The New Age of Innovation

I continue to blog at #WIF11.

M. S.Kishnan was the first speaker. He is the author of The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks.

His view is the increasing communication is changing the way innovation happens. Trends change the way innovation happens.

Trends:

Ubiquitous connectivity
Pervasive Digitization
Cloud and Convergence of Technologies
Social Networks
Cloud Computing
Virtual Call Centers (Like Telax Virtual Call Center)

These trends change the way we compete. These combined with and overlay of globalization will create wealth.

There is a movement toward complete personalization. A unique experience for each person.

He is a big believer in globalizaton and the World is Flat type thinking. He showed an example of tutoring over the internet. I am less convinced that this will work with everything. I see high upward cost pressure in emerging countries - partly because wages increase but partly driven by currency. I see increased energy costs so anything physical that needs shipping will be more expensive.

If there is a trend to moving offshore then there are markets for things like ESL, accent correction, communication process and systems. Moving offshore would need to be done efficiently so a focus on making it frictionless.

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Larry Huston, Wharton fellow and former innovation officer of Procter and Gamble spoke on innovation (like the rest of the speakers). He told the story of Gold Corp crowdsourcing gold prospecting to the internet. They posted $500,000 in rewards and their data to the world. Internet users then went to work and successfully reduced their cost to prospect to gold.

He is a big advocate of open source.

"This is the new gift economy". Put your data out there and use open innovation and crowd sourcing to reduce cost and speed development.

Outsourcing ideas/innovation costs half as much as developing it internally. Of course any company would have to get over NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here). "You will be amazed by how much stuff is out there".

He suggests planning to innovate. Decide what it is you want to invent or innovate. Define it. Define the top 10 needs. Simply putting it out there that you need something tends to bring answers.

He gave an interesting example of innovation from China - Rasors. $17 electric one. A $5.50 one. A $2.50 version - nice package, rechargable. Then a $.90. I never knew electric rasors were so cheap. The message was how much China can cost reduce things. His point is cost innovation is also innovation. It is almost scary.

He talks about how many people you have in your innovation network. We can deliberately build those.

"Growth is challenging. It is the world of hard work."