The Most Innovative Companies (Top 10)
“…Everyone knows Parisians are snobs. So it probably shouldn't have come as a surprise that an unshaven, middle-aged American, speaking English and dressed in cuffed jeans, sneakers, and a worn black T-shirt, was rudely turned away from the bar at a lavish fete inside Paris's Musee d'Orsay on September 16, 2003… Except that the man was Steven P. Jobs, the cofounder and chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., and it was his party. And some bash it was. For three hours, Apple's guests grazed on foie gras and seared tuna canapes, and sipped champagne while strolling under a massive glass arcade that shelters one of the world's largest collections of Impressionist masters, Rodin sculpture, and art nouveau furniture. In a Baroque salon at the far end of the museum, a raucous jazz band played. As one guest observing the scene intoned, "This is huge."
Google's Culture of Innovation
“…A recent article in Business Week was titled Managing Google's Idea Factory. The article listed specific steps that Google is taking to encourage innovations, which are crucial for Google to be able to compete with giants like Microsoft and Yahoo! as well as newcomers like Technorati... What do we like about their approach? Rigor and discipline It is nice that Google mentions that not only creativity is key to their success, but so are the rigor and discipline behind their approach. The company has eight brainstorming sessions each year with 100 engineers. Six concepts are pitched and discussed for ten minutes each. The stated goal is to build on the initial idea with at least one complementary idea per minute…”
3) Toyota Motors
“…The IEEE has named the Toyota Motor Corp. co-recipient of its 2007 Corporate Innovation Recognition. The award recognizes Toyota's hybrid combustion-electric power technology for its ability to improve fuel economy and reduce emissions without sacrificing vehicle dynamic performance. Toyota made the technology available to the general population though the launch of the world's first mass-produced hybrid automobile, Prius, in 1997, and revolutionized the automotive industry with its Toyota Hybrid System (THS). The IEEE is a professional association for the advancement of technology…”
Technology: In Handling Innovation, Patience Is a Virtue
“…Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of the General Electric Company, also counseled patience, to engineers and investors. He has poured extra money into research and development at G.E. while loosening timelines on projects that may not pay off for 10 years or more. For established companies, he said, investing in emerging technologies is a matter of survival… ''I just see very clearly that unless you're out there pushing the envelope and driving innovation, you're not going to get the kind of margins and the kind of growth that we need for a company like G.E.,'' Mr. Immelt said. ''I really see it as an economic imperative…''
Powerpoint - acquired with purchase of Forethought in 1987
“…Bob Gaskins, the man who has to take final responsibility for the drawn blinds of high-rise offices around the world and the bullet points dashing across computer screens inside... his idea: a graphics program that would work with Windows and the Macintosh, and that would put together, and edit, a string of single pages, or "slides." In 1984, he left B.N.R., joined an ailing Silicon Valley software firm, Forethought, in exchange for a sizeable share of the company, and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. They began work on a program called Presenter. After a trademark problem, and an epiphany Gaskins had in the shower, Presenter became PowerPoint… PowerPoint 1.0 went on sale in April, 1987-available only for the Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies… Shortly after the launch, Forethought accepted an acquisition offer of fourteen million dollars from Microsoft. Microsoft paid cash and allowed Bob Gaskins and his colleagues to remain partly self-governing in Silicon Valley, far from the Microsoft campus, in Redmond, Washington… In 1990, the first PowerPoint for Windows was launched, alongside Windows 3.0. And PowerPoint quickly became what Gaskins calls "a cog in the great machine." The PowerPoint programmers were forced to make unwelcome changes, partly because in 1990 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint began to be integrated into Microsoft Office-a strategy that would eventually make PowerPoint invincible-and partly in response to market research…”
"P&G: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks"
“…Procter & Gamble's CEO A. G. Lafley has reinvigorated P&G's model for innovation. Here are the key elements he has emphasized:
- Crank up one-on-one consumer research—Marketers now spend three times as much time as previously with consumers in their homes, watching the way products are used
- Expand what each brand does—Broader missions for each brand have been created
