Silicon Valley Innovation at Your Company

How do you get companies to start investing in future innovations, when their tendency is to finance past success? I read this article about Gary Hamel's observations on Silicon Valley dynamics and how these principles can foster innovation in a corporate setting:
  1. Requires a diversity of funding options.
  2. Creates an environment of emergent business planning
  3. Naturally aligns with "angel investors" (sponsors with direct interest and coaching capability)
Hamel suggests replicating this effect internally by creating a corporate wide network of "angel investors", allocating a portion of corporate budgets to these individuals, and encouraging innovators to "pitch" their ideas, competing for the attention and funding needed.

Read the full article, or Gary Hamel's book, The Future of Management, for more thought provoking ideas...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 90-9-1 Rule

Image
What does successful collaboration look like? Understanding how communities and people interact online is essential for setting the right expectations. Often people misinterpret metrics or focus their energy in the wrong direction because they do not have a reasonable benchmark to assess how well their on-line communities are functioning. All Things Are Not Equal In any team or community you can expect to find a variety of expertise and strengths. We usually don't expect everyone to do the exact same thing, or to have the same skill sets and strengths. In fact, the complementary nature of individual strengths is essential to creating strong teams and vibrant communities. Knowing this, it is surprising that the default expectation for online interaction is identical contribution, with performance metrics that reinforce this unhealthy view. Not only is this unrealistic, it's a sure recipe for failure! Setting Expectations Most everyone is familiar with the Pareto principle
Read more

The Knowledge Factory

Image
SECI Model at Fuji Xerox - from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology A Model for Learning When researching knowledge management and organizational learning you're bound to come across the SECI model and the work of the Nonaka and Takeuchi. Appreciating the value of tacit knowledge (carried in people's minds) and explicit knowledge (codified or articulated) is paramount for the knowledge based industries. The authors of the SECI model emphasize that as valuable as the knowledge assets may be, the process of creating knowledge and how it is transformed is where the real potential lies. Simply managing existing knowledge is not enough . The Heart of the Machine Intuitively we know that human talent is the critical success factor in hi-tech and other knowledge based contexts. Creativity and innovation are primarily human functions and are hard to systematize but are essential for ongoing success. Additionally, the picture below demonstrates how all significa
Read more

Superstar Productivity in the Cloud

Image
I've been a Getting Things Done © disciple for a few years. Over that time I learned a couple of secrets to leverage David Allen's principles in my day to day work environment: Work context is everything - physical context is becoming less important Keep it simple - use the parts that make sense for you Work Context I spend 80% of my day online.  Either on my computer, or my Android phone.  A large portion of that time is spent communicating with people ... and Gmail does most of the heavy lifting.  Since this is where I work from, this is where my GTD experiments were honed.  If you have a similar work profile, perhaps you'll find something useful in my experience. Getting Organized 1. Collection The Gmail Inbox is a natural collector.  Don't fight it ... feed it! Stuff all ideas, tasks and loose ends into your inbox.  How?  Simply email yourself. I've added a little twist to boost this process.  First, I added a contact with the email address of my_email+ac
Read more