Commentary by Ellen Domb

Business Innovation Conference Day 3

Day 3 of the Business Innovation Conference opened with the address by Dr. Gautam Sardar on “Innovation at Tata Consultancy Services” –since the Tata group of companies is everything from the 1880’s original tea producers to the $2500 car and Jaguar automobiles and giant IT companies in many countries, he had a lot of history and a lot of current activities to draw on. His main theme was co-innovation, building collaborative frameworks using the innovation “ecosystem” of IT and human knowledge resources, using Tata’s resources and the resources of their entire client community to help solve each new problem. The cost of creating sophisticated systems, such as virtual reality simulations, is very high, and creating the co-innovation community shares the costs among participants. The delicate issue of intellectual property in shared knowledge situations is still in active development. (Photo: G. Sardar)

Reminder: this is a personal report, NOT a comprehensive review—see www.businessinnovationconference.com for the complete agenda. I chose Track 1, which started with Raj Datta, VP of Mindtree, discussing the knowledge management system at Mindtree, and how it is a key element of the innovation system. He introduced a mixed audience to the structure, vocabulary, and methods of knowledge management, so that we could understand how Mindtree has used KM as a key element of innovation. Get-Share-Apply-Learn-Innovate is the “virtuous cycle” of Knowledge. In many cases KM is only Get or Get & Share, and that is the broken cycle and not effective. Many participants were fascinated by the self-organizing knowledge communities (and the similarity to Kim Johnson’s report yesterday on the 3M GRIT and TechForum communities.) The emphasis is on peer learning and face-to-face interaction.

Mindtree is an active TRIZ-using company, and it was interesting to hear the observations on TRIZ of a non-advocate. Datta said that they encourage people to find the methods that work best for them (TRIZ, lateral thinking, mind mapping, many other methods) and to learn and use the methods that are the best fit, both on their own work and on collaborative projects.

Krishna Kumar of Microsoft had a bunch of very scary statistics (3000 new books are published every day. By 2010, information will be doubling every 72 hours….) as the lead-in to his talk about teaching students in all global environments how to be prepared for jobs that don’t exist that require continual innovation.

Sarah Caldicott’s presentation was based on her book, “Innovate Like Edison” and the five competencies of innovation. Both the historical framework (she is Edison’s grand-niece and part of the research team that is analyzing his notebooks) and the practical how-to orientation made this talk a highlight of the conference. Each competency has 5 supporting concepts—here’s a sample:

1. Solution Centered Mindset
2. Kaleidoscopic Thinking
1. Maintain a Notebook
2. Practice "Ideaphoria”
3. Discern Patterns
4. Express Ideas Visually
5. Explore the Road NOT Taken
3. Full Spectrum Engagement
4. Master Mind Collaboration
5. Super Value Creation

Sean O’Toole President and Chief Executive Officer, GiftCertificates.com did the lunchtime keynote speech, emphasizing that his experiences at his own company, American Express, and McKinsey all taught him that trust among the members of the team and trust of management in its own judgment (they KNOW that cutting the training budget is dumb!) are the key elements of an innovation environment.

Roy Luebke of Innovationedge moved us toward the end of the conference with a nice approach to getting people to summarize their learning from the conference, and, as a graduate of the Institute of Design at IIT, tied the learning back to Whitney’s talk last night.

The conference ended with discussion of adding all the attendees to the Innovation Network so that conversation and networking could continue on-line and at informal events throughout the year.

Many thanks to Praveen Gupta for his hard work and dedication to making this event happen. He is now looking for people to join the organizing commitee for future events. (Photo: Keynote speaker Tony Reyes -left, Chairman Praveen Gupta -right.)

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