Innovation Explosion

"Intellectual processes create most of the competitive edge for companies and value-added in all sectors of the economy."

"But most institutions need to move much more radically and quickly than they have."

"Software is now a critical ingredient at all levels of the innovation-diffusion process and is especially important for the organizational learning that innovation requires."

"In many cases, software itself becomes the discoverer or inventor."

"Software can identify subtle supplier, user, or environmental trends as potential problems or market opportunities long before personal observations might do so."

"Maximizing innovation impact in software systems requires as open a system as possible, both to capture innovation at the nodes and to disseminate knowledge to all centers."

"The most powerful new software systems for both self-learning and option generation are evolutionary and object-oriented systems."

"Problem identification, imagination, expertise, persistence, and careful interactive testing with customers are the most usual determinants of success."

"Software substitutes for many of the infrastructures formerly imposed by teams."

"In software, as in most other innovations, intellect and intellect alone creates value."

"Talented people collaborate because they want to accomplish something special but lack the capacity to deal with all the challenges they face."

"Superabundant information forces a phase change in the way people interact."

"To maintain and deepen needed levels of competency, individuals must work relatively consistently and closely with peer experts in the same disciplines, sharing a common language and worldview."

"There are solid reasons why customers make such a high percentage of innovations."

"When truly motivated innovation suppliers interact with strongly motivated leading user-innovators, a kind of feeding frenzy of "what might be" often results."

"Only top managers can establish the palpable visions, focused strategies, and challenging, rewarding support environments that most encourage innovation."

"The essence of leadership is the ability to see and make vivid to others the positive connections between external events and their lives."

"To guide innovation most effectively, most enterprises need three more levels of specificity beyond a well-understood vision."

"A vital step in implementing a corporate innovation strategy is to consciously design a risk, timing, and payoff portfolio."

"Far from being straitjackets, figures of merit stimulate creativity, innovation, and commercial success by defining in challenging terms the technical-economic characteristics essential for success."

"The essence of all strategy is to be able to focus more capability on a concentrated area than any other competitor can, yet maintain the needed flexibilities to meet unexpected environmental changes or competitive assaults."

"Core-competency-with-outsourcing strategies make special sense in rapidly changing marketplaces and technological situations."

"Middle managers have to operate in multiple time frames to maintain both their daily operations efficiencies and longer-term innovation strategies."

"The most innovative companies also recognize that innovative champions tend to work for more than just monetary rewards."

"A true leader _stimulates others to achieve extraordinary results_ they would have not conceived or accomplished on their own."

"Many of the conflicts about the . . . validity of "research" versus "practical" knowledge in business, academic, legal, and national policy circles rests on different perceptions about what constitutes scientific knowledge at any given time."

"Governments actively create positive wealth through a variety of mechanisms"

"Well-conceived public (or government) action creates large increments of economic growth"

"Both economists and sensible policymakers are beginning to stress "market-like" incentive mechanisms, which, by creating new markets, generate higher-quality and lower-cost solutions to public problems."

"National intellectual, technology, and economic strategies must be integrated more specifically to support the rapidly developing services, software, and intellect-based economy of the future."