Innovation Flow

Liquid Metal Battery Technology - Donald Sadoway (MIT) Image Source - http://www.technologyreview.com/photogallery/427701/making-liquid-metal-batteries/ We often hear about the goodness of alternative energy, like solar and wind - then what is holding us back from using them ? The primary concern is how do we manage when the Sun is not around in the night or when the wind is not blowing - these concerns shifts our focus to the energy storage technologies. Currently we use solid state batteries. A fundamental technology evolution trend is to move from solid to liquid - it is easy to predict that the next revolution in energy storage will come from all-liquid batteries. We see evidence for the "TRIZ technology evolution trend of Solid - Liquid - Gas - Field" in many domains. Donald Sadoway is working on a battery miracle -- an inexpensive, incredibly efficient, three-layered battery using “liquid metal. His Inventive thinking is best des...

Difficult situations and critical moments are like the surprise tests that were subjected to while at School. By definition, they are surprises but we need to be prepared for it. Gita teaches us how to think and prepare ourselves to handle the difficult situations in our life. The Hero, Arjuna is a good person and has only noble intentions. He is brave and well-trained in warfare – he was Drona’s best student. He had powerful brothers to support and Krishna as a friend to advise. Despite of all these positive aspects, he was unable to face the situation. All his knowledge and training was of no help. He was reduced to a helpless state and was unable to think and act. If this is is the fate of Arjuna, the great hero, what chances do we have. I may have the best education, secure job, supporting family etc but I may become an Arjuna-when I am confronted with a difficult situation. How do I handle such critical moments in my life? How do I prepare myself ? Who is my friend Krish...

There were three paths that diverge into the woods all the three were less travelled so I wondered which path to take but as I travelled, I realised that all the three lead to the same woods The first path helps the Innovator to arrive at an insight purely through Knowledge. In-depth knowledge arrived a through disciplined analysis. Intimate knowledge of the Customer. Holistic knowledge of the ecosystem. Predictive knowledge of Market and Technology evolution. Intuitive knowledge of the barriers to idea diffusion etc. The second path helps the Innovator to create value (to the Customer) purely through his devotion to the cause. Many good ideas fail to bring significant value to the Customer. When the Innovator is devoted to the cause - he understands the Customer's pain points well and he is focused on shaping the Idea to create value to the Customer.  The third path helps the Innovator to exceute the Idea purely through Action...

The right brain helps us to get a new idea. In fact it offers us many new ideas and we register and act on a few of those. The left brain helps us to make the Idea work. Hence it is obvious that we need to learn to use both the right and left guys effectively. The funny thing about these two neighbours is that they dont get along well (like most neighbours). When the right guy talks, the left guy jumps in and criticizes him. Then the right guy becomes silent. Real innovation happends when these two guys can sing a duet together. How do you control these two guys and make them speak in tandem ? - this is a million dollar question for an individual or an organization that wants to excel in Innovation. Helps comes from the ancient Indian science of Pranayama - balancing the life breath. I attended a Medidation camp at Adi Sankara Nilayam (Sankaracharya's birthplace in Kerala). The Meditation was taught by Guruji Tejomayananda who head the Chinmaya Interna...

Creativity is not a process, right ? (Tim Cook, The Apple CEO) http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/85214-tim-cooks-freshman-year-the-apple-ceo-speaks?src=longreads&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=f156d I agree with Tim, Creativity is not a process. In fact many creative folks fear that a process may well wipe out whatever creativity that exists. But Creativity and Innovation are not synonymous. Innovation is still a process. Innovation is the process of (a) using creativity to create insightful ideas (b) using these ideas to craete value to the Customer and (c) taking that value-creating idea to the Market successfully. Creativity will yield good ideas. But a process is still needed to make that creative idea solve real problems and craete value to customer. Without a structured process, it is difficult to take an idea (however great it is) successfully to the Market. So Tim, Innovation is a process unlike Creativity.

• What is the real challenge in innovation ? The poor conversion of good ideas into truly valuable innovation. The fundamental issues behind this challenge are - How to create the vision for technology innovation? How to engage the experts and focus their efforts? How to organize the resources? How to deliver the innovations in time? • How is it a challenge? When ideas don’t evolve into innovations, the inventors get discouraged, technology managers are frustrated, stakeholders are disappointed, technology development stagnates, the business loses confidence in R&D, new product development falls into a coma and ultimately the market suffers. • Who faces the challenge? Technologists and scientists everywhere face this challenge whether they are in university research groups, government laboratories, industrial R&D teams in large companies, small technology start-ups etc. Though the innovation environment is significantly different across these organi...

