Over the past year, Deloitte have publish a short series on digital leadership and are wrapping it up with the final edition “Innovating for a Digital Future“. Each publication looks at the different challenges facing leaders in the digital era particularly in the technology, media and telecoms industries.
This last one examines the challenges around innovation and how it’s possible to be innovative particularly within large organisations that feature heavily in the technology and telecoms arenas. Doing the research for the publication, Deloitte found three unexpected paradoxes.
1. Innovation is a social sport. It is not the preserve of “lone geniuses” yet it requires lone geniuses working effectively with others to make it work.
2. Innovation is somewhat anarchic and organisation can impede it. Innovation rates substantially increase when there is a large population of people, yet large organisations do not appear to gain an innovation premium. The construct of the organisation itself is in many ways anti-innovation.
3. “Good” failure is critical to the innovation process. For innovation to flourish organisations need to embrace failure, yet not many chief execs would survive if they made failure a virtue.
The research further suggests that leaders need to work across four areas to develop organisations that can successfully innovate.
1. Strategy and vision
2. Environment and culture
3. Organisation and design of work
4. Leadership and talent
Each of these areas is explored over a couple of pages and there are case studies as well. If you’ve done a Degree or Masters in management, you’ll find much of it familiar but there’s the odd nugget in there. For instance, the question is posed, “Innovation should have real monetary value attached to it. How many executives in organisations received bonuses based on innovation metrics?”
Overall, worth spending 15 mins to run through the material and see if there’s anything of interest. Also might be quite a good primer if you are trying to get innovation off the ground in your organisation.
The previous editions, “New Shapes and Sizes” and “Leadership at All Levels“, are still available for download as .pdfs.
For some time now, when it came to desktop and laptop computer hardware, innovation has seemed to be somewhat stagnate. After all, what more can be done with word processing software? How can spreadsheets possibly be improved? How can the browsing experience be made better? Can email be made more effective or efficient?
David Politis of Xi3 Microcomputers (http://xi3.org/) presents the Xi3 Modular Computer. It is an extremely small form factor and operates on only 20 watts of power, yet contains a dual-core AMD Athlon x86 processor operating at 2 gigahertz. The standard model ships with 2 gigabytes of DDR 2 RAM and 8 gigabytes of solid SSD solid state drive memory.
communication client that sends pop3 and imap into oblivian. Imagine sending a note to your coworker who is at their desk. They see the new “wave” arrive and read it. You have not yet turned away from the screen when they begin to type their reply. You begin to see their reply character by character while they type. Instantaneous. Now wave is no longer “email” but instant messenger reinvented. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. You can add in other participants to your conversation, wave, and they can replay it. That means they can play the message and see how it all took place start to finish. No more scrolling to the bottom to see the previous conversation. They can play it back, jump in and participate. Wow. I didn’t know I was thirsty but Google Wave is like a refreshing glass of cold water on a warm day.
