From modern conveniences to breakthrough, life changing innovations, we here at Invention Machine, are proud to celebrate the innovation greats of past generations.  But we are equally thrilled to celebrate those of you who innovate, every day, to improve our world and make life better for all of us.

When most of us think about innovation or inventors – we think of ground-breaking new products. Without a doubt, the invention of the automobile, the zipper, the rocket engine, life saving cardiac devices, the computer, algae-based biofuel, and countless other breakthroughs, have left an indelible mark on all of our lives. 

But innovation is not just developing breakthrough new products.  And innovators are not just inventors with a Eureka-like product inspiration.

Instead, innovation (“big” I and “small” i) happens across organizations every single day with innovators focused on:

• Finding new markets  – Looking at new or adjacent market opportunities for an existing product or technology. Indentifying unmet needs in a market. Anticipating how a product or technology might evolve. These types of innovation represent huge potential and value for companies. A New England-based chemical company identified and monetized millions of dollars in new market opportunities for existing products.
• Improving existing products or processes – Though much less often heralded than breakthrough innovation, many innovations are incremental improvements to existing technologies, products or processes.  Incremental innovations like those led by innovator Hugh Blaxill, chief engineer at MAHLE Powertrain, who is improving fuel economy of engine systems, or Cato Willie, Chief Researcher at Statoil, who is working to develop more eco-friendly ways to address costly, complex challenges deep water drilling.
• Mitigating risk.  From space shuttle missions and medical devices, to food products and automotive parts, success in innovation means improving the chances of success through comprehensive analysis and resolution of potential risks.
• Leveraging Intellectual Property. Intellectual property is the value-creating, life force of a company. It’s correlation to company growth and profitability is no surprise. To maximize return on investment, companies must seize market opportunities, protect their ability to compete, and navigate competitive roadblocks.

This month, as we pay homage to the inventor, let’s also celebrate the every day innovator and herald those organizations that are working to drive sustainable innovation.  By making innovation a systematic and repeatable process, companies can accelerate innovation.

I look forward to all of the incredible innovations to come.

The study’s key finding? The factor most critical to driving global manufacturing competitiveness is access to talented workers capable of supporting innovation. A manufacturer’s ability to attract and retain talented scientists, engineers, and production workers ranked well ahead of traditional factors associated with competitive manufacturing such as materials and labor costs, energy policies, regulatory systems, or trade, financial and tax systems.

For those of us in the business of espousing, supporting and driving sustainable innovation, the report’s finding comes as no surprise. What is surprising is how many organizations fail to fully leverage their single greatest competitive advantage: their innovation workers.

We work with manufacturing leaders around the world, and have found three key elements to maximizing the effectiveness of an innovation workforce:

Empower innovation workers with knowledge.
On a daily basis, your engineers, scientists, researchers and other innovation workers, must tackle complex product development challenges. Innovation thrives when innovation workers have access to both the knowledge required to solve the problem and the innovation tools to help them apply that knowledge.  Internal knowledge such as lessons learned help avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating the same costly mistakes.   External knowledge — such as patents and web-based technical documents – provides fresh perspectives, spurs creative thinking and provides insights outside of your domain. Traditional methods for disseminating internal knowledge and accessing external content are insufficient.  And, while knowledge access is critical, it falls short if innovation workers are not also equipped with a comprehensive platform for problem identification, analysis and resolution. 

Provide a framework for collaboration.
Much of the critical institutional knowledge is not well documented, but instead resides in the minds of the employees. As employees tackle new innovation challenges, they struggle with identifying and leveraging the right subject matter experts. It is essential to provide a collaboration framework allowing the connection of people to people based on what they know and in the context of the innovation challenges at hand.

Give innovation workers the tools they need to perform innovation activities.
Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right innovation software, tools and skills for innovation success.  By arming your engineers and scientists with tools to help them focus their problem solving and speed problem resolution – all the while leveraging internal and external knowledge and sharing and exchanging this knowledge with their peers – innovation and product delivery are accelerated and worker productivity is enhanced.      

