Corante published this today: "Renee Hopkins has posted part one of her interview with Henry Chesbrough, the Harvard Business School professor who's just published "Open
Innovation: The New Imperative For Creating And Profiting From Technology." His central argument: the traditional, internally focused model of innovation is becoming obsolete and that what's taking its place is a new paradigm of "open innovation" that has companies leveraging, licensing and buying existing technologies developed elsewhere.
An excerpt: "Closed Innovation is fundamentally about scarcity of useful knowledge. In order to do anything, you have to do everything. It is inwardly focused, and deeply vertically integrated. It takes little or no notice of external knowledge and resources. Open Innovation is fundamentally about operating in a world of abundant knowledge, where 'not all the smart people work for you', so you better go find them, connect to them, and build upon what they can do. It seeks ways to build upon and leverage external knowledge, and focuses internal activities upon filling in the gaps, and integrating internal and external knowledge into useful systems."
My experience with innovation is that it is an knowledge intensive process that cannot be done from the inside out. All decisions need to be informed by what others are doing. Organizations can learn and adapt much faster if they embrace innovation from all sources and don't look solely internally for the best ideas. Henry Chesborough is a good thinker on this topic.
Owen Thomas writes a good article in Business 2.0 about SBI & Co, a company that is rolling up dead consulting firms. There are lots of good people in these firms, however I don't know if there is a current market for the services. He says... "Few dotcom-era businesses were more thoroughly discredited than Internet consultants. Arrogant during the boom, most were decimated when the bubble popped. Now SBI & Co., a privately held professional-services firm based in Salt Lake City, has paid more than $50 million to buy the remains of Lante, MarchFirst, Razorfish, and Scient. Ned Stringham, CEO of SBI, says he expects the roll-up strategy to nearly double his company's revenue from $87 million in 2002 to $150 million in 2003. All the same, we were curious to know how he plans to turn a jumble of undead consultancies into a viable business"
This is a good article about new email clients. I looked at Bloomba, Kubi Client, and Ella. Each has interesting features, although I have not tried them. It is worth investigating. I am especially interested in applications that add functionality to Outlook, my current email client. BTW, I am using Outlook 2003, Beta 2, which is far superior to other releases.
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