I was recently reading a blog for Thought Leaders and something struck me. Thought Leaders are the key to Innovation. If you don’t have anyone taking the lead, innovation will not just come out of nowhere.

Thought leaders create new ideas, new products, new services, write new ideas, publish books, reports, etc. The whole area of thought leadership is surrounded by experts, authors, consultants, professors, and even entrepreneurs. At the site linked above, you will notice they have a thought leader mini-course soon available at no charge, but you have to sign up at this time. Anyway, my take is that you will learn a lot about innovation, if you study thought leaders… and maybe become one yourself.

If you want to innovate in your company, organization, or association, one way is to outsource your innovation by partnering with experts.  This is a great way to research new product ideas, marketing campaigns, and a host of other valued-added solutions for your customers and clients.  In fact, if you do it right, you can even partner with a collection of experts and they can be your research team.  Stay tuned for more thoughts on how to outsource your innovation!

Yes, new jetliner that could fly many more times as fast as the Concorde, burn only hydrogen and get you from Brussels to Sydney in four hours is on the drawing boards for the future. The plane is Reaction Engine’s A2 concept, a Mach 5 (3,400 mph) aircraft for 300 passengers. It is being funded by the European Union’s Long Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and technologies project. If they build it the plane will produce virtually no carbon emissions. In examining the record and performance of the Concorde the engineers today say that it could not fly far enough to do trans-Pacific routes and its engines were efficient at only Mach 0.9. The gas mileage was also horrible and the passenger capacity was small as well.

The new engine, named the A2, operates on two modes—a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems. Once the plane takes off and reaches Mach 2.5 the second mode takes over and it can reach cruising speed over the Pacific of Mach 5. Joseph Schetz, a hypersonic propulsion expert at Virginia Tech when interviewed said, “there’s nothing fundamentally unsound about the A2’s plans. Whether it’s doable or not is a whole other conversation”.

The engineers will face crucial design obstacles including building heat exchangers that are reliable enough for hypersonic flights. Another huge challenge will be manufacturing hydrogen fuel on a large scale without emitting carbon in the process. Another potential problem is that the engineers had to design the craft without windows for the 300 passengers. The type they would have to use that are standard on the space shuttle would be too heavy for it and would cause construction and fuel excesses, as well. But in our foreseeable future we could very well see the A2 as the new long flight airliner of choice.

U.S. researchers at five universities have identified 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. The U. of Rochester, Scripps Research Institute, U. of Southern California, U of California San Francisco U. of California Los Angeles have all been searching for ways to diagnose disease potential in human saliva. A recent discovery they said could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests that could be done without the need for a single drop of blood being drawn. As many as 20 percent of the proteins that are found in saliva are also found in blood, according to Fred Hagen, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who worked on the study. This is potentially a large field that has many clinical implications in the area of disease diagnostics.

The researchers have hopes that saliva-based tests could be used to diagnose cancer, heart disease, diabetes and a number of other conditions. Early analysis has already turned up a number of proteins with known roles in Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases; breast, colorectal and pancreatic cancer and diabetes. They collected saliva from 23 healthy men and women of several races and tested saliva samples using some form of mass spectrometry, which determines the identity of proteins based on measurements of their mass and charge. Like a genome, which lists all of the genes in an organism, a proteome is a complete map of proteins. While genes provide the instruction manual, proteins carry out the instructions by regulating cellular processes. Already there are saliva-based antibody tests to detect human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, and hepatitis infections. This protein map will provide new targets.

The researchers envision in the future that spitting in a tube and looking for a marker like a breast cancer marker could potentially be done at home and maybe eliminate some mammograms. This information has been made publicly available, and it’s expected that a number of research groups will be picking their favorite targets and developing their own tests. That is the intent — to create a wealth of data to stimulate more research and increase the chances of producing better diagnostic tests.

Many great companies of today and in the past have remained in their top respective industry segments because of INNOVATION within. There are large ones like GE and McDonalds and very small ones, maybe just like your own. There are many definitions OF INNOVATION you can choose from: “the act of introducing something new”, “the successful exploitation of new ideas”, the Peter Drucker one—“change that creates a new dimension of performance. Whichever one you choose, they will all mean the same. In economics, business and government policy,- something new - must be substantially different, not an insignificant change. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. Innovations are intended to make someone better off, and the succession of many innovations grows the whole economy. The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental changes to products, processes or services. The often unspoken goal of innovation is to solve a problem. An important distinction is normally made between invention and innovation. Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process, while innovation is the first attempt to carry it out into practice. An innovation is not an innovation until someone successfully implements and makes money on an idea. Extracting the essential concept of innovation from these other closely linked notions is no easy thing.
There are a number of types of innovation that have been identified by business school teachers: Business model innovation, Marketing innovation, Organizational innnovation, Process, Product, Service, Supply chain, Substantial, Financial, Incremental Breakthrough or radical, New technological systems, Social. Eric von Hippel has identified end-user innovation as by far the most important and critical in his classic book on the subject, Sources of Innovation. Innovation by businesses is achieved in many ways, with much attention now given to formal research and development for “breakthrough innovations.” But innovations may be developed by less formal on-the-job modifications of practice, through exchange and combination of professional experience and by many other routes. Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School has written a definitive book on the importance of experimentation. Experimentation Matters argues that every company’s ability to innovate depends on a series of experiments [successful or not], that help create new products and services or improve old ones. Once innovation occurs, innovations may be spread from the innovator to other individuals and groups. This process has been studied extensively in the scholarly literature from a variety of viewpoints, most notably in Everett Rogers’ classic book, The Diffusion of Innovations.
One driver for innovation programs in corporations is to achieve growth objectives. Companies cannot grow through cost reduction and re-engineering alone. Innovation is the key element in providing aggressive top-line growth, and for increasing bottom-line results. Systematic programs of organizational innovation are most frequently driven by: Improved quality, Creation of new markets, Extension of the product range, Reduced labour costs, Improved production processes, Reduced materials, Reduced environmental damage, Replacement of products/services, Reduced energy consumption, Conformance to regulations. There is often failure in organized company programs too before success is achieved. Some research quotes failure rates of fifty percent while other research quotes as high as ninety percent of innovation has no impact on organisational goals. So do not be discouraged. The following are common across all organizations at some stage in their life cycle. Here are the five top failure problems: Poor goal definition. Poor alignment of actions to goals, Poor participation in teams, Poor monitoring of results, Poor communication and access to information.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  Many of you have been asking if we’re going to be doing our 2008 Innovation series, and of course, the answer is Yes.

Remember… as Peter Drucker has emphatically said… 1 of the 4 Top areas of business is Innovation; and if you don’t stay on top of the who, what, and how of innovation, you’ll end up in the dust!

And we, at The Innovation Insider are fully committed to giving you what you need to take your enterprise to the next level using the latest cutting edge Innovation Strategies!  We’re Looking  forward to having you join us.