Innovation Redux

Innovation is a process, the way resources are used to affect the common weal (a sound, healthy, or prosperous state), or to create a new resource. An innovation is the result of that process. Resources include people, capital, knowledge, relationships, tools, facilities, land and nature. The activities within the process of innovation (or projects) act on the resources within the context of an organizational, community or national culture. A culture is composed of philosophies, beliefs, values and behavior norms. Culture determines how innovative an organization or society is, and influences the process in subtle ways that shape the type of innovation that results. An innovation has impacts on and consequences for culture and resources. The capacity of the resources and culture for the process of innovation can be increased through education, communication, incentives, infrastructure and measurements.

An innovation that meets an emerging need is much more likely to be accepted and have a longer life than one that attempts to create a new need, or of course, one that meets a past or declining need. As the process of innovation requires time, leading the process requires foresight. The foresight horizon must extend into the future at least as far as the innovation process is long. And, the coupling between views of the future and the innovation process must be tight in order to adjust the target of the innovation process over time.

Today I believe that that means the development of real-time, collaborative, strategic and market intelligence systems, based on web 2.0 technologies, in order to facilitate the innovation process.

According to Wikipedia, “Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.“