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The Innovation index

• Is your company on it?
• Do you agree with the list?
• Who is missing?

How is the Innovation Index doing today?

I guess the list originated from this Business Week Article.

I think everyone knows someone that thery would call a creative or innovative person. Hopefully you have had the experience of working for an innovative/creative boss also.

I was thinking to myself there are a lot of lists of “what leaders do”, or “traits for a leader” or ” the Successful Manager”, but I haven’t really seen one for the  innovation manager.
That is until I ran across this list that Sanjay Dalal has up on his website “Top Ten Creative Leadership Traits”.

So what are the top ten characteristics and traits of Creative Leaders?

1. Great at generating many ideas – innovative, game changing and even commonplace.
2. Always looking to experiment with good ideas. Sometimes, trying out a few times.
3. Unwavering belief in their creativity and innovation, coupled with originality in thinking.
4. Smart and bright with a positive self-image. More often, they are not born geniuses.
5. Passionate, expressive and sensitive to their teams, colleagues and surroundings.
6. Demonstrate superior judgment, and do not make quick decisions (although have a gut feel).
7. Non-conformists and independent, requiring less social approval than most people.
8. Innate ability to understand and solve the problem, and manage the consequences.
9. Born dreamers with strong imagination; however, manage to keep things in perspective.
10. Create and launch game changing products meeting a high level of quality and design.

One thing that I don’t see captured here is the ability to motivate and inspire his team.  This is an essential part of the equation.  The good leaders can do this  with what seems like  little effort.  Some people call it charisma or presence, but if it more than just like-ability.  It is that trait that will cause people to get behind someone and unify towards a common targeted goal.

Do you know a creative leader?  Did they have some of the traits on this list?

Do you ever have a day where you feel like this ?

Here are a couple interesting articles thrown together here for your clicking pleasure.

1.  Guy Kawasaki has a great post talking about some studies on which is more effective:  a raise or a bonus?
2. Innoblog  has a great post on Cisco pulling an  “if you can’t beat em buy em” move purchasing WebEx for $3.2 billion.     Seems to me a great example of a large company  co-opting a disruptive technology for themselves.
3. Innoblog has another post on  an example of entering your market with a more expensive product/service positioned against non-use as opposed to fighting the dominant and lowest cost supplier in an already developed market. For those of you familiar with “The Innovator’s Solution” or “Seeing what’s next” will recognize this as an example strategy from these texts.
4. Seth Godin Points to Amazon adapting the citation model so popular in the science citation index.  Which books link to your favorite book and which books does your favorate reference?
5. Endless Innovation points to this article on Wired blog about the history of the computer mouse.  Interesting to remind yourself how that ubiquitous interface we all use started and developed to what it is.

Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame has a whole series of articles on “How to be creative.”  You really should check them out if you haven’t read them  before.  Although the Hugh was approaching this from a artist point of view, there is some universality to  some of these comments that each person can adapt as needed.   One that happened to strike a cord with me today was:

“6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”……..”

This really is very qutie striking. The engineer and scientist in me likes the order and rules that we build up to explain the world, control our environment, and make the future.   We  didn’t start out with models, or rules,  or equations, we had to be trained.  All of us started out as uncontrolled little minds that didn’t know or care for the rules.   We dripped of “outside the box” thinking and creativity, but over time had to learn the proper way of things.

S o what does this have to do with you or your career or innovation?   Well a couple of things.   One is the importance of stepping out of your training and experience to imagine what might be possible if you ignored the rules temporarily.   What opportunities do you miss because you use the current paradigm that everyone accepts?  Have you ever had a situation where an answer was simple and elegeant, yet it was counter-intuitive to the “right way”?    What happens when you remove the lens through which you view reality and replace it with someone else’s?

Second is to leverage those fresh perspectives when you have a chance to come across them.  One great example of this is the finding yourself in a situation where you have a fresh employee to your company or a fresh new team member?   Take this blessing and use it.   Give them enough information to see the problem and then step away.  Let them identify the problem details and come up with those solutions that you would never think of due to your “training”.

After reading the article do any of you have a favorite.  “guest author” spot up for grabs.  Just shoot me and email.

This is pretty simple but at the same time quite stimulating.   I ran across this app that looks to be a front-end for images.google.com.   It is called the “Google Image Ripper“.