You have invested in enterprise software across every facet of your business and individual productivity tools across nearly every discipline – yet engineers and scientists are still solving problems and generating ideas in the same ad-hoc way they have for decades. Empower your innovation workers with knowledge (innovation intelligence), tools to help automate and facilitate innovation activities and the ability to collaborate with others to tackle problems and find solutions and you will come a long way to maximizing your single greatest asset and source of competitive differentiation, your people.

These are the keys to building a successful innovation engine that I’ve seen from our customers – what are your thoughts?

But like many, I believe that every month is innovation month. In fact, innovation is an every day activity for me — whether I am running the company or working with my team to make sure our global customers are on the cutting-edge of technology and innovating 24X7.

But Scott’s question stopped me dead in my tracks and got me thinking. What’s so important about June? Why not declare 2010 as the start of an innovation decade? Here’s my perspective on June:

Blooming Partnerships: June, as you know, is a popular wedding month (bear with me here). After long engagements, couples look forward to tying the knot and living a happy, prosperous life. Summer is also the time when most couples evaluate their relationships and adjust accordingly, whether they are planning a family or about to become empty nesters. In the world of technology, June signifies the end of the first half and a time to reflect on our business strategy and forecast the future. It’s time to re-engage with customers on the progress of their innovation initiatives. Are the projects blooming or wilting? Are there programs they need a divorce from so they can embark on new initiatives? Granted we are always collaborating with our customers. But June is when we refocus and revisit our game plan and ensure that the relationships are strong and prosperous.

Anticipation: For sport fans, this is an exciting time. The Red Sox are finally hitting their strides. Basketball fans are holding their breath. Who will win the NBA championship? In reality, it’s always nail-biting time in New England — whether you are rooting for a team or innovation breakthroughs. We literally sit at the edge of our seats every day, not knowing what will come next – will a company deliver another game changing product, what medical discoveries will cure terminal illnesses or perhaps a young entrepreneur could save the planet from global warming. Yes, we wait in anticipation for innovations that will not just change our lives but impact the economic prosperity of the commonwealth and the world.

Inspiration:  June is optimal for awakening, from nature to ideas. The glorious weather and coastline nurturers creativity, irrespective of our expertise or interest. And, I can’t think of another city that has as many medical and research institutions as Boston. The academic world is filled with professors and advisors who influence government policies and private initiatives. They also serve as mentors to all the students who get their education here. And after years of preparation and tough internships, thousands of these brilliant minds and eager contributors join the workplace in June, adding to our innovation culture and growth. As an adjunct professor, it’s an amazing feeling to see my MBA students enter the professional world, ready to impact and influence the business community and drive next generation innovations.

The Happening Place: Massachusetts is indeed the innovation hub. Many breakthrough technologies and industries are born here, from medical and life sciences to energy and manufacturing. Just look at the number of events taking place in June and multiply that with events that happen throughout the year. It’s at these events that people collaborate, create and deliver. As an entrepreneur, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. I grew up in the area, worked in multiple companies, collaborated with VCs to build and sell companies. Currently, I run a profitable company with outstanding professionals and we are proud to be working with global corporations to drive and foster their innovation initiatives.

So thanks Scott for making me step back and reflect on things that we take for granted. June is indeed a special month in New England, and possibly around the world.

Here’s to innovators, entrepreneurs, investors and mentors. Let our passion for innovation continue to permeate through our lives, every day of every month. After all, an innovation economy is as good as the people who contribute, and execute well on brilliant ideas.

Let me take a moment to share with you my definition of innovation and ROI as it pertains to our business and clients.  

To me, innovation is transforming ideas into market-leading, practical products – products that are affordable and impact life and society every day. Innovation for innovation sake is wasted investment. Innovation must be useful to a company’s target audience not just be a ‘cool’ idea that will hopefully find an audience. As for patents, they must be monetized so they add value to a company’s bottom line and give the company a competitive-edge.

