Lightweight Innovation
feedKeeping with Institute for the Future's commitment to share our research with public, throughout 2010 this blog will explore our forecasts and impacts of the future of lightweight innovation. Around the 15th of each month, we'll share the next section of the report, as well as signals and trends from the world around us that showcase how lightweight innovation models are evolving.
Lightweight Innovation: Guidelines for Reinvention (Part 1)
Lightweight innovation processes are emerging on the web, aided by new ideas about how to organize innovation and technologies that reduce the cost and complexity of incremental innovation. But which of these tools might enable a shift to lightweight models in other industries? This section highlights a few generalized tools discovered in our research that are likely to deliver...
Recognizing Lightweight Innovation: Key Characteristics and Technology Drivers
In 2007, the Institute for the Future forecast on lightweight infrastructure introduced a set of characteristics common in the design of emerging technical systems. When we look for lightweight innovation, we are more concerned with the characteristics...
Financial Lightweight Innovation: Thomson Reuters and the StreetApps Challenge
It's great to see a company that gets lightweight innovation and is willing to stick it's neck out. In partnership with NYC-based ChallengePost, Thomson Reuters is offering $25,000 in prizes to developers that create innovative mobile apps that leverage its financial data APIs.
The StreetApps Challenge is "challenging...
Moving Beyond Open Innovation
Opening up R&D organizations to outside ideas has become a powerful weapon in the strategic arsenal of research managers. As Henry Chesbrough writes, “[O]pen innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.” This strategy has been...
Idea Management + Prediction Markets = Lightweight Innovation
When I first joined the Institute four years ago, I spent much of 2006 looking at the prospects of prediction markets for long-range forecasting. For the 5-10 year time range that IFTF typical does forecasting for, prediction markets were of limited use. People just didn't have the patience to make long-term bets.
But in the meantime, prediction markets have taken hold as short-range...
Lightweight Innovation: ShopKeep Upends Retail IT With Cloud Services
At a mixer for The Hive at 55, a new coworking space launched recently by the Downtown Alliance here in Manhattan, I accidentally met one of the employees of a new startup called ShopKeep. Founded by ex-PWC technology consultant turned wine store-entrepreneur Jason Richelson, the project grew out of the retail...
The Strategic Challenge: Innovating the Process of Innovation
This is the second in a series of monthly articles presenting the Institute for the Future's forecast on the future of lightweight innovation. In the first post, we explored the how lightweight models for building the web are changing the way companies innovate. This month, we look at some of the key strategic challenges this shift poses for existing...
The Humanities Gaming Institute: A Model for Lightweight Innovation in Highly Traditional Organizations?
IFTF colleague Sean Ness recently drew my attention to an interesting lightweight innovation event being held this summer at the University of South Carolina, the Humanities Gaming Institute. During three weeks in June, a group of 20 fellows selected in a competitive selection process with work with three gamedesign experts to...
Venture Capital and Lightweight Innovation: The Growing Gap
James Suroweicki writes in this month's Technology Review looking at the looming crisis in venture capital. Suroweicki's analysis partly hinges on one of the core trends in our lightweight innovation forecast - the rapidly falling cost of bringing products and services to market, particularly on the web, but increasingly across...
Microsoft: Not Lightweight Innovator
From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley:
"Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. ... What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite...
Spaces of Lightweight Innovation: What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?
Last night, I had the opportunity to participate in an informal workshop on "What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?" held at New Work City, one of the biggest and oldest coworking spaces in Manhattan. The workshop was organized by Shift, a workplace consultancy loosely based out of Austin, Texas but with team members around the world. Shift is...
How new models for building the Web will reshape Innovation
Just a few years ago, launching an Internet startup typically entailed making the rounds on Sand Hill Road, pitching venture capitalists an idea and a business plan illustrated by a handful of slides. Today, PowerPoint decks are replaced by working prototypes and the business plans by waiting lists for beta test accounts. Even the venture capitalists are being replaced by angels and self-...
