The innovation problem

Innovation vs Process. Social Media Ninjas vs IT Managers. Agile vs Waterfall. A few tidbits from the fringe of recent O’Reilly’s OSCON conference caught my eye in the last week or so, and helped me think about these age-old battles in a new way.

Simon Wardley‘s session takes a bit of following if enterprise IT isn’t your bread and butter, but is packed with rewarding gems, specifically using the lifecycle analysis curve (introduction, growth, maturity, stability, decline) as a model for understanding the respective roles and purpose of innovation and process: or why your fast-growing organisation seems to be getting more bureaucratic:

(hat tip, Dennis Howlett).

Rolf Skyberg, Head of Innovation at eBay has some great slides analysing innovation models, particularly mapping out the new idea development process, from ideation through filtering, implementation, integration and monetization – and that you can do it the conventional way or the innovative way, but at some point those tracks have to merge. It’s a fairly elementary point that corporate ‘innovation schemes’ generally fail to acknowledge, leading to frustration and waste. It applies to government crowdsourcing too: at what point does the innovation track merge with conventional policymaking and delivery – and what happens to good ideas along the way?

(hat tip: Dave Briggs)

I think lifecycle analysis and an understanding of how innovations become process (and how process is then in turn innovated) might help to resolve a few old chesnuts.

How about disproving the old one-CMS-to-rule-them-all silver bullet? Fact is, web technologies are at different stages on the curve:

As, perhaps, are we all 😉