Innovation is also about identifying new markets, improving existing systems and product evolution. Given the recent economy, many companies chose to invest in new market opportunities for existing products or expanded into emerging countries. Improving products is just as important. Often, you might be able to solve a problem by repurposing concepts from another industry or even learning from nature, a growing field called biomimicry. Despite the Latin translation, innovation doesn’t have to be something new.

But most importantly, innovation has to be repeatable and sustainable. It’s not about one brilliant idea but being able to sustain the product innovation process. And, innovation happens across the company not just in the R&D department. Today’s innovation community includes new business development, strategic planning and competitive analysis teams, among others.

Given our economy, innovation must result in revenue growth and increase market share within an accelerated timeframe. Therefore the innovation agenda and ROI must be tightly integrated with a company’s corporate goals.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?

I have been writing regularly about innovation trends and the importance of executives championing a company’s innovation agenda. Now let me share with you my company’s innovation agenda and give you a taste of what’s to come in 2010.

Our innovation agenda is pretty straight forward. Hire and retain the best minds. Help drive and sustain our customers’ innovation initiatives and boost their return on innovation. Our technology is designed to strategically infuse innovation into every step of the product development process and deliver the right products, quickly and cost effectively — which in turn positively impacts a company’s bottomline.     

Like many CEOs, I meet with customers regularly to learn about their challenges and achievements. I then share the information with my team so they can create new technology or programs to meet our client’s innovation goals. Each week I also meet with my executive team and collectively design and shape our corporate agenda. Here are Invention Machine’s focus areas for the year:

Product Development

As leaders in our industry, we pay close attention to our customers needs and act on them quickly. Several months ago, they told us that collaboration and identifying experts were important to their business. We delivered Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0, with automatic expert identification and collaboration functionalities, along with other new features. Now global teams can use the technology to better collaborate and work outside their silos.

As the role of innovation is expanding, so is the usage of Goldfire, our innovation intelligence platform. Initially thought to be the exclusive domain of scientists and engineers, companies now recognize that innovation happens across the organization, every day. Mapping to this shift, we have decided to broaden Goldfire’s innovation workflows and are looking to add new workflows for tasks such as tracking user sentiment and technology landscaping. 

We will also incorporate additional capabilities to manage broad deployments while making the software easier to adapt across multiple departments. New language support will be added to expand Goldfire’s current multi-lingual offerings of English, French, German and Japanese. 

Client Services

This year, our focus is shifting from just successful software implementations to becoming a trusted advisor. To ensure our customers success, my team has created roadmaps to empower users to easily design an Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem, build high performance teams and see return on innovation  within 90 days. Our innovation experts will work closely with individuals to tailor the use of Goldfire to their specific job functions as well as design customized workshops for broader groups that will help the team further accelerate the innovation process.

Marketing

As innovation practitioners and champions, our clients are dedicated to delivering successful projects.  As we all know, just delivering great products and processes are not enough. One must effectively communicate the value of innovation initiatives to their peers and other potential communities across an organization. Therefore I have asked my marketing department to engage with our clients and their internal communications team to create campaigns that will effectively spread the word of their innovation success. This will also help attract people from other departments and geographies who may be able to pitch in as well as learn from best practices, all of which will foster better collaboration and impact revenue.

These are some highlights. Obviously I am not giving you every detail of our corporate strategy. Would you? In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you help drive your company’s innovation agenda.

Needless to say, going green is a business imperative that drives a company’s bottom-line and competitiveness.  Green innovation is primarily about new product development and redesigning existing products so they are environmentally compliant.

Here are some tips on going green the right way, based on observations and conversations with leading innovation companies:  

• Identify a sustainability executive to champion and measure green innovation initiatives. The program must tie to the company’s business objectives and drive revenue.     
• Operationalize green across the enterprise so ‘design for green’ becomes part of the standard innovation process – whether it’s new product development or redesigning products, they must comply with the sustainability guidelines.
• Assess and understand what percentage of your company’s intellectual property portfolio is green compliant and quickly transform those patents into market-leading, eco-friendly products.  
• Use innovation software to generate concepts that identify green compatible material substitutions to upgrade strategic products so they meet environmental and regulatory standards.    
• Utilize semantic technology to research and apply revolutionary principals such as biomimicry to design eco-friendly products.

