools to Support Creativity and Innovation
14. Taking Action: Your Innovation Master Plan
15. 25 Steps to Jump-Start your Innovation Journey

Pl. visit

Big ideas from small towns

In this feature, published in The Hindu dt. 19th Jul 2015 under the column "Sunday Anchor", the writer profiles 10 tech ventures from small cities and towns across the country.

On Sundays, Rohith Bhat takes his daughter for a ride on a red Hero scooter through the temple town of Udupi. On other days, he is busy running a company that makes some of the best-selling Apple iOS apps from a traditional town known for its Krishna temple and a distinctive vegetarian cuisine.

“You don’t need to be in Bengaluru or Delhi to develop world-class products,” said Mr. Bhat, 43, the founder of Robosoft Technologies, the company behind popular apps such as Camera Plus. The app, used to enhance phone camera functions, has until now been downloaded 27 million times. “We could be in Udupi, and the rest of the world can discover and consume our products,” said Mr. Bhat, who hired local talent in the town to build the app’s technology.

Nearly 1,900 kilometres north of Udupi, in Jaipur, Nishant Patni’s start-up CultureAlley has till date helped 30 lakh users, mostly Indians, learn English through their mother tongue. Vadodara, the third largest city in neighbouring Gujarat, is home to Indusface, a small company in the business of protecting large customers such as Bharat Petroleum and the National Stock Exchange of India from cyberattacks and hacking.

Even as many new-generation start-ups sprout up in India’s metros, especially Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, the likes of Robosoft, CultureAlley and Indusface, among the hundreds of start-ups that exist today in the small towns and cities, are showing how ideas can be incubated and developed anywhere. These companies not only build products and services for a global audience, but their employees experience a far better quality of life compared to their metro counterparts. This is because cost of living is low, retention of talent is high, and there are hardly any traffic bottlenecks. “They are making their home in small towns because there is less competition for talent and it is much cheaper to operate,” says Sasha Mirchandani, managing director at Kae Capital, a venture capital firm that has backed CultureAlley. “Also, many people just want to work from their hometowns.”

At a later stage, though, when these companies grow and mature, they might find the small city environment challenging. That’s when they need access to more senior managers and also talent in large numbers. “They will have to move to metros like Bengaluru when they have to scale up their business and hire talent in large numbers,” said Rajan Anandan, Google India managing director and a top angel investor.

Thiruvananthapuram: Senzit -- crime detection

Bhopal: Appointy -- business of scheduling appointments

Hubbali: LabInApp -- interactive virtual laboratory tool

Tiruchirappalli: Dextrasys -- patent filing, prosecution and litigation

Udupi: Robosoft -- mobile applications and games

Coimbatore: Ampere -- electric vehicle manufacture

Jaipur: CultureAlley -- learn conversational English

Kochi: Sayabot Systems -- building robots for many purposes

Belagavi: SenseGiz -- create products that talk to each other

Vadodara: Indusface -- protect organisations from hackers

Read the full feature

Invention Is a Flower, Innovation Is a Weed

The inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com shares some lessons with young innovators.

Bob Metcalfe’s career traces the trajectory of innovation. He started in the academy, as an undergraduate at MIT and a graduate student at Harvard. In his doctoral dissertation he laid the theoretical foundations for a novel method of boosting the power of personal computers: network them. At Xerox PARC, he turned that theory into something called Ethernet. Xerox wasn’t particularly successful at exploiting Ethernet commercially, so Metcalfe decided to try himself, founding 3Com to do the job. After many incarnations at 3Com, he cashed in his chips and became, in his words, a “technology pundit,” who writes a column for InfoWorld, organizes some of the information world’s best conferences, and sits on the board of Technology Review. TR asked Metcalfe to tell us what he learned as he followed the trajectory of innovation from the lab bench to the boardroom and beyond.

Full Article

Top 10 LTE service innovations

The global roll-out of LTE has been beneficial to all parties involved although, there is a danger that some operators could risk commoditizing their data services by focusing on just price and data volume.

In order to differentiate their offerings, operators are creating innovative data services that meet their subscribers' needs. These include data roaming propositions, time of day offers, TV and entertainment content and flexible data rollover services.