- Get employees from different divisions to exchange ideas—An internal R&D website and Communities of Practice have been developed
- Reach outside for ideas—More ideas are being brought in from entrepreneurs, and P&G is also working more closely with other companies
- Stop testing so much—Getting the product to market sooner is key
- Give designers more power—Focus on the customer's experience as well as the product itself
- Cater to developing markets—This includes making smarter, cheaper products and asking consumers more what they want
- Know what not to do—Fat bonuses for innovation are not offered, and "stars" are not hired from outside…”
“…March 16, 1998 -- With an average installation time of only two minutes per socket (two fibres) the Volition™ brand VF-45™ brand duplex fibre optic connector from 3M provides 7X savings in installed cost over duplex SC connectors… The Volition™ connector has a yield of 98 percent or greater and uses a simple mechanical connection, which completely eliminates the ferrules found in conventional connectors. Constructed of a few basic parts made from injection-molded, standard engineering plastic, the connector has the same footprint density and familiarity as a standard RJ-45 connector… There are no adhesives required for installation, and no precision parts to be aligned making termination simpler and quicker than with ferruled connectors. The plug-and-socket design provides a duplex connection that is approximately half the size of the standard duplex SC interface, thus allowing higher density installations. For example, 24 of these new connector scan be plugged across the typical width of a rack where only 12 duplex SC circuits (with four ferrules and two sleeves) could fit, depending on the patching scheme…”
Digital and Wireless Innovation at The Walt Disney Company
“…In January 2001, the senior management of The Walt Disney Company made an important decision concerning its online venture, GO.com. After a lackluster performance in which the site failed to compete with other Web portals such as Yahoo!, AOL, and Lycos, the Disney Company decided to shut down the portal and revise its online strategy. Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President of Business Development and Operations of The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG) summed up the problem: We saw there was no room at the portal table for us. Yahoo, Lycos and the others made it extremely competitive for us and we had to spend too much money to be as big and then to eventually be better than Yahoo. We decided it wasn’t worth it… As a successful $25 billion entertainment company with a universally known brand, Disney found itself in uncharted territory (Exhibit 1). Despite having an excellent track record in its various businesses including theme parks, films, publishing, and television, it was now competing in a media industry landscape that included companies such as Yahoo! and AOL which were providing a new type of media experience for their audiences on the World Wide Web. Because of the development of the Internet, which was a robust technology platform on which content could be developed, these companies were creating innovative multi-dimensional, non-linear content which could be accessed by a wide variety of users…”
“…On a bright, warm morning at IBM's research center here, seven of Big Blue's scientists gathered around a conference table to consider a nonscientific question: What helps inventors invent things?... IBM brass had asked the researchers to design a class that could teach lab managers how to help inventors stay fresh and innovative. Quickly the group erupted with ideas for the class's title, its methods, even whether someone could fail it… Then a boyish-looking operating system programmer, Michal Ostrowski, wondered aloud if the group had made some false assumptions… "Is it innovation if everyone can see that it is?" he asked, drawing a few murmurs of agreement. "Innovation is not obvious at the time…"
Sony: The elixir of eternal innovation
“…Most people would not balk at the idea of jamming a mobile phone, an MP3 player, two USB data sticks and maybe even a personal digital assistant (PDAs) in their standard shirt pocket. However, this wasn't always so easy. And that's not just because these ubiquitous electronic devices didn't exist. In 1957, the 11-year old fledgling Sony, released the first "pocketable" transistor radio. There was one problem. Sony's "pocketable" radio was bigger than a standard shirt pocket. Sony's founders - Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka - had envisioned Sony salespeople smoothly pulling the radio from their shirt pocket to demonstrate the nifty device. So, instead of immediately going back to the drawing board and developing a smaller version, they had their own shirts fashioned up with larger shirt pockets to allow for the "pocketable" radio…”
Fuente: Innovation 2007, Boston Consulting Group, Senior Management Survey
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