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!  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.

Clayton Christensen’s Innoblog points to an article in the New York Times (”Snowbound Neverland”) describing a disruptive new business model for the ski resort industry being developed by Echo Mountain Park in Colorado:

“Echo is a new resort built exclusively for freestyle snowboarders and skiers. It is much smaller than traditional resorts, covering just 50 acres with a vertical drop of 600 feet, miniscule for Colorado. There are no groomed runs, no gondolas, no moguls; Echo is 100% terrain park, all jumps, rails, and half pipe. It is relatively cheap and easy to operate since there is much less need for snow coverage and maintenance and it can handle considerably higher utilization than its competitors (many more freestylers fit on a slope at a time since they tend to congregate around jumps, watching their friends and taking turns). It is more skate park on snow than downhill resort.

This approach is much more economically viable than, say, building another Vail, and it is also perfectly targeted at the fastest growing segment of the winter sports industry – the youth market. Prices are low ($35 vs. $70-plus at competing resorts), the entire park is lighted so lifts run until 9pm daily, and the mountain is a quick 30 minute drive from Denver. The cafeteria sells microwavable burritos and Red Bull, and kids crowd around video game consoles while they eat. The resort operators field user requests and suggestions online, actively adding and subtracting features according to popularity. The décor, music, and atmosphere targets the young.

Jerry Pettit, Echo’s owner, sums it up: “It’s nothing against places like Aspen, but the young people we consulted early on told us they can’t afford to pay $75 for a lift ticket or $14 for a buffalo burger…What kept coming back to us was: ‘Keep it inexpensive. Make it for us.’”

Anyway, over at Flickr, there’s a cool collection of snowboarding pics by photographer Matthew Staver that were taken at the opening of the Echo Mountain snowboard park in March 2006.

[image: Snowboarding at Echo Mountain Park by Matthew Staver]

One of my favorite year-end lists comes from The New York Times Magazine, which for six years has been putting together a list of the most important and influential ideas of the year every December. Even if you read an impressive number of blogs, subscribe to FORTUNE magazine and occasionally pick up the random issue of Scientific American or Popular Science, there’s a good chance that you would have missed about half of the 70-75 ideas the Times comes up with each year. Anyway, here’s the intro to the 6th annual Year in Ideas from New York Times Magazine:

“This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity - the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.”

Among the ideas worth checking out: empty-stomach intelligence, digital Maoism, psychological neoteny, the truth of workplace rumors, the LifeStraw, smart elevators, and my personal favorite: walk-in health care.

Michael Arrington of the influential Tech Crunch site has put together a list of his favorite Web 2.0 companies and products of 2006. The list includes the fifteen products or services that he uses everyday and couldn’t do without:

* 800-Free-411
* Amie Street
* Ask City

* Blue Dot
* Digg
* Flickr
* Flock
* Gmail
* NetNewsWire
* NetVibes
* Pandora
* Skype

* TechMeme
* WordPress
* YouTube

[image: Web 2.0, courtesy of Markus Angermeier]

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently outlined a $95 million R&D initiative intended to keep California on the leading edge of innovation in areas such as nanotech, clean tech and biotech. The “Governor’s Research and Innovation Initiative” will help create jobs while also preserving the environment. In a statement, Schwarzenegger explained that, “as a leader in developing new technologies, California will reap tremendous rewards for our economy and environment from this investment in our innovation infrastructure.”

The governor’s R&D initiative focuses on four primary projects:

* The Helios Project at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is developing new energy sources, improving energy conservation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions;

* The Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, which plans to develop biofuels for use in transportation;

* The California Centers for Science and Innovation, which will work with private companies to conduct research in IT, biomedical and nano technology;

* The Petascale Supercomputer project, which is building the next-generation supercomputer.

[image: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the winner of the Arnold Classic]

The International Herald Tribune has posted a wide-ranging review of the best in design for 2006. Among the highlights:

(1) The World Economic Forum in Davos made “design” part of its strategic agenda for the first time;

(2) Architects experimented with new types of emergency housing for the victims of Hurricane Katrina;

(3) The designers working on the $100-laptop project for the One Laptop per Child nonprofit foundation produced their first models of the X0-1;

(4) A group of Guatemalan politicians, academics and industrialists enlisted the help of Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau in the ¡GuateAmala! campaign, to encourage their compatriots to be more optimistic about the future after decades of civil war and human rights abuse;

(5) Black finally replaced silver as the “default color” for digital and electronic products (e.g. Apple’s iPod Hi-Fi and the glossy black Apple MacBook);