Download this white paper to discover:
10 Innovative use cases delivering additional value to subscribers
How operators are leveraging the capabilities of LTE to drive differentiation
Examples from global operators including AT&T, Telus, Optus, Mobinil and Vodafone

Download

How to fund your own startup

This deluge has lasted several years, but no one's complaining. It has been raining startups in India for the past 3-4 years and has swept away all divides. From bubbling graduates to brainy professionals, from salaried staffers to sparkling housewives, in metros and small towns, all are hopping on to the idea bandwagon. There seems to be no venture too wacky, no business plan too flaky to succeed.

In fact, India ranks fifth in the world in terms of startups, with nearly 3,100 currently in operation. " India is seeing high quality of entrepreneurs giving up large opportunity costs and it has never been witnessed before. This, combined with the Internet growth story, makes it a very attractive investment market," says Gopal Modi, President, Investments, Orios Venture Partners.

In tandem with the surging enterprise, funds are flowing in like never before and the country is buzzing with options—venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators and banks. Currently, the number of active investors in the country include 172 VCs, 43 angel investors and 48 incubators. As much as $4.75 billion of VC funding came through in 2014 and it has already touched $3.18 billion in 2015. Flipkart made the biggest splash with its two rounds of $1.7 billion funding, the highest in 2014, ..

The business environment is also turning more conducive, with the government setting up the MUDRA Bank, which offers a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore for small and medium enterprises. Besides, various banks and finance companies have stepped up to encourage the trend.

If this has got you fired up to launch your own enterprise, hold on. Stories abound of individuals who have raised millions of dollars with merely ideas and passion as collateral, but these often overshadow the struggle, sweat ..

Full Story from Economic Tims Published on 29 Jun 2015

7-1/2 steps to innovation

1. Focus on the customer
2. Do what is natural
3. Don’t hire MBAs
4. It is about creating the future
5. Stop asking people what they want
6. Your company IS the barrier
7. There are no best practices
7-1/2. Stop hoping to depend on lists and books by the innovation gurus

Full article

From Infosys to Snapdeal: 25 years of startup wisdom

The recent Times LitFest, Bangalore, featured over 60 speakers, 24 panels, a music act by Moon Arra, and standup comedy by Cyrus Broacha. For two days, an estimated 20,000 attendees heard expert insights on topics ranging from entrepreneurship and creativity to politics and movies.

Here are my top 18 takeaways on startup wisdom from the LitFest, especially from the two panels titled ‘Changing Faces of Entrepreneurship: 1980 and 2015’ and ‘New Retail v/s Old Retail.’ The speakers included Snapdeal Co-Founder Kunal Bahl, Infosys Co-Founder N.R. Narayana Murthy, Portea Medical CEO Meena Ganesh, Zivame CEO Richa Kar, Reliance Retail CEO Damodar Mall (author of ‘Supermarketwalla’) and Vivek Kaul (author of ‘Easy Money’).

Full Post

The ‘8 Is’ of design thinking for startups

From ‘lean’ methods and ‘agile’ innovation to design thinking and customer development, a number of useful tools are emerging for startups and innovators. Design thinking is a human-centered approach towards problem solving and product generation which is driven by creativity, customer empathy and iterative learning.

Based on research, case studies and workshops conducted in this field, here is my framework of the ‘8 Is’ of design thinking for startups: intent, insights, immersion, interaction, ideation, integration, iteration and intensification.

Full Post

Best Business Books 2014: Innovation

These days, it seems as though every business challenge has the same solution: innovation. Innovation is the watchword for generating fast growth in the very slow recovery from the Great Recession, and, thanks largely to Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation, it’s the narrative center of gravity in Silicon Valley and the rest of the global tech community. But if innovation is the answer, the obvious next question is how to innovate.

This year’s three best business books on innovation offer answers to this crucial query in intriguing and insightful, if sometimes indirect, ways. In The Second Machine Age, economist Erik Brynjolfsson and information technologist Andrew McAfee suggest that smart machines are not only the products of innovation, but also essential enablers of innovation prowess. In Social Physics, MIT data scientist Alex Pentland offers a data-driven and eye-opening inquiry into the flow of ideas among people. And in How Google Works, high-level company insiders Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle, take us down to where the rubber meets the road.

