On the Really Simple Sidi blog, an employee from Elsevier Engineering Information points to the cover story in the March 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review about Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop innovation strategy: “In a HBR article (subs req) Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab who are VP for product innovation and knowledge and senior VP for corporate research and development respectively for P&G explains how P&G is transforming their innovation process by aiming to acquire 50% of their innovation outside of their company through implementing a “connect and develop” strategy. Authors list yet2, innocentive, ninesigma, and yourencore as some of the sources that they rely in the open networks.”

On the Connect + Develop website, P&G chairman A.G. Lafley lays out the building blocks of the company’s innovation strategy:

“We’ve collaborated with outside partners for generations - but the importance of these alliances to P&G has never been greater. Our vision is simple. We want P&G to be known as the company that collaborates - inside and out - better than any other company in the world. I want us to be the absolute best at spotting, developing and leveraging relationships with best-in-class partners in every part of our business. In fact, I want P&G to be a magnet for the best-in-class. The company you most want to work with because you know a partnership with P&G will be more rewarding than any other option available to you.”

Tags: P&G innovation strategy

The X Prize Foundation, which organized the highly successful $10 million Ansari X PRIZE competition that was eventually won by Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, just announced the creation of a new X Prize to inspire entrepreneurial innovation in the automotive industry. Although the details are still being firmed up, it looks like the prize will encourage cutting-edge research into automobile fuel efficiency. Not sure if the new prize will require alternative fuel sources or traditional fuel sources (i.e. gas from the local filling station), but the premise sounds interesting enough. Mark Goodstein, the recently appointed executive director for the new X Prize, explains what the new award is all about:

“The X PRIZE is about changing paradigms. The current paradigm is that it’s perfectly acceptable to drive a car that only gets 20 or 30 miles per gallon. This prize is about leveraging cash and opportunity to effect positive change in the environment, economy and geopolitics.”

Anyway, you may recognize the name Mark Goodstein - he was the founder of GoTo.com as well as the founder of X1 Technologies (no relation to the X Prize). With a successful serial entrepreneur at the helm, the new X Prize competition should get off to a running start. John Neff of Autoblog suggests that the cash prize will finally spur some real breakthrough innovation in Detroit:

“As fun as the X-Cup race to outer space was, a major breakthrough in fuel efficiency for automobiles would be a much more useful achievement than being able to cart fat cats with deep pockets into lower orbit. No official word yet on the contest’s rules or what the prize will be, though we suspect it will likely be in the many millions.

Since it seems that the auto industry moves only by the hand of market pressure, here’s hoping that a large quantity of cash will motivate all those amateur engineers out there to save us from oblivion. You can bet that Autoblog will be sponsoring Eric Bryant, our own resident engineer, who can build a vehicle out of a garbage can, a roll of duct tape and a wire hanger that runs on Boo-Berry Kool-Aid and gets 168 mpg.”

Tags: XPrize fuel automobile

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen of the Hobby Princess blog points to the new Platform 21 initiative in Amsterdam, which sounds like an interesting showcase of design & innovation in the center of a large urban metropolis:

“Putting money in cultural activities within an urban area is an investment that pays back. At least that is what the directors of ING Real Estate in Amsterdam believe. ING, Premsela Dutch Design Foundation and the Amsterdam City Council have started an amazing project, which aims at building a 5000 square meter space for design, fashion and creation in the city of Amsterdam. Joanna van der Zandenfrom, the manager and main architect of Platform 21, has admirably fresh ideas about what design is and how it should be exhibited.”

The building, which was originally envisioned as a design museum of sorts, is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2009. (the architect will be announced in mid-2006) According to the event’s website, Platform 21 will be “an international meeting point, real and virtual, where seemingly disparate groups can inspire and strengthen each other: a network for people curious to explore our new century… We look forward to experimenting with different ways of exhibiting design and fashion, showing the process of creation, and allowing interested designers and companies to share and test their latest projects.”

Not clear yet on what Platform 21 is? This could be a tough one to wrap your arms around, given that, the Platform 21 logo will randomly change over time:

“The logo of Platform 21 is a small platform in itself. It will change in style, colour and pattern according to its purpose, the season or Platform 21’s programme. Its creator, graphic designer Roelof Mulder, foresees that the Platform 21 logo will become more than just a corporate image. He imagines a fashion label, a 3-D product design, a cookie, a sculpture. Watch this page to follow the changing moods of our logo and download your favourites.”

Dude, groovy. Instead of a mood ring, a mood logo.

Tags: innovation Amsterdam Platform21

IFTF’s Future Now blog points to a new working paper (The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’) from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which suggests that innovation is becoming too complex for individuals to go it alone. Instead, the recipe for innovation success includes teams and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Anyway, the download from NBER costs $5, so the Future Now blog has generously summarized the key points of the paper:

(1) As the volume of knowledge grows over time, invention requires a depth and breadth of knowledge that is impossible for single individuals to attain;

(2) This will encourage researchers to become more specialized;

(3) Innovation will require more teamwork

Tags: innovation collaboration teamwork

[image: How To Save The World]

Today’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link available) has a fascinating feature piece on how some companies are attempting to nurture worker innovation by replicating the success of the MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest and most famous artist colony. MacDowell has been home to Aaron Copland, Alice Walker, Thornton Wilder, Leonard Bernstein and James Baldwin, so it knows a thing or two about innovation and creativity. By understanding how poets, painters and writers tap into creativity, business professionals are hoping to learn new approaches to solving existing business problems. While turning a company into an artist colony may not be possible - at MacDowell, colonists work in 32 isolated cabins with panoramic views of nature and dine out of wooden picnic baskets that silently appear each day - it does look like there is a long-term trend toward cultivating creativity within corporations. This might take the form of unconventional work environments and greater exchange of ideas across disciplines during “odd-hour encounters.”

In one example cited by the Wall Street Journal, a maker of specialized printing machinery assembled a team of engineers, software programmers and marketers and simulated the working conditions of an artist colony, hoping to come up with a new label application machine. This approach could become a model for future innovation, says Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class: “Managers typically tap only a small portion of workers’ creative capabilities. Successful companies increasingly will look more like an artist colony or inventor’s laboratory than the office of today.”

Tags: creativity innovation artistcolony

[image: The MacDowell Colony postcard by Lisa Dahl]