Blogs

Over at ThinkWithGoogle, an interesting article was put up with the title "The Eight Pillars of Innovation". In the post, Susan Wojcicki , Google employee #16, shares 8 tips on how Google looks at software innovation. 

Some of the most remarkable tips she shares, and a little bit of my interpretation:

• Think big, but start small: Although your vision might be extremely ambitious and large, you have to start somewhere. So by all means, start with something small, and let it grow bigger when you get traction. Today's open source tools and services out there make it easy to have something simple up and running in very little time.
• Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection: get something out, learn what works and what not, improve, iterate. You will not get it right the first time, luckily, you can improve and deploy your software continuously.
• Be a platform: no matter how big and smart your development team is, others might have ideas to make your products and services better, nicer, faster, more valuable. By trying to be a platform on top of which others can build, you facilitate other people's creativity and innovation. Your products will be much more valued. Examples of this strategy include Google Maps (just have a look at googlemapsmania to have a glimpse on all sorts of applications and services people build on top of Google Maps) or the Twitter eco-system.

I encourage you to look at all 8 tips and look forward to hearing tips and insights from you in the comments.

Innovation management platforms are hot. Many companies are starting to look at such platforms and wonder what they could mean for them, how to start adopting them and how to embed them into their own environment and maybe most importantly, how do others do it. In this latest ITEI newsletter you'll find testimonies and lessons learned from companies adopting such platforms.

In this post I’ll talk, based upon own experience, about how the 3 Scrum questions increase the likelihood of serendipity to happen within your team, thereby increasing the impact of your critical developer resources.

One major deliverable of the ITEI project will be SinnoBoK, a body of knowledge for software in­novation. Despite the fact that software is rapidly becoming an instrument for realizing innovation, it is remarkable to see that a frequently used ref­erence framework in the domain of software en­gineering such as the “Software Engineering Body Of Knowledge” SWEBOK makes little or no mention of innovation with software. The SWEBOK organ­izes the software engineering domain in a set of 10 knowledge areas, but does not mention the aspect ‘innovation with software’. SinnoBoK will help close this gap between the existing state of the art in software engineering and innovation management.