Generations of music lovers have mourned the early death of Mozart, imagining the magnificent contributions he would have made had he lived into old age. Similarly, people today around the world, while celebrating the remarkable life of Steve Jobs, are simultaneously sorrowful as they contemplate the many ways he might have continued to delight us had his life not been curtailed. His ability to innovate and break new ground in so many diverse areas – from computing to animation, marketing to music – makes his loss all the more profound.

Steve’s Stanford graduation address is being replayed repeatedly today, full of life lessons for us all. But it’s also intriguing in the context of the discussion so prevalent today of developed versus developing countries, and innovation – the one card, Cutter Fellow Professor Rob Austin tells us, that developed nations Read more …

Today, CIOs are faced with the challenge of predicting how rapidly evolving information technologies might positively or negatively impact their organizations’ strategy, product lines or customer relationships. Most IT managers are in the reactive role when it comes to disruption.

The October 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Dennis Adams, will examine the issues associated with potentially disruptive innovations and how to anticipate the impact of these new technologies on your enterprise. Proposals of interest are due 22 July 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers01.html

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a compelling alternative to the traditional processes that firms rely on to innovate and to create and capture value.

The June 2011 Cutter IT Journal will examine both the opportunities and challenges created by the crowdsourcing phenomenon, particularly in the context of IT and IT-intensive businesses. Proposals of interest are due 18 March 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers01.html

In September 2010 and in January, I attended two instances of “Stanford Leading Matters,” a roving conference by Stanford University aimed at raising the visibility (and gathering donations) for the “Stanford Challenge,” a decade-long $10 billion fundraiser.

This was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university’s inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university’s vision, which is no less than helping solve the world’s toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today’s world; and very good food could be sampled.

I am a rather fastidious note taker, and I thought I’d share my notes from a presentation I attended at the Boston Read more …

Last week I attended the monthly meeting of a local chapter of SIM (Society of Information Management), a professional society that I have belonged to for years. The after-dinner topic was “The 2010 Annual Report on Technology, Innovation and the Economy.” The last of the three panelists presented statistics and survey data showing that small businesses, particularly in the technology sector, were responsible for most, if not all, of the jobs created during previous recovery periods through innovation and, therefore, should be the recipient of all federal stimulus money targeted at job creation.

During the meeting I asked the speaker to explain his assertion that it was innovation by small businesses that led to their job creation ability. I offered that nothing in the numbers and analysis presented had demonstrated a linkage between the two. As is usually the case Read more …

The crystal ball gazing continues. Here are more excerpts from Cutter Senior Consultants’ predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Dave Rooney: Agile Software Development will follow the same pattern as two other game-changing trends — Relational Database Management Systems and Object-Oriented Programming over the upcoming decade. Claude Baudoin: Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer’s loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee. Ken Collier: Although Agile adoptions will proliferate, we will see an increase Agile project failures due to misunderstanding, misapplication, and misguided attempts to follow an “agile recipe”. Mike Rosen: Continued “cyber events” will temper the rush to the Cloud. Jeff Kaplan: The consumerization of IT by end-users and availability of a Read more …

Check out this Wall Street Journal article, Oops!, by Rob Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan — all members of Cutter’s Innovation and Enterprise Agility team. The piece is engaging from start to end, but the section “Let Innovators Collect Ideas” really drew me in. It makes me optimistic that my daughter, who keeps every scrap of paper she’s ever drawn or written on, is not a packrat; she’s an innovator-in-training!

Innovators squirrel away things they don’t know how to use. Designers and sculptors collect photos and keep warehouses or cabinets full of things they can’t use (yet). Painters and product developers keep sketchbooks. Innovators of all stripes keep “junk,” as one designer called it, against the day when, leafing through a notebook or tidying a shelf, they have Read more …

I see a difference between innovation as it relates to particular products, services, or ideas, and innovation as it relates to the great changes that are shuffling their feet in the wings, ready to come on stage and change our lives. To assure long life as a company making goods to sell at a profit, we need a lot of the first kind of innovation; we need, in other words, to continually improve the way we develop and exploit our industrial methods. To assure life at all as a developed economy — a planet even — we need a whole lot of the second kind; we need, in other words, to break with the past and move on.

Soon. Now would be good.

To begin on innovation of the second kind, we need to cultivate a frame of mind that Read more …