On Tuesday 13th February I attended an interesting talk on Innovation at the Royal Society of Arts that was organised by Imperial College, London.
The talk gave an overview of business innovation, its history and its future. The main speakers were two business Professors and three big business types. I was a little surprised that they didn't ask anyone from entrepreneurial businesses to speak but there you go. It was a bad start from my point of view. However, overall my 90 minutes were not wasted, there were some interesting comments.
Like....
Innovation patterns have changed
The way innovation works has changed down the centuries.
- 19th century: individual innovation,eg Edison, Bell.
- 20th century: Corporate machine, eg Bell Labs, Xerox
- 21st century: Networked innovation, biotech does R&D for big pharma.
Governments though still think innovation works in a linear fashion and govern accordingly. This explains the disconnect between the realities of how innovation takes place and the government initiatives I see on a daily basis.
IT is now an established industry. It is 50 years old now and works like the Bell lab corporate machine.
The internet however is still evolving, and works in a networked fashion.
The US in the Reagan era came up with an interesting idea to support small firms. The Small Business Innovation Research grant. SBIR legislation requires that 2.5 percent of US government agency funds must be spent with small firms. In the US that amounted to $2b in 2005. Bigger than angel and formal VC. Why can't we have this in the EU ?
Big is bad
Big companies are now at risk from the Internet. The sustainable size of firms is getting smaller. The internet gets the small firms message out globally. What does size get you apart from an overhead ?
How do we solve the big problems like global warming? What innovation structures are required for the big ideas?
Nothing right now, and this is desperately needed. Where is the Manhattan project of the networked age ?
Key Performance Indicators
What are the KPIs for the innovation junction? How can we measure whether a company is really doing well in the networked environment ? How do we know great ideas are being created at the Junction ?
Great books on innovation up next...
