Innovation in Practice

Design the Future of Mobile Communications

It's time to put innovation into practice.

LG Mobile Phones, the fastest growing mobile phone brand in North America, is partnering with crowdSPRING, an online marketplace for creative services, to announce a new competition to define the future of personal mobile communication.  U.S. residents age 18 and over can have a chance to design their vision of the next revolutionary LG mobile phone and compete for more than $80,000 in awards.  See http://www.crowdspring.com/LG for details on how to submit your ideas.

Here is how submissions will be judged:

The LAB: Innovating a Computer Keyboard with Attribute Dependency (April 2009)

Zachary Campau is an MBA candidate at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan who I met last week while lecturing there.  He was intrigued by Systematic Inventive Thinking, and he emailed me with a proposition.  He noted that I preach a lot about the value of team innovation, but I don't practice what I preach.  He noticed in my LAB series that I innovate alone, thus not taking advantage of the power of collaboration.  He was right.  So I accepted his offer to join me in my next LAB posting...this one.

We decided to innovate a computer keyboard using the Attribute Dependency tool.  But there is more to the story.  We did this all via phone while he was in Ann Arbor and I was in Naples, Florida on holiday.  In fact, I decided to multi-task by both innovating with Zach while doing one of my favorite pastimes: fishing.  My ultimate dream was to create a BIG innovation while simultaneously catching a BIG fish.  Of course, luck would determine the ultimate outcome.  The big innovation was something I could count on happening.  Fish, on the other hand, tend to be less cooperative.

Innovation at the U.S. Automakers

As some U.S. automakers face inevitable restructuring, the key questions are what should they become?  What is the best way to do it?  The answer depends on what battle they think they are fighting.  In simplest terms:  should they build better cars?  Build cars better?  Build cars?

Consider the battles U.S. automakers have fought against the Japanese and other automakers.  How has Detroit done in:  design?  quality? productivity? brand building?  Given the steady loss of market share and margin, they seem to be losing.  There are a variety of reasons, some of their own making and some not.

There is one battle worth winning more than the others - the battle of ideas.  U.S. automakers need to outperform the competition in one definitive way - systematically develop and deploy a steady, uninterrupted stream of novel ideas and inventions across all aspects of their business.  At the risk of falling deep into the "easier-said-than-done" category, I offer my blueprint for change for U.S. automakers: reframe, retrain, and redeploy...a model based on my own experience.