Innovation in large organizations

A new browser to challenge MS from Google?Its not surprising considering the latest hires, says NY Post. Adam Bosworth (who incidentally moved from BEA to Google) mentioned that the excitement of web services is not in the B2B space, but in the B2C space - "making apps that my mom can use" - as he put it.

So what does constitute an innovative company ? The age old formula of attracting the best industry talent, providing them a sandbox to tryout concepts, a fundamental tolerance toward failure, rapid productization of ones that work, clear differentiation between core competencies and complementary competencies - and enabling easy access to complementary technolgies provided by partners will certainly help.

The Innovator's dilemma is a great book that talks about how bigger companies often stratgeically choose to ignore emerging technologies due to the low revenue stream during the inception stage and find that they have been superseded by the next generation of technology. A recommended read.


My take on this is that during periods of economic growth, companies often ignore the core competency model due to the inflow of cash that encourages risk in non core areas - a classic example is of GE acquiring an investment company, and in lean/declining growth go back to basics, "back into the box", "focus on fundamentals" - which seemed to be the theme at Connect anyways.