Innovate ??

Ultimate and permanent challenge for people, companies, societies is to innovate (to survive?)

This week, a lot of point of view on this topic, re-emphasizing some basic evident ideas:

First, innovation in IT is often nowadays coming from "transgressive renegades".
Continuous flow of new emerging technologies allows permanently unsatisfied end-user to invent their way.
A good IT department must consider/absorb these innovations, considered as valid prototypes, and to transform them into reliable professional solid applications...

This idea is not far from the need, for organizations who want to adapt and change, to capitalize on "change agents" (This way is the only way! Organizations, closed in their today's paradigm, cannot event imagine the methods of to-morrow. Fortunately, some people, these change agents, are already in to-morrow's paradigm....)

Not far too from this idea is the search of "bumpy bits"
If the world is flat, seek out the bumpy bits, in an aligned, flat world....

But innovation must be highly stimulated by collaboration, toward collective creativity. That is a new key mission for CIOs...
Some people can think there is a conflict then between IT Governance (driving to a flat aligned world?) and creativity stimulation (subversive guys...). Good debate, where opinions (and experiences) are mixed...

Informal network concept, illustrated by 1993 famous article "The Company Behind the Chart" in Harvard Business Review, still the key condition, following Booz-Allen-Hamilton, for collective creativity.

Some french thinking now...
Les universités, lieu d'innovation, devraient quant à elles être en pointe. Mais...
Le budget de R&D de la Chine, dont les grandes universités s'inspirent du MIT ou de Stanford, va dépasser celui du Japon... qui achève une réforme sans précédent de ses universités... tandis que l'université de Cambridge investit dans des « hedge funds » pour ses placements !!!

Why did I focus on Innovation this week? Just because a friend of mine sent me a personality test, to check if I was really a "strategist" (my official title on my business card...). And guess what? I am not a "strategist", but an "innovator" !!! And you?