I am not sure of the original motivation for building it but I find it fabulous for random association generation.  For example search for a word that you think you have an idea of what a search would return.  Here are some simple exaples.

•  Paint
•  Flower
•  Water
•  General Electric

I don’t know about you, but you see some of what you expect,  but ever 4-5 images you get something that doesn’t make sense at first glance.  Why is that here?  Where is article for the image?   What story can I tell about the image?  What does the image tell me?

Next time you need a new direction or perspective, give it a try.   This also works with Flickr or some of the other photo sites,  but I really like this clean interface.

Hugh MacLeod over at gapingvoid (of the cartoon fame) has a great summary of a talk he gave recently.  For anyone in business this is a must read.   It is the best synopsis I have seen on why you want to have strategy around the use of blogs in business.

Some great quotes from the article:

“To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written. Why? Because it was the first book that talked about the internet the way it REALLY is- i.e. people talking- as opposed to the way business and the media pretend it is- i.e. people buying.”

“If corporate blogs work, it’s because they help humanify the company”

“Blogging is not about reaching a mass audience. Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. Blogging is about allowing “The Smarter Conversation” to happen.”

 ”Blogs allow you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.”

There is much more in the link and it is worth the few minutes it takes to read. Seth refers to this article as a great take “humanification” and  “being small”.  That state of  acting like a small, nimble company that is  in-tune and  aligned with its customers because they only have a few and they make or break you. You can’t treat them as a transaction.

Seems like everywhere you look people are getting funding for web-based apps. Like most people I have tried some of Google’s offerings like docs.google.com but have not been impressed. (gmail is my default webmail so I’m not anti-google or anything) I tried opening some excel sheets and even simple ones totally tanked. My impression overall was “pretty nice AJAX is making great strides, but I couldn’t replace any of my desktop apps.” My opinion was that they are basically swinging the pendulum back to a centralized server model like before wintel box on every desk period. Basically copying desktop application and their functionality while providing web-based, always accessible copies. My opinion changed today as I ran across Kiko Calendar. It looks to provide a lot of the functionality of Outlook but with a footprint and interface that is tailored the the web. I then stubbled across 37signals which has a couple different products all based on a web-based app with a pay as you go pricing model. Their offerings include:

• Basecamp™ Project management and collaboration
• Highrise^™ Track leads, clients, vendors, and more
• Campfire™ Real-time group chat
• Backpack^™ Information organizer and calendar

This is a nice little roundup of apps. I plan on giving them a try going forward. It really changes the ability of small and medium size companies to digitize some processes that previously would have been prohibitively expensive. The backpack application is also very interestin in how they are pitching it. Here are some examples of how people have been using it. It is really amazing the many uses and polymorphic nature of this offering. Just copying a desktop based app isn’t the best strategy. What do you have to change about the interface to make it work.

Another real possibility here is the ability to change the dynamic between customers and suppliers. Now you can pop up an impromptu project management site to deal with a product evalution or some other joint work. It is not as easy as it should be to share digital data when you cna’t get access to your partners network.

• How could you use something like Basecamp or Backpack in your group at work?
• How much better would your interactions with customers and partners be if you had neutral ground for project goals, actions, and project data?
• What applications that are still on the desktop could be switched to AJAX based?

Addition:  After I wrote this I saw Seth’s post on the topic also.

I can’t really improve on Guy’s post linking to this interview with Eric Schmidt of Google.  Check out the original podcast over at iinnovatecast.com.   Good stuff in the interview on disruptive technology, managing innovation, and non-traditional organizational structures.  Worth the listen.

I ran across this podcast interview with Heidi Roizen of Mobius Venture Capital. Julio from iinnovatecast.com put together some great questions for Heidi ranging in topic from what is web 3.0 going to look like?, how to hire great people?, how to manage your list of contacts and build great relationships?, and how to balance work and life?. Some very interesting discussion on what she sees as chief motivators for employees and what has been most satisfying in her carreer. Her insights on women in technology and VC are great. Heidi offers some interesting perspective as she has lived both sides of the street in that she has been at the reigns of a sucessful startup and now funds those hopefully successful startups. For more insight from Heidi check out this interview over at PodTech.