In short, companies that adopt and drive green innovation initiatives will gain financial and competitive edge, which in turn will help foster people, planet and profitability. 

What are your thoughts on going green?

We have long known that the best way to spur the economy is via job retention, job creation and executing on a strong innovation agenda. In most cases it’s up to the CEOs, not politicians, to design the agenda and drive the innovation economy.

Lately we’ve been hearing some positive news that show the economy may be mildly stabilizing. Several companies have reported strong earnings results and America’s GDP rose by 5.7 percent at the end of 2009, the best economic growth in six years. Yet, many people are still losing their jobs and struggling to pay their mortgage.

Granted, turning a global economy around is a Herculean task. I am glad the president is talking about job creation and the economy. But as some of the CEOs advising the government have said, we need policies and programs to sustain economic growth, not just short term stimulus projects.

As politicians and advisors tackle the issue on a macro level, let’s look at what companies can do to stimulate the innovation economy:

Focus: As I have said before, 2010 is the start of an innovation decade. We are on the cusp of major breakthroughs and America could once again top the list of most innovative countries (U.S. is currently #8). But in order to succeed, CEOs must continue to drive the innovation agenda and stay focused on the end game, i.e. profitability and growth. CEOs must encourage teams to create an innovation process that’s sustainable, adopt technology that empowers engineers to deliver the right products the first time and mitigate risks associated with product innovation. No company can afford 12 product failures for every one success, which is the case today.

Practical innovations: CEOs are the catalyst for delivering innovative products and services that impact our world today, from life saving medical technologies to planet saving green products. I often hear about interesting new ideas that claim to be breakthrough innovations. However, if a majority of users won’t adopt the product or can’t purchase it because of high price points, the product is not a useful innovation. And, the company is simply wasting resources and money. Successful innovation should address both functional and economic criteria.

Expand to retain: To succeed in a global economy, companies need long term planning that will mobilize teams and sustain cutting-edge product delivery. If you have happy customers, look for opportunities to expand product usage within your customer base. If you have a successful product line, identify adjacent market opportunities to bring in additional revenue. With sustained profitability and growth, a company can expand its employee base, and an innovative company will find it easier to attract and retain best talents.

Personalization: It’s all about relationships and knowing what your customers really want. This help companies design products or programs that closely match consumer needs. For example, for a B2B business like ours, we have to understand what ‘innovation success’ looks like to our enterprise customers. In most cases, they want to show innovation milestones within 90 days. So we created a “90 Days to Innovation” customizable program that allows Invention Machine Goldfire users to demonstrate success and ROI within 90 days.

Running a company isn’t rocket science and these concepts are not new. I strongly believe that it is our responsibility as CEOs to deliver the results we promise to our employees, customers and shareholders. So, I am sharing the philosophies I use to run my company, philosophies that have made Invention Machine a successful and growing company.

Now that you know my views, I’d love to know yours. What else can companies do to stimulate the innovation economy?

Innovate to Dominate: Innovation will continue to be a focus for all Best-in-Class companies. No surprise there. In NESTA’s recent ‘Everyday Innovation’ report, 78% of participants said innovation is key to improving their products and services and 70% said their focus on innovation has been reinforced. Also, 80% claimed innovation is an important part of their role. However, just ‘innovation’ is not enough.

Reign of process and collaboration: In 2010, we’ll see large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses focusing more on structured and sustainable innovation vs. an ad hoc innovation process. Sustainable innovation is the only way for companies to compete globally and drive the innovation economy. In addition, global collaboration with experts will become an integral part of the innovation process so teams can leverage innovation intelligence and deliver the right products the first time.