Year - 2002 Place - India I : I have a great Idea Management : We dont want your Ideas - give us Innovations I :  ? I :  :( As technologists (scientists, engineers, inventors), we have the responsibility of focusing our efforts to solve critical problems in the domains of Energy, Healthcare, Food, Water management, waste management etc. Many of these challenges are complex and strongly inter-related. Though we have good insights into the scientific and engineering aspects of these problems, we are far away from visualizing holistic solutions that are affordable and sustainable. I am fully confident that we, the technology community, are ready with the insights to address each of these problems. When we as a community share our insights, pool our resources and further build upon the insights through focused ideation, we will get good ideas. We are all trained to solve such technology problems and we routinely come up with good ideas, hence the...

I am speaking at the Nanotechnology Center, Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) on 16 August. Nanotechnology is a fertile area of inter-disciplinary research and holds great potential for solving the World's most critical problems in renewable energy, affordable healthcare, water management etc. We often read reports on promising nanotechnology inventions that seem to have the potential to positively impact the lives of people. However a very small fraction of these inventions are commercialized and made available to the common man as affordable and valuable solutions.  During my years at GE, Dow and Honeywell, I had the opportunity to work with global teams of scientists and inventors who are some of the best in Nanotechnology. I lead many programs to bring their minds together and create innovative new products enabled by nanotechnology - I had my share of successes and failures and I got some very valuable learning out of these efforts. I intend to focus my tal...

Lead Question: How to create an Innovation Strategy that will lead to Differentiation ? I took up the role of Innovation Differentiation Leader at a Multinational Company two years back. Our team's focus was on growing the business in emerging markets through product innovation. I spent the first 30 days defining and getting acceptance from folks on (a) what should be the focus of our innovation efforts and the next 30 days on (b) if product differentiation is the purpose of our innovation, then how should we define and achieve sustainable differentiation ?. I share the general wisdom on this topic, my own experience and the key learning here. I realized that the first and most important step is to decide what particular kind of value we want to deliver to whom. Differentiation  When it comes to strategy, I would like to hear Porter's thoughts first. I came across three  excellent tips from Porter on differentiation - differentiate yourself, deliver v...

If you are looking for a simple and effective framework that you can adapt for organizational innovation and for coaching your innovation leaders, then you will find help here. You may be familiar with the framework for leadership that was developed at MIT over a four-year period by Professors   Deborah Ancona ,   Tom Malone , and   Wanda Orlikowski , with Peter Senge , and tested in diverse real world settings, the FCF is a powerful tool for understanding and integrating the four critical components of leadership.  The FCF, as described in research on  Leadership in the Age of Uncertainty , defines these components as follows ( http://mitleadership.mit.edu/r-dlm.php ) Sensemaking:  making sense of the world around us, coming to understand the context in which we are operating. Relating:  developing key relationships within and across organizations. Visioning:  creating a compelling picture of the future. Inventing:  designing new...

I am currently teaching a course on Technology and Innovation Management at the Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore. It is a 2-credit elective course and the class comprises of both Marketing and Finance students (about 60 students). This is the third consecutive year that I am teaching this course - i make it interesting to myself  by preparing fresh charts, case-studies and projects every time. It is a very refreshing experience to design fresh and teach this course every year. I aim to learn from my class as much as I teach. To ensure effective learning, I spend about 25% time to introduce the concepts - the rest 75% time is interactive discussions, hand-on exercises, focused ideation sessions and problem solving workshops. I have taught the first 8 sessions out of a total of 24 sessions as of today. In the first two sessions, we focused on defining innovation management, breaking the Myths and discussing the key issues that make managing innovation d...

There are good parallels between how Panini simplified and made Sanskrit grammar accessible to all and how Altshuller simplified and made the collective wisdom of Inventive knowledge accessible to all. Panini and Altshuller were not contemporaries, they were separated by at least 25 centuries. But their zeal and perseverance to reduce complex stuff into a handful of powerful principles is very much comparable. Their himalayan effort connected the invisible dots and brought out patterns that were submerged in a vast amount of unstructured data.  Panini is a great sanskrit grammarian and logician (~ 4th century BC).  He was a pioneer in Linguistics and his works were path breaking in both descriptive and generative linguistics. He was a forerunner of modern formal language widely used in modern computer languages. Source -  http://ramm.hubpages.com/hub/PANINI-LOGICIAN-AND-SANSKRIT-GRAMMARIAN Genrich Altshuller, the originator of TRIZ, was working in the pat...