Innovation and Collaboration

Delivered a talk at IMRB(Indian Marketing Research Bureau), Delhi on 10 Sept 2010. Here is the presentation..

Innovation and collaboration

View more presentations from Gaurav Sharma.

Also here are few quotes on Creativity:

• "The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - are the primary sources of creativity." - Alfred North Whitehead
• "The chief enemy of creativity is 'good" sense.'" - Pablo Picasso
• "As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better, no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems." - Edward de Bono
• "Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." - Theodore Levitt

Open Innovation

In a world where strategy life cycles are shrinking, innovation is the only way a company can renew its lease on success. It’s also the only way it can survive in a world of bare-knuckle competition.

Not every management innovation creates a competitive advantage. Some are incremental. Some are wrongheaded. And many never pay off. But’s that no excuse not to innovate.

There are different flavors of innovation and can be stacked in the increasing order of importance as follows : Operational Innovation, Product and Service Innovation, Strategic Innovation, and Management Innovation.

With rapid transformation of businesses , the nature of relationship between consumers and the firm has changed radically.

Let’s take an example here of Open & Collaborative Innovation.


Who can forget the Ford Model-T? - large assembly lines , massive production units in Detroit, you could have any car as long as the color was black ( assumption here was that the end consumer is an undifferentiated lot).

Letting volunteers build your business

Everyday millions of people make all sort of voluntary contributions to companies-from informed opinions to computing resources-that create tremendous value for those firms' customers and, consequently for their shareholders.In the Oct 08 issue of HBR, Intuit co founder Scott Cook suggests that companies should collaborate actively with their customers. This might not seem an insightful idea at first , but more deeply he explores the idea, the more profound it becomes.

Now the concept of user contribution isn't new, but the companies such as Google, ebay,Skype,Honda, Procter & Gamble, Hyatt, Amazon etc.- have created a user contribution system, methods for aggregating and leveraging people's contribution or behaviours in ways that are useful to other people.

Honeybee Network - Grassroot Innovation

http://knownetgrin.honeybee.org/honeybee.htm

Check out the above link …It is about a remarkable person and a remarkable organisation.The HoneyBee Network was incubated by Prof. Anil Gupta at IIM Ahmedabad in 1988. The Network uncovers and documents grass root innovations from rural and small town India and tries to spread the knowledge and helps the inventors get a fair economic reward for their creativity.