innovation

Business is slave to the familiar, sold on the management logic of commoditizing, standardizing or outsourcing anything not viewed as "the core competency," choking off its own capacity to deal with innovation in an act of auto-technologic asphyxiation.

IT workers who want to be a CIO need to think outside the box -- like pushing for staff to spend 10% of their time working on something other than operational tasks, according to advice at a recent CIO conference.

Roam the open, warehouse-style headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif., and you'll see posters on nearly every wall encouraging innovation. One in particular reads, "Move fast and break things"--a principle that Facebook CIO Tim Campos says is core to the success of his 65-person IT team.

"Mac" users promote their own agenda of complex coffee drinks, silly clothing choices and a dangerous tendency toward technical innovation no good PC user should tolerate.

He doesn't come right out and say it, but Leo Apotheker thinks former Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd left him a fine mess to clean up.

As developer advocate at Google, Don Dodge treks across the country looking for innovative startups that Google can help make successful.

Most of the CIOs I speak with are looking at the year ahead as an opportunity to drive innovation within their organizations, usually by automating back office activities. That's a good place to start. But the most aggressive are looking beyond running the IT shop more efficiently and effectively; they're also experimenting with new technologies that can increase profitability, improve competitiveness and attract new customers. We call them ambidextrous innovators.

Students at the University of Washington invent a device to measure the purification level of water.

Reinvest in R&D

There were no big brainstorming sessions, rah-rah team meetings or executive committees convened to devise a plan to drive FiOS TV customers away from using call centers in favor of self-service ordering, the more cost-effective option.

Gartner analysts warned users that the growing merger and acquisition activity among large vendors could help stifle technology innovation.

For 40 years, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (commonly called Xerox PARC, now just PARC) has been a place of technological creativity and bold ideas. The inventions it has spawned, from Ethernet networking to laser printing and the graphical user interface (GUI), have led to myriad technologies that allow us to use computers in ways that we take for granted today.