August 2006 Archives

Babson Insight: The Iconoclast's Approach to Innovation: An Interview with Dean Kamen Professors Allan Cohen and Jay Rao from Babson Executive Education interviewed Dean Kamen for Babson Insight. A self-taught physicist and entrepreneur, Dean Kamen has a profound insight into the innovation process.

Federal Enterprise Architecture : This website provides excellent definitions of KM terms.

DealBook - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds - New York Times Companies continually make resource allocation decisions and there are times when they decide that investing in their own shares will have a better return than making other investment choices. In my opinion, growth inevitably suffers because a company is buying back its own stock. Mature companies should be investing in and actively growing a portfolio of new ideas and opportunities. Growth requires cash and if the cash is being invested in a company's own stock, the result can only offer short term reward in the stock market and may actually the company for the long term.

Thinking Faster: Don't make me think

Enterprise Systems | Tool-and-Die Makers in a Knowledge Economy

I created a public Google Notebook on Innovation that contains clippings from interesting sites and articles on Innovaiton.  I believe that process, service and product innovation are critical to company success and renewal.  So that it will be a consistently useful tool, I will add to the innovation notebook as I continue to research the topic.

As I read my RSS feeds tonight, I came across Manager Tools because it just won an award for producing one of the best podcasts. The site is good too. Lots of good content on managing a team and self-management.

Eric Mankin, a research director at Babson Executive Education, recently discussed some of his insight into law firm innovation.  In an email from The Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center, he reports:

"I’ve been spending part of my summer on a research project looking at innovation in US law firms, or the lack thereof.   According to the interviews I’ve been conducting with lawyers, consultants, and law practice administrators, law firms may be some of the least innovative organizations in the US economy.  This is partially due to the nature of law as a profession.  Laws don’t change very often.  As one of my interviewees noted:

“Lawyers practice a profession that is rooted firmly in the power of precedent.  They don’t want to change and are very suspicious of change efforts.”  Retired Chief Administrative Officer of several law firms, July 06

It’s also due to the ways in which law firms structure themselves.  It’s hard to be innovative when you’re billing by the hour and you’re measured by the number of hours that you bill.  

“Innovation is not a dominant strategy; profitability is.  Law firms will do anything to preserve profitability and not take risks.” Consultant to Law Firms,  July 06"

 In addition to Eric's work on Law Firm Innovation, the Financial Times published a section on law firm innovation.  In pursuit of modern practice documents innovations submitted to the FT from British law firms.   In contrast to Eric's work in the United States, UK law firm's have many more examples of innovative offerings and processes.

Innovation Weblog - Use a strategy canvas to identify innovation opportunities Years ago this type of chart was called a comb chart. The Y axis depicts the degree to which each competitor differentiates their product or service offering. The X axis shows each of the competitive dimensions that the players can choose to compete upon. With this analysis you can visually compare a company's strategy with other players in the market.

Innovation is notoriously difficult to measure.  The Britsh Quality Foundation Innovation Group Weblog lists several approaches including measuring innovation inputs, innovation process performance and innovation outputs. For a balanced and forward looking view of innovation in an organisation, they recommend 8 to 12 measures.

In a recent Financial Times letter to the editor, IBM's chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, described how multinational enterprises have evolved into "globally integrated enterprises" He believes this change represents an entirely different type of organizaiton. He says:

The globally integrated enterprise, fashions its strategy, management and operations to integrate production - and deliver value to clients - worldwide. That has been made possible by shared technologies and shared business standards, built on top of a global information technology and communications infrastructure. Because new technology and business models are allowing companies to treat their functions and operations as component pieces, companies can pull those pieces apart and put them back together in new combinations, based on judgments about which operations the company wants to excel at and which are best suited to its partners.

This article was actually a summary of a larger article published in Foreign Affairs, in which he describes how "globally integrated enterprises" will transform geopolitics, trade and education.

Here is an unusually rich picture of a learning community which was presented in the Learning Circuts Blog. Click through for a larger image.