Consider this…you want to vacation in the much talked about Cancun to explore those mysterious Mayan ruins that always fascinated you. Off you go to your friendly neighbourhood travel agent (err.. ok.. maybe… sidestep.com or travelzoo.com) to help you plan the whole trip. How would it be if the agent told you about the latest and greatest on Cancun, how the trip to Cancun is the soul's journey into the distant past that will transform you as an individual (all right..you get the point...)…but with one catch - he will not tell you nor does he know how to get you to Cancun from where you live today say, Boulder city, CO. He only knows how good Cancun is and why you should vacation there!

Increased regulations and alternate fuel technology is going to take a lot of investment, therefore companies have to re look at their cost structures and generate enough profits for future investment.

As I've written earlier, in the lexicon of modern-day business, innovation and isolation are firm opposites. The most successful companies have embraced unplugged approaches to innovation, which seek to allow the judicious flow of information, ideas and insights across what would conventionally be watertight walls.
Unplugged approaches epitomize how innovation happens on our ever-flattening and increasingly hyperconnected planet. Innovative new companies such as Innocentive have  even built a business model around helping such unplugged innovation thrive.

But let us pause to dwell upon the fate of the new products being birthed thus.
Across industries, the mortality of new products has traditionally been high (as high as 60%, or even higher depending on which source you consult). Clearly, new product innovation is fraught with risk.  Can unplugged approaches to innovation help ameliorate this risk?

I believe they can – particularly those that emphasize blurring barriers with customers, such as Co-creation and User-centric innovation.  These approaches to innovation posit that you should begin working with customers long before the new product is complete. They obviate the conventional need to have a complete product before coming to market, instead allowing the product to evolve in the direction of a more organic fit with customer needs.
In other words, rather than assume if you build it they will come, these approaches take the more pragmatic route of saying, if you invite them (customers) to help create the product, maybe they’ll use it!

So everybody from Ben Bernanke http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7357595 to your neighborhood grocer is talking about a potential recession in the US Markets and its potential impact on the rest of the world. Consumer confidence and business confidence in the US have been the lowest in February. However, US export numbers are holding up and the trade deficit is narrowing. There are mixed signals from retailers as well.  CFOs of decently performing companies are exercising caution as they go about planning the year’s budgets. It’s easy in such times to cut down on IT spending and capital investments in technology. Ever wonder in such times, what happens to our visionary dynamic Flat World CIO. With new IT budgets that are either flat for the year or have decreased marginally is it a good time for the CIO to lay low until things change…. or is it time to stand up and be counted?

There can scarcely be any doubt that innovation is among the most top-of-mind issues facing the world of business today. The need to innovate manifests itself in manifold organizational activities, always with the goal of boosting some dimension of organizational performance.

There have been myriad approaches, prescriptions and mantras purporting to help organizations boost their innovative prowess. If you look at the most successful among these - Open Innovation, "Crowdsourcing", Co-creation, User-centric Innovation - you will find that they appear to have quite a lot in common with each other. And if you think about it a bit more, you will realize that this similarity is not a result of coincidence. It is because each has at its core the same idea: that of opening out, inviting fresh perspectives, admitting new participants, allowing new combinations - in short, dissolving conventional boundaries.

Putting these thoughts together, what emerges is a case for using collaborative innovation for solving some of the biggest issues facing humanity – issues such as climate change, food security, basic health and education. 

As Kris pointed out, the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies is changing how we work and collaborate.  And as we master these collaborative technologies, it will be only natural, and expected, that we use them to help solve our biggest issues. 

As we design these collaborative mechanisms, we should keep three points in mind:

The company undertook the transformation journey few years back when it saw huge losses of $110 million in 2001 and today is set to change the rules of the game with the introduction of Nano. The learning from this is that Impossible is Nothing and companies need to constantly innovate.

In response to my earlier post on automotive industry, a reader asked the above question.

I think, at a level of abstraction, the basic lean manufacturing principles of abolishing waste (muda) apply to Product Development as well. However manufacturing processes are largely unidirectional and recurring while Product Development processes are iterative and are to a certain extent unique for each new product. Hence the tools and methodologies for identifying waste and addressing it have to be different. Of late a number of good books have emerged on the topic of lean Product Development that illustrates some pertinent tools and methodologies. The Lean Enterprise Institute of MIT has also conducted copious research on the topic. So we can expect more excitement on this topic in the time to come.

On a related note, we are seeing the adoption of lean methodologies to software development emerge very quickly. Drawing a parallel between product development and software development, we can definitely see the trend increasing in the near future where components of lean will merge with existing development methodologies.

Another core area of merging of these principles is the adoption of agile methodologies to drive consistent improvement (Kaizen) and we believe all these streams will eventually merge in the near future.

In the final post of the series above, I had painted a potential scenario wherein peer-to-peer lending sites find a way to securitize and sell the loans transacted; I was happy to read a recent report in the American Banker (read here – subscription may be required) which mentioned that Prosper has filed a registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US to develop a system  enabling people to resell the loans originated through its website.

While I am personally happy that a trend I had predicted has been vindicated by actions in the market, this piece of news is probably very timely, given the credit-market crisis that is unraveling around us. It reinforces the fact that the Internet is constantly driving more innovative and efficient ways for markets to exploit newer transaction opportunities. It also signals the fact that Internet based business models can build resilience in traditional markets.

Prosper’s strategic move may have a limited impact in the short term, given that it currently caters to niche, high cost, individual loans; however, larger financial institutions focused on retail lending need to watch developments in this area very carefully!

We have read numerous news-articles on the efforts by the major manufacturers to launch hybrid cars over the past couple of years. I am aware of a few models from Toyota that have hit the roads and seem to have found a strong 'green' franchise. General Motors, the largest car manufacturer worldwide (yet, with Toyota nipping at its heels!), has announced grand plans to launch an 'unplug-and-drive' electric hybrid, aptly called the Volt.