January, 2009

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11
Jan 09

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

diffusionofinnovation

Wiki on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle in terms of farm technology:

  • innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented
  • early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders
  • early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours
  • late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active
  • laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

Where are you on this scale? Your company?

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9
Jan 09

The Business of Buying Ideas

Seth says there are “Two things have to happen before a big company buys your idea”

  1. They have to be in the business of buying ideas
  2. They have to trust you
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7
Jan 09

Five Traits of Innovative Companies

BusinessWeek recently interviewed Rajesh Chandy, Professor of Marketing at the U of M. Chandy identified five common traits of innovative companies in his recent paper, ”Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Pre-eminence of Corporate Culture.” Perhaps somewhat surprising, he found that corporate culture was the driving influence on wether your company was innovative or not.

Those five traits are:

  • Future Market Orientation – how much your managers and execs talk about what will be vs what is. Think about “the extent to which a firm emphasizes, in its market research activities, customers and competitors who are not currently in the markets it serves.”
  • Willingness to Cannibalize – how willing you are to destroy something you fought for (or created) in order to create something new. In paper format, this “is an attitude that puts up for review and sacrifice current profit-generating assets, including current profitable and successful innovations, so that the firm can get ahead with the next generation of innovations”
  • Tolerance for Risk – The more you are willing to take calculated risk, the more innovative you will be. 
  • Incentives for Enterprise – Innovative companies reward employee’s success in a significant way, and failure comes with only a mild reprimand. “By this practice, the firm refrains from rewarding only or primarily seniority or management of current products. Rather, it ensures that adequate if not large incentives are reserved for employees who venture to explore or build new enterprises for the firm.”
  • Empowering Product Champions – “By this practice, a firm empowers an individual with resources to explore, research, and build on promising but uncertain, future technologies. In effect, it embeds within the firm the enterprising spirit that enabled it to initiate the original innovation that brought it success.”

These rung rather true for me. 

Chandy ended the interview with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina line: Just like “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” innovative companies are all alike and un-innovative companies lack innovative in their own special way.

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