Changing of the guard: Emerging companies and countries around the world will become more innovative. Innovation leadership will no longer be exclusive to Global 2000 companies or established global powers.  In fact, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland topped the 2008 list of world’s most innovative countries, while the US dropped to number eight. Don’t be surprised to see China and India topping next year’s list. Emerging growth companies will also become innovation leaders as they can quickly amass greater market cap values and overtake or take over yesterday’s leaders. This is possible because lower stock prices in this economy have made multinational companies more vulnerable to acquisitions.

Ideation to productization: In 2009, the US patent applications dropped by 2.3 percent, primarily due to the economy, according to experts. Perhaps this trend will continue as companies will focus more on transforming ideas into commercial, revenue generating products and leverage existing technology from different industries to design new products or solve problems. After all, a company’s true success is measured by its revenue and products sold, not number of patents.

Green is the new black: Companies will continue on the path of green innovation. Today, many companies and government are still talking the green talk. But few are able to design cost efficient products that meet customer demands. In 2010 we expect to see more companies operationalise green innovation across an enterprise, making it a key business imperative for driving profitability and competitive-edge.

These are my top predictions. What are yours?

Last month we hosted our second user conference in Boston. It was attended by innovators from 10 countries, representing some of the best minds in the manufacturing industry. Right after the two-day event, CTO James Todhunter and I left for a trip to Europe and Asia. There, we met with more than a dozen customers and partners. Needless to say, the discussions around innovation were stimulating. The feedback, outstanding.

Here are highlights of what I heard from our clients at the conference and around the world:

• Companies recognize the benefit of investing in innovation, despite the recession. A quick analysis showed that companies that attended our October user conference outperformed market by 11.5% over the past 13 months. Investing in innovation does deliver results.
• Companies are making Invention Machine Goldfire the standard for concept research and sustainable innovation.
• Invention Machine is meeting their corporate innovation agenda, including identifying new markets, designing competitive products in half the time, and repurposing technology to drive revenue.
• Invention Machine Goldfire is a game changer, they said. It powers an innovation intelligence ecosystem that delivers precise intelligence to scientists and engineers and other innovators across the organization. Translation: companies are saving on labor costs, increasing productivity, delivering the right products the first time, and repurposing existing products into new markets – all of which leads to increased market share and competitive-edge.  
• Resellers are excited to be part of our global network, especially the new resellers who can now meet the innovation demands of small and medium businesses.

 As a CEO, such feedback is music to my ear. And, I’d like to increase the flow of such comments over the next few years. I am proud of Invention Machine and our accomplishments.  More importantly, I am grateful to my Invention Machine team, our customers and the industry influencers.  Thank you for your continued support.

Here’s to 2010 and beyond.

I am also looking forward to discussing our technology roadmap with our advisory council members from AkzoNobel, Applied Materials, Boston Scientific, Leggett & Platt, Northrop Grumman and StatoilHydro. Their input is invaluable in designing our future products.   

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘collaborate to innovate’. Therefore, over the next few days attendees will hear a lot about collaboration and the role of knowledge in sustaining the innovation process. As innovators, you know that collaboration is key to fueling innovation and that the right innovation intelligence can boost efficiency and product delivery. I also think it’s time we step up collaboration between companies, government and academia.       

At Power to Innovate, we’ll provide an overview of the Innovation Intelligence Ecosystem and how it leads to increased revenue and competitive edge as well as ways to successfully deploy the initiative across an enterprise. Attendees will also hear from a company that significantly increased productivity by designing a process to capture, share and reuse knowledge.  

In addition, the agenda is packed with in-depth innovation sessions and best practices from some of the brightest minds in innovation. We hope participants will find the sessions informative and that the networking will open doors for worldwide collaboration between peers. If you are not attending, but would like to get event highlights, please follow Invention Machine on Twitter or #P2I09.

In the meantime, I’d like to get your opinion on collaboration. Do you think it’s essential to driving and sustaining innovation?