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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SeachRE who wrote (252912)	7/29/2003 6:47:20 PM
From: MythMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

rofl. tell that to Kobe..

To: SeachRE who wrote (252912)	7/30/2003 3:40:30 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Looks like a book to put on the reading list.. Book review: Innovation is not a black art [I think it's true too, even though I have not read the book yet. You can tell places that are able to innovate soon after you walk in through the doors imho pb] By Simon London Published: July 30 2003 18:38 \| Last Updated: July 30 2003 18:58 HOW BREAKTHROUGHS HAPPEN The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate By Andrew Hargadon Harvard Business School Press, £18.75 Innovation has been a dirty word since the dotcom bubble burst. The first 43 months of the new millennium have been dominated by talk of efficiency, execution and retrenchment. This hair-shirt approach to management is probably healthy after the profligate waste of the late 1990s. But, as every chief executive knows, efficiency on its own does not bring business success. To win over the long term, companies also need to come up with new products, services and business models. In other words, they need to innovate. And so, after a fallow period, the flow of management books dealing with innovation has resumed. Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation was reviewed here last month. Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Solution - a follow-up to the influential Innovators Dilemma (1997) - arrives in October. This month brings How Breakthroughs Happen, a readable first book by Andrew Hargadon, an engineer-turned-business- school-professor. While each author has a unique perspective, they share a common aspiration: to banish the notion that innovation is a black art, best left to creative individuals kept in ghettos known as "new product development" or "corporate venturing". The idea, first identified by Gary Hamel, the management thinker, is to do for innovation what W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran did for quality: make it something that can be managed, measured and planned across an organisation. Prof Hargadon's first service is to remind us that most innovation arises from the recombination of existing ideas by teams. Thus Henry Ford's revolution was based on interchangeable parts (pioneered in the sewing machine industry), continuous flow production (from soup canning) and the assembly line (from slaughterhouses). The recombination was achieved not by the great man acting alone but by his team of talented engineers. As Prof Hargadon admits, students of innovation since Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, have recognised this. But the implications for management are rarely faced. To recombine ideas from different domains, you must have access to these ideas in the first place. "These entrepreneurs and inventors [such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford] are no smarter, no more courageous, tenacious or rebellious than the rest of us - they are simply better connected," says Prof Hargadon. The same goes for organisations. Innovative companies develop mechanisms for picking up technologies and ideas from a range of industries and recombine them in novel ways. The prime examples are consultancies working at the crossroads of multiple industries. Thus the agency that designed the Reebok Pump basketball shoe borrowed medical technology to create the world's first inflatable training shoe. Large companies contain such diversity. The challenge they face is balancing the need for innovation with the pressing requirements of day-to-day business. Prof Hargadon's advice is that executives should identify teams within the company that can perform what he calls a "technology brokering" role. And what of companies that are focused on a single product or market? The implication of this "network theory" approach to innovation is that they are dis- advantaged. Taken to its logical conclusion, this amounts to an argument for conglomeracy. Thus, General Electric, the jet-engines-to-appliances group, argues that diversity encourages innovation by allowing it to recombine technology, mindsets and best practice. If this sounds abstruse, remember that innovation leads to value added, which leads to profit. Companies that find the balance between innovation and efficiency will trounce those that lean too far either way. On an even broader view, books such as How Breakthroughs Happen raise one of the big questions of 21st-century management: can modern corporations, designed for mass production and uniformity, become forces for innovation? Or will new ways of recombining expertise - the open source software movement, for example - do a better job? Expect innovation aplenty over the next few years as business leaders grope their way towards an answer.