Venture Capital in Australia: Building our Future - Nurturing our Innovators

Venture Capital in Australia: Building our Future - Nurturing our Innovators: 1n 2002 BSI identified a need to support innovators.... 13 years on, with innovation squarely on the agenda, and 13 years of blood , sweat a...

Innovation needs to be in the DNA of everything we do... no industry is sacred

Vivek Wadhwa has written an excellent piece in the WashingtonPost on how innovation is in the DNA in everything we do.

Clayton Christensen's theories in his book "the Innovators Dilemma" was a guiding light to innovators to innovate... his ideas being used by the likes of Proctor and Gamble, GE and 

Salesforce. 

Are his theories still relevant?

The old way was to separate the innovative disruptors from the core businesses; to put them in new company divisions. 

We are now in an era in which technologies such as computing, networks, sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics are advancing exponentially and converging, thereby allowing industries to encroach on and disrupt one another.

Competition doesn't come from lower end of the market anymore... they come from completely different industries.... 

Apple disrupting music and computing industry and now disrupting healthcare and finance industries. 

Automobile Companies (Uber) delivering flu shots with Uberhealth!

Tesla becoming an energy company - providing solar powered energy and battery power  for homes enabling them to be disconnected from the grid. 

Google and Facebook providing Wifi Internet Access everywhere using drones, microsatellites and balloons. disrupting the telecommunication industry.... looking to monetise data, vs charging for usage. 

The Power of Wonder - The inverted Pyramid and the football analogy

Jeff Hoffman insights 

1. Don't lose your childlike wonder - After listening to incessant questions from hi 5 year old on a visit to his office, Jeff actually wondered why people were doing what they were doing and made significant positive changes. The gem....innovative people remove filters and open their minds .

When companies lose their ability to reinvent and continue to find better ways to run their business - they will die!

 As my mentor Allen Pathmarajah says.... "When the rate of change on the outside is greater than the rate of change on the inside - the end is near"

2. Every day - for 20 minutes - Let your mind wonder - info sponging 

Go lateral - think beyond your domain of expertise.

What are you looking for? Who knows - but be open to ideas .

After a while - these random ideas and data points form a picture.... They connect and that is where innovation can happen . You have looked at the world that's bigger than your own and interpreted it in your special way... Creating Magic 

3. Get info not only from research  - but go to the diner and listen to your customers!

4. the football analogy - The coach doesn't block the opposing players or tackle them.  Instead he finds the best blockers and tacklers and motivates them to perform at their highest possible level.  Similarly, while the company itself lives to serve its customers, it is the CEO or leader's job to recruit, retain, and inspire the best possible employees for those customers.  As a CEO, my job is to nurture and support players at every position so that they can best serve our customers.

5. The best thing he ever achieved as a CEO was selling my company to a Fortune 500 company and discovering that from the day he started the company to the day we sold it, not one person ever quit.  The success of Priceline was truly a byproduct of that fact.

6. He doesn't believe in a "bossless office" at all.  A strong and decisive leader is what drives the team.  I never left my employees completely on their own.  It's the leader's job to collect everyone's input and then make decisions to chart the company's course and set the strategy.  The freedom comes in the tactics, allowing competent employees to find their own way to deliver on the strategic plan.

7. Another Football analogy - Common traits of succesful coaches and their teams....  They all have different strategies, playbooks, and methods for how to maximize its implementation to be world champions.  The team is aligned, they understand the playbook, they practice its implementation unrelentingly,  and everyone is providing maximum commitment.  

8. Success starts with recruiting and retaining the best players who share the teams values and are motivated to be gold medal winners.  Thinking about their needs and how to keep them fully motivated, engaged, aligned, and retained.  In an important way, the team are his customers — the inverted pyramid.

Challenge - let's build a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy

An idea from Professor Caroline Wagner - Ohio State University

How to engage students, innovators to collaborate and grow

The Pain

• The diffusion deficit - A weakness exists in the local links between the University and innovative actors in the region, exacerbated by a lack of incentives to create these links. 

• The data deficit - Numerous events in the physical world leave “data traces” in isolated silos that could be useful to the knowledge economy--but, the data are at different granularities and they lack interoperability; paucity of knowledge access and flow inhibits the pace of research and innovation. 

•   The insight deficit - difficulty in processing and analusing the data into meaningful information - Add to this problem that over 80% of data analytics time is spent in time-consuming pre-processing tasks and we have an insight deficit.

• The attraction deficit - The Knowledge exodus -   Smart students leave the region to go to innovation-rich regions.  

How do we keep them ? In order to keep them in the region, we need to create local opportunities for them to be entrepreneurial – to solve problems and re-invent locally.  

A Potential Pain Killer

National service in an Altruistic Capacity  Right now, our pro-social students are overwhelmingly attracted to a year of service at Teach for America, City Year, Peace Corps, ViSTA –

• how can we harvest these altruistic vitalities towards building the local and regional economy—to grow the society they want to live in right where they live? 

• how can we link students with local enterprises that will simultaneously build the data we need, create the local links, give students a chance to create their own jobs/businesses/non-profit start-ups, all while making data-for-innovation available to larger groups and decision makers? Let’s call this: Catalyzing innovative energy.

HOW DO WE SCALE THIS VISION?

How can we find a way to get the funding needed to: 

1. pay students; 
2. seed pro-social enterprises; 
3. create an open data platform for innovation; 
4. link students to faculty (who are themselves linked to the global knowledge network) to diffuse knowledge to make it locally available???

 Let’s call this: building a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy.

That is my challenge to you – help me design this system from the ground up, tap dynamism, incentivize growth – include the poorest and excluded in the development. Ideas needed!

Ikigai - the reason for being

 Ikigai - the reason for being: Very relevant to a new paradigm  Thank you David Nordfors and I4J

Can the whales be saved?

Below is a message from Steve Denning that I am passing on

Can the existing bureaucracies be saved through more Agile customer-focused innovation.

www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ad47a4d6-6e40-11e4-afe5-00144feabdc0.html (subscription required)

The article also discusses the Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy. This is an alliance of eleven firms, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Magna, and Riot Games, which I have been leading for Scrum Alliance. As part of the Learning Consortium, these firms undertook a series of mutual site visits in the summer to explore progress in implementing innovative management practices.

The full report of the Learning Consortium, with findings and recommendations, is now available here:
https://www.scrumalliance.org/why-scrum/learning-consortium/learning-consortium-report-2015

The Learning Consortium explored the hypothesis that forward-looking companies had already made progress in developing and implementing leadership and management goals, principles and values that constitute a fundamental management makeover.

It suggests that "saving the whales" is not out of the question.

The findings of the Learning Consortium will be presented to the Drucker Forum in Vienna, Austria next week. The entire event will be live-streamed: free registration is here: http://www.druckerforum.org/2015/live-stream-registration/

The particular session of the Drucker Forum on the Learning Consortium will be live-streamed at 8.30amUS ET on Friday November 6.

Thoughts?

Steve Denning
Forbes blog: http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/ 
The Leader's Guide to Radical Management
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx
Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevedenning
Web: http://www.stevedenning.com/About/default.aspx

Building our Future - Nurturing our Innovators

http://bsivc.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/our-call-for-investment-in-startups-in.html?spref=bl