Full Post

The Global Innovation 1000: Proven Paths to Innovation Success

The Global Innovation 1000: Proven Paths to Innovation Success

Ten years of research reveal the best R&D strategies for the decade ahead.

Post by Barry Jaruzelski, Volker Staack and Brad Goehle

The success of corporate R&D is on every C-suite agenda. Yet wide disparities persist in how well innovation investments actually pay off. As a consequence, R&D is often seen as a black box, where large sums of money go in and innovative products and services only sometimes come out. One of the aims of the Global Innovation 1000 study, our annual analysis of R&D spending, has been to demystify the process—and to find universal principles that can be applied by any company, in any industry.

This year, the 10th anniversary of the study, we looked back at a decade’s worth of research on R&D spending patterns and surveys of innovation executives, plus anecdotal insights about how companies have been improving their innovation performance. We also surveyed more than 500 innovation leaders in companies large and small, across every major region and industry sector, to ask what they have learned in the last 10 years about why some investments work and others do not. We found that it’s really not that mysterious: Over the years, we’ve identified the core strategies that can improve a company’s return on its R&D investment, and we’ve witnessed some consensus around the key success factors that drive results. For example, one of the main messages we heard is that innovation leaders feel they have made real progress in better leveraging their R&D investments, particularly by more tightly aligning their innovation and business strategies, and by gaining better insights into customers’ stated and unstated needs. And in fact, 44 percent of our 2014 survey respondents say that their companies are better innovators today than they were a decade ago, while another 32 percent say they are much better. Only 6 percent say they are doing worse.

Full Post

What Self-Made Billionaires Do Best

What Self-Made Billionaires Do Best.

They don’t just generate results. They produce breakthroughs.

Post by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen

Lynda Rae Harris was in her 20s and the owner of a Los Angeles–based ad agency when she met her second husband, Stewart Resnick. He was an entrepreneur who had built a successful janitorial business from scratch after his father won an industrial floor scrubber in a contest. Together, the couple made their first joint acquisition—of the floral wire service company Teleflora—in 1979. They followed it with acquisitions of agricultural land in California, and of the Franklin Mint, all chosen because of Stewart’s penchant for service businesses with repeat customers.

But even the most loyal customers need a reason to keep coming back, and Lynda was always looking for new ways to draw them—seeing and creating what they needed long before they knew they needed it. For example, she came up with the “gift within a gift” concept of packaging Teleflora flower deliveries in a reusable planter or vase. Lynda also redesigned the Franklin Mint’s traditional product set of commemorative coins and stamps to include collectible dolls, including porcelain Scarlett O’Hara and Princess Diana dolls that earned millions.

To make the most of their agricultural assets, Lynda sold the masses on the virtually unknown pomegranate fruit by packaging it as an antioxidant-rich juice drink now known as POM Wonderful. She also rebranded clementines—a sweet orange–mandarin orange hybrid fruit—as “Cuties” and marketed them to time-strapped parents with the slogan “Peel It Yourself.”

Stewart has an eye for purchasing viable businesses with high financial potential. He knows how to make them perform. Lynda can transcend their perceived limits with innovative product ideas and focused marketing. She knows how to produce entirely new business lines, time and again. Together, their ability to perform and produce has made the Resnicks billionaire.

Self-made billionaires are distinguished from the average business leader in one respect. It’s the way they look at the world. Their unusual perspective allows them to turn good ideas into great businesses. We found that most self-made billionaires practice five habits of mind as they apply to ideas, time, action, risk, and leadership. These five habits can be summed up with the word produce. To produce, in our lexicon, is to look beyond an existing business or market to envision something new, develop the often divergent resources necessary to make it real, and sell it to customers who didn’t even know they wanted it. Producers see unmet demand or potential for disruption and meet it head-on. They do this not once or twice, but throughout their careers. If they suffer professionally, it’s because producing is difficult to measure, and sometimes it’s difficult to spot.

Full Post