Practice of Innovation

"The way we work is our most important innovation." Observations by Curtis R. Carlson

Will You Succeed?

Measure Your Innovative Potentialstevejobs

Can your enterprise or team succeed?  I have created two spread sheets that allow you to measure the innovative potential of your enterprise and your project team.  I call them the Enterprise Innovative Index and the Project Innovative index.  A discussion about their design and utility can be found by clicking on either Innovative Indices at the top of the home page or here.  

The Enterprise Index spread sheet is here.

The Project Index spread sheet is here.  

These are subjective metrics, but the attributes listed are fundamental to success.  My hope is that the indices will stimulate a discussion among your teammates to promote improvement.  I have added a few reference enterprises on the spread sheets, including Apple and SRI International.  As you will find out, getting a high score is very hard.  If Steve Jobs is one of your benchmarks for innovative excellence, then you will understand why.  There is a reason Apple has 92% of smart phone profits

Computers That Love Us

Value Hierarchy in a People-Centric EconomyFluffy-maltese-puppy-dogs-white-puppies-wallpaper-700x438

Are we obsolete? There are endless articles about what society will do once artificial intelligence, robotics, 3-D manufacturing, drones, and driverless cars can design, make, and deliver products and services better, faster, and cheaper than humans.  Will there be any jobs?  What does GDP mean when products are ubiquitous and almost free?  Will our world be a dystopia or a utopia?  (more…)

Customer Value Analysis

DK Untitled
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics.

Products, Services, and Prospect Theory

Behavioral science is now an influential part of economics. It needs to become a more important part of the discipline of innovation. Although the discussion below is somewhat speculative, it highlights important perceptual attributes of “customer value.” Prospect Theory inspired this discussion, but the focus is quite different. Therefore I call it “Customer Value Analysis,” a model to help better evaluate the relative merits of different forms and amounts of customer value. (more…)

Will There Be Any Jobs?

Innovation, Value, and the Way We Work 

_DSC0844
Curt Carlson: Innovation and Jobs

Every day there is another article about how automation will decimate the workforce. Ray Kurzweil says computer intelligence will catch up with humans by 2029. Does that mean we have only 14 years of dominance left? If true, why bother doing anything at this point?

Predicting the future is impossible; no one is there yet. But the history of artificial intelligence suggests it is harder and progress is slower than imagined, even with exponential improvement in the underlying technologies.

(more…)

Creativity and Innovation

The Arts and Entertainment

maxresdefault
Les Objects Volants: Boomwhackers

In a recent post stimulated by a conversation with David Nordfors and Pramod Khargonekar and his team at NSF, I suggested a more general definition for innovation:

Innovation is the creation and delivery of surprising new knowledge that has sustainable value for society.

All innovations are surprising and all are, to some degree, sustainable.   Otherwise, as we have discussed at this blog, they are not innovations.
(more…)

css.php