Ongoing Innovation: Tom Malloy on Sustaining the Relevance and Impact of Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs - Knowledge@Wharton

A look at Adobe Systems innovation practice in an interview with Tom Malloy head of Adobe Advanced Technology Labs.

The interview is one of a series conducted by Knowledge@Wharton a fountain of university student's inquiry into a range of important "vertical" slices of the knowledge pie.

Here is a key quote from the interview about how Adobe innovates:

"New product development, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. First of all, it is not strictly a technology-centric approach. So when I talk about new product development, I am not just talking about new product development within the Advanced Technology Labs. I am talking about our philosophy for new product development throughout the company. In the case of new products, we try to mimic the venture capital model as much as possible within the context of a medium-to-large sized company. We believe in backing entrepreneurial people, and putting people in front of the ideas.

The company is full of ideas. The critical resource is entrepreneurial people who know how to plow a path that is not as well defined as it is if you are working on the "nth" version of an existing product."

Ongoing Innovation: Tom Malloy on Sustaining the Relevance and Impact of Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs - Knowledge@Wharton

Innovation Champions and Networks Survey

We've just posted the results of a very interesting survey about how innovation champions and innovation networks help companies to evoke more and better innovations. More than 200 people responded.

The key insight from this survey is that innovation champions add the greatest value by helping to improve the human dimensions of innovation - by enabling people to have time to work on their ideas, giving encouragement, and helping come up with good ideas.

A surprise to us was that innovation software tools were not considered all that important.

You can view and download the complete results at permanentinnovation.com/survey (along with the results of our prior survey).

iinnovate: a podcast about innovation and entre preneurship:

A major driving force for innovation in the Silicon Valley springs from the entrepreneurial environment of the Stanford campus - here 2 bright Stanford entrepreneurs-to-be interview Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google - worth a listen. As Schmidt says " I come to Stanford to teach because I always learn a lot from my students questions'" Here are some great student's questions in this interview of the CEO of one of the most successful entrepreneurships in Silicon Valley history.

iinnovate: a podcast about innovation and entrepreneurship: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Open Design Space at EPFL - space as an instrument for business model innovation and visual thinking

Open Design Space at EPFL - space as an instrument for business model innovation and visual thinking
Originally uploaded by Alex Osterwalder.

great photo - visual design tools built into collaborative spaces make teamwork much more productive.

The greatest innovations of all time

View the Slide Show The Greatest Innovations of All Time

Innovation from Nintendo - The Wii controller - Less is More!

THE game for a broader audience - going beyond gamers.

Innovator Shigeru Miyamoto tells the Game Developers Conference how the Nintendo Wii controller was developed, among other musings.

PC World - Nintendo Legend Discusses Wiis and Miis

When Things Get Chaotic, Part 2

Speaking of energy enonomics and the dynamics of a changing energy market (see the blog post here for Monday, March 5), the 6th annual Clean Energy Trends report found that the market for renewable energy sources was about $55 billion worldwide in 2006, and forecast growth to $226 billion by 2016.

(Look for their press release dated March 6.)

Slow Down to Speed Up

We were doing a workshop last week with a group of people who are innovators in education. Innovation in this sector is not easy to do, largely because there are so many social forces that resist change. Many parents, teachers, and adminstrators say, "It was good enough for me 20 (or 30) years ago, so it's good enough for my children."

Except in many cases it's not. The world has changed, and change is accelerating. The education tools and methods of the 20th century may not work now (and they may not have worked all that well then, either).

But introducing change into these systems requires perserverence and cleverness. A strategy that emerged in the discussion as one of the most promising is "slow down to speed up," by which we mean that creating a successful track record in small or incremental changes may create the context in which people are willing to experiment with larger-scale change also.

But hit them with the big stuff first and you're likely to alienate them, which will end up costing you time in the end.

Slow down to speed up is thus an innovation strategy when the controlling context is created by social dynamics rather than technological ones.

When Things Get Chaotic

I'm reading a good book called "Beyond Oil" by Kenneth Deffeyes, which explores what happens when we start running out of oil. It's not an alarmist book, but rather a detailed discussion by an oil company veteran of what's likely to happen, and when.

An interesting comment in the book comes from Suzy Sachs, a Bell systems engineer. She notes that "systems become chaotic when the load approaches the capacity of the system." (p. 31) In the oil context this refers to price volatility when demand catches up to supply, which is what happened in the Oil Shock era of the 1973-1978. When there isn't excess capacity, the mismatch between supply and demand causes volatility. It's about to start happening again.

The same dynamic is what causes stop-and-go traffic jams on moving freeways - no slack; no buffers. (Technically, it's fluid dynamics.)

Such a situation simply begs for innovation, and yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle obliges by looking in detail at the flip side of the same issue, a cover story on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are developing new technologies for alternative energy sources, including solar, ethanol, and algae. The economics here are complemented with an environmental element - these sources are not carbon-based.

Today's New York Times also has a related article - which explores the new technologies that oil companies are using to extract more oil from existing fields. Yields are increasing dramatically in some fields because of the many innovations that petroleum engineers are developing.

When big money is on the line (not to mentioned the future of civilization), innovation is everywhere. Entrepreneurs step up to meet demand and create new demand, and innovation is their means.