Innovation

I have been blogging for a while about business value and how the whole Web 2.0 thing in the enterprise will be about business value and not productivity. I am convinced this is the way things are going and so was doing some research in the whole business value area which lead me to technology driven innovation and innovation generally. There is some great work going on in innovation by companies such as GE and IBM, interestingly enough I used to work in an indirect way for Irving Wladawsky-Berger who is leading IBM's innovation work and I have a good deal of respect for his abilities.

Wikipedia has a really good article about innovation and points to marketing and product as important innovation areas, just as I had independently determined. It misses the importance of consumer centric innovation however but then I found a book called "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel, author of "Sources of Innovation" which seems to be completely about consumer centric innovation. I shall have to read it in more detail.

Innovation, business value and efficacy are going to be the watchwords for Organizations in the next five years and consumers and collaboration will be the delivery mechanism of innovation on a new platform built from software + services.