Management

This post is first and for all about my experience on the R&D management conference, but it builds up to a story on Drupal too.

After giving several presentations in September, we have begone to visit companies to investigate how innovation is happening there. The idea is to find the AS-IS situation and compare it to some of the literature. I won't be writing about the specific cases, the companies and the people we work with should be able to evaluate that first. I can talk about the methodology.

It is not my intention to create boring questionnaires, but to experience the full complexity of the innovation process. The method can be called Participatory learning based on action research. I know it more from antropology research, just observer or being a participant is a quite different story. The participatory method should lead to an improvement for the partners too, this is very important aspect.

I'm also a bit inspired by the concept of repurposing. There is the story of Gutenberg and his discovery of the printing press. The story goes that Gutenberg had the idea, but could not create it. Only by being on a wine exposition and seeing a wine press did he found a breakthrough on his vision. Repurposing has been important during my whole research, it was a key aspect of my master thesis too. The expected outcome from this participation is a breakthrough on how to create a web2.0 tool for the Enterprise Innovation planning ... still a long way to go !

I was just a bit surfing the web for Clayton M. Christensen new work and listened to a blogcast on his recent book Disrupting Class. In the blogcast he talks about disrupting class by using computers, but argues that it is not yet good enough to compete with universities and should compete with non-consumption. This surprised me, as I'm not competing with non-consumption but with new-market consumption with my WSDB course.

In Friedman's book "The World Is Flat" you find the expression "creative destruction on steroid". Recently I've been hearing this term more frequently, probably not all have read the book, but the expression does seems appeal to many. In a recent debate on service science we got from the economic crisis to that expression. You could understand this as "flattening is a disruptive innovation". It seems to be a disruption of nations, by globalization and the rise of a new order. Let me outline what I mean with that.

Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Wim Vanhaverbeke who is an expert on open innovation. For example he is a coauthor of Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. To give some idea of the talk I would like to tell about open-innovation as false-negatives. One of the many thing I've learned yesterday.

When you stand on a crossroad of two disciplines, how do you make one aware of the potential leverage from the other? It may be easer when one uses the jargon from the discipline you try to reach at, in this case management. The goal is to manage radical change by creating something similar as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for Innovation (so EIP). It is the intention to make a project/experiment for the research on novelty during my PhD. I've been making a small paper as introduction to the idea of EIP, mostly as Doctoral consortium paper for Open IT-based innovation. Here follows the abstract, or have a look at the full extended abstract:

Recently I'm getting more into IT management, thanks to the mentoring of the professors at MOSI (E. Torfs and E. Vandijck). During reading in the book "Corporate Information Strategy and Management" I came across the concept and examples of B2B, what stands for "Business to Business". The concept C2C (customers), like ebay was of course known to me. The B2B example was Covisint. Using the web for B2C may be the most strait forward e-commerce example.