OLD INNOVATION PARADIGM

• Innovation by in-house specialists, in an ivory tower.
• Proprietary, the R&D team producing things that are not open standards.
• Sharing little.
• Painstakingly slow to market and the world is moving at  a rapid pace.
• Out of touch with reality and customer. Customer centricity is essential. If you don’t have a good understanding of what your customer is about you may as well go home. R & D people sometimes don’t see customers. Innovators need to really know what the customer is about. Steve Jobs seems to have a unique ability to understand what the customer wants before they know they want it. Being in touch with the customer is really important, most innovation people aren’t.
• Hierarchical information flow. Off to management for sign off, people kill off projects when they don’t like it or they don’t like you.
• Weak innovation pipelines, have to have a governance process.
• Rising innovation costs.
• Emergence of global low-cost imitators. For example you might spend 7 years developing a new chair, 2 months later someone,  perhaps from another country,  will replicate it. This is a real problem.
• Poor track record of M&A.

NEW INNOVATION PARADIGM

• Global. The world is flat, everyone knows what your doing and vice versa. Geography and accessibility barriers are removed.
• Multi-disciplinary. Solutions people are developing are much more complex that they were in the past.
• Collaborative and Open. All studies say the model moving forward is to a much more open model than we have had in the past.
• Customer Centricity is Paramount. Expose customers to the innovation guys, expose innovation to customers much earlier e.g Google Going to announce Wave, here try it have a go and tell us what you think. Google develops and pushes it out. As more control is divested to the consumer, the need to actively embrace the consumer increases.
• Agility and Empowerment. Agile, you can’t wait 7 years to build a chair, have to empower staff to get on with it.