Time To Innovate Innovation?

Recently many consultancy companies have reported on innovation. Examples are AT Kearney and McKinsey. Each explores new ways in his own way. Time for me to do some exploration as well.

AT Kearney has facilitated a meeting of innovation award winners, and hopes to create synergy. McKinsey on the other hand dives into what they call 'Open Innovation': The development and spread of the 'LAMP' software: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. Examples of software created in this way, with LAMP, are the famous content management systems (CMS) Drupal and Joombla!. Some software built this way has reached an excellent quality level, leaving commercial software far behind.

Open Innovation has of course is challenges:

• How to attract and motivate co-creators?
• How to structure problems, maintain an architecture, so others participate?
• How to maintain the quality?

So is Open Innovation going to change the world? Well, it provides technology alternatives. It leaves open the issues as:

• Creating new ways to replace old technology.
• Making goals possible which were unreachable until then.

So I think innovation does not need to be innovated. Open Innovation is still innovation, and all the 'old' goals of innovation still apply. People will create new applications, and those new applications will lead to new products and services. And innovation will still remain a core activity of a company, that is, if it will remain in business tomorrow.

We value your opinion. Share your thoughts and visions with the Results2Match Community!

This blog is part of a series of blogs on innovation:

1. Time to innovate innovation? (this blog)
2. Can you provide me with some KPI's to measure innovation?
3. CIO should stand for Chief Innovation Officer!
4. Is dislocating technology a change agent?
5. IT Conglomerates; Please start innovation again!

Results2Match has a strong vision on successful business strategies and result driven implementations.

This blog is written by Hans Lodder. Hans is a very experienced management consultant and interim manager. You can contact Hans by email.