wolfc's blah blah blog

I was one of the panelists to share insights about how companies can use social networking for innovation. The event was on Friday January 14, 2011 at Santa Clara University.It was a really interesting event where leaders from several major companies as well as knowledgeable academics discussed external and internal challenges and approaches for leveraging social networking for innovation.

Some goodies I picked up from the speakers include:

• ideas are an organizing social object
• Techshop sounds like a way cool community workshop with industrial tools to help get the maker out in all of us
• give people access to a network of collaborators, give them access to the right tools.... get out of the way
• crowdsourcing can be very good for incremental innovation, disruptive breakthroughs perhaps not so much
• The crowd might miss stuff.
• position yourself to become the 'escape valve' of ideas
• "Technology has the shelf life of a banana" - Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems
• Difference between Consumers & Enterprise with respect to innovation = consumers not about money, enterprise is ALWAYS about money
• Pain for external innovation is socializing value of co-creation and negotiating IP
• We are clearly entering a future where there will be more and more open innovation markets, perhaps there will be too many
• There are idea networks and there are action networks.  (I personally love this 'action network' term, captures the essence I think).
• there's not doubt about need for mobility going forward but there's disagreement to how critical mobility is for supporting innovation efforts.
• The Chicken and the Pig fable is an analogy for the different levels of commitment.  (Personally I think there are many many chickens dressed up like Pigs.)

Of course there were many more insights, especially during the internal panel but I didn't get them all down in notes. I also walked away with a list of web sites to check out for some reason or another.  Here's some things I heard about and sounded interesting enough I looked them up:

• Magic Seth - guy does amazing mind-reading tricks via technology
• ninesigma - the ebay of open innovation?
• Build it with me - connect business folks, idea folks, and technical folks
• Techshop - community workshop with industrial tools to help get the maker out in all of us

Special thanks to Terri Griffith and Tatyana Kanzaveli for organizing the event and including me as a panelist.