See you all on April!

“Disruptive innovations trade off pure performance in favor of simplicity, convenience or affordability. Disrupters target customers who find existing solutions too expensive or too complicated. They offer “good enough” solutions at a lower price.”

I would add to this description “with a profitable/sustainable business model”.

In this article the authors provide some examples of successful disruptive innovations such as Southwest Airlines (for those of us living in Europe, EasyJet is the european version of this example) or Spot Runner and introduce Vonage (an VoIP service provider) to show that not all disruptions win.

Guy Kawasaki has also published in his weblog an article that includes picture with a visualization of this speech by Martha McGinnis (in the original post you can also find a bigger version of this image, which has better quality, specially if you want to print it).

• How Kayak Users Built a New Industry (related to user innovations, if you are interested in this topic it you may want to check Eric Von Hippel’s work and the two posts on Lead Users previously published in this blog).
• Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation (Eric Von Hippel also has published some interesting papers on this topic).
• Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win? (also related to user innovations).
• The Accidental Innovator.
• The Strategic Way to Go to Market.
• The Power of Ordinary Practices.
• Lessons Not Learned About Innovation.
• What Happens When the Economics of Scarcity Meets the Economics of Abundance? (although it is not directly related to innovation, it is related to “Long Tail”, one of the topics I cover in my other blog).

The main difference among this new tool and the existing free search service of USPTO is that the latter only supports full text search for patents issued in 1976 and onwards. It has to be noticed that there are also several paid tools that provide advanced patent search features.

Consequently, this new tool could be useful not only for academics and researchers (Patents are commonly used to measure innovation) but also for innovators and inventors. Nevertheless, initially I would use this tool carefully as it seems that not all patents may be returned when searching in Google Patent Search (via Paul Kedrosky’s blog).

Finally and for those of you not so interested in this “serious” uses of this tool, you may want to check Wired post on this subject which points out some “cool” patents.

1. Analyze the organization and its need for a change
2. Create a shared vision and common direction
3. Separate from the past
4. Create a sense of urgency
5. Support a strong leader role
6. Line up political sponsorship
7. Craft an implementation plan
8. Develop enabling structures
9. Communicate, involve people, and be honest
10. Reinforce and institutionalize the change

• The first one was provided by Carol Pletcher, Chief Innovation Officer of Cargill, during the second day of the Innovation Immersion Conference and defines innovation as “Converting knowledge and insights into solutions that create distinctive value“. Meaning than innovation is about creating products, services and business models and not only about making the next iPod-like gadget .
• The second one was included in an article that explained the differences between Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurs and it states that innovation is people putting ideas into valuable action. Thus, every organization and every person in an organization can be innovative.

Although I like them both, I still prefer the one provided by Peter F. Drucker in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” .

If you find this article interesting, you may want to check periodically the Innovation and Entrepreneurship section of Knowledge @ Wharton (I have already added it to my bookmarks).

Another example of Open Innovation is online DVD rent service Netflix which will award $1 million to whoever manages to improve the accuracy of their film recommendation system Cinematch^SM at least 10%. This is also another example of Open Innovation, because they are looking for the best solution they can get, no matter where it comes from. Moreover, and following the Open Innovation paradigm, they are not asking for an exclusive license of the solution, but instead they want a non-exclusive license and they encourage the winners to to commercialize the product, selling licenses to other companies. Further details regarding this contest can be found in the web page Netflix Prize.