(6) Rapid prototyping technologies, originally used in the automotive and aerospace industries, became part of the mainstream (e.g. the Sketch furniture made by Swedish design group Front);

There’s also a lot to look forward to in 2007:

“Take Apple’s long-rumored iPhone; and the Great Journeys series of Penguin paperbacks designed by David Pearson. Or Microsoft’s Multimouse, which will enable more children in poorly resourced schools to use the same computer, and Spore, the ambitious game devised by Will Wright as his follow-up to The Sims. And next summer the XO- 1 laptop will be shipped to schools throughout the developing world, albeit with a price tag closer to $150, than $100, for the first year or so.”

[image: Sketch Furniture by Front (Sweden)]

With retailers such as Trader Joe’s, Safeway and Wal-Mart branching out into natural and organic food offerings, Whole Foods is fighting back with an innovation of its own. The Austin-based supermarket chain recently launched its first wellness spa located within one of its stores in North Dallas (the really wealthy part of Dallas where the “ladies who lunch” hang out with their Hermes scarves and plan their next shopping trip to Neiman Marcus). The thinking, of course, is that people who care about what they eat will also care about their overall mental and physical well-being:

“Refresh: The Everyday Spa by Whole Foods Market is a new venture for the Austin-based supermarket chain. Housed in a 4,500-square foot space above the main floor are seven treatment rooms stocked with organic cotton sheets and towels and offering various massages, scrubs and other treatments. Massage chairs on the balcony overlooking the main grocery floor will provide a range of five- and 10-minute pick-me-ups. Spa guests who feel a bit peckish can order from the chef’s spa menu (the store also has a staff dietitian who can be booked for menu planning, diet consultations and shopping guidance). The spa reception area also is stocked with Whole Foods’ higher-end beauty and body-care products, including the Dr. Hauschka line, along with organic-cotton bedding and towels, and organic-fiber clothing.”

Taking a big picture view, this experiment by Whole Foods is an interesting development. Judging from the spectacular success of the minute clinic concept in other retail stores, it appears that people are willing to satisfy their healthcare and wellness needs without the help of traditional healthcare providers. Speed, convenience and pricing, it appears, are powerful motivators.

[image: A massage table at Whole Foods]

As much attention as innovation is attracting in the business world, it’s perhaps not surprising that the world of academia is also re-thinking the importance of innovation and creativity within the curriculum. In one notable example, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs recently announced the creation of the Bachelor of Innovation™ (BI) family of degrees. After debating which elements of engineering, entrepreneurship, business and law should be blended together to form the basis of an innovation academic program, the university finalized the creation of an “Innovation Core.” This core has some unique aspects to it, including the use of long-term, multi-disciplinary teams working on real projects for companies; a course in proposal preparation and responding to RFPs; and an undergraduate law course with half of it dedicated to intellectual property issues.

The Bachelor of Innovation™ program is not a degree in innovation, it’s actually a family of related majors (much like a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science) with a common core supporting a mix of degrees. The university currently offers 5 BI degrees and expects to add more soon. The core of the majors is the same (e.g. BI in Business and BI in EE have exactly the same required courses), only the electives are different.

[image: The Bachelor of Innovation]

Booz Allen Hamilton examined R&D spending patterns at 1,000 global companies and found that less than 10% of them were deriving full value from money spent. Which leads, of course, to the inevitable question: Why do some high-tech companies get great bang for their R&D dollars while others seem to get very little?. Being a “big spender” may work on Broadway, but it is not necessarily the best way to go about innovation at America’s biggest and best companies. David Gardner of Information Week explains:

“Led by chief investigator Barry Jaruzelski, a Booz Allen VP, the team sought to find the key, if any, to the attributes that lead to innovation at companies. “We tortured the data,” says Jaruzelski, observing that 10,000 separate analyses were performed. “People think there are predictable black boxes out there. They think if you put money in, innovation comes out. If only it worked that way,” he says. While high-tech firms with winning innovation strategies approach R&D with different tactical methods, they employ a major standard that seems to work for all: a deep understanding of customer needs, says Jaruzelski. They also used an end-to-end multifunction process in developing products, he says.”

Using this methodology, Booz Allen found that Apple, eBay, Google, Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) and Yahoo! were among some of the “high leverage innovators.” Somewhat disturbingly, Ford Motor Company was the #1 spender on R&D in 2005 - and we all know how well that has gone…

[video clip: “Hey Big Spender”]