innovation

innovation metrics

There is an interesting article on the business week site regarding the US governments initiative to develop a metric for innovation. It will likely bemore of an economic indicator, but may well lay the ground work for corporate and academic metrics as well.

Peter Drucker said the only two investments in a business are markeitng and innovation. Everything else is a cost.

In the short run, I think innovation metrics within an organization will be focused on controlling expense. In the mid run it will be about measuring ROI.

Innovation and User Expectations

"never fail user expectations" is often repeated in the User Experience
fields. Consistency is important, but what about innovation? New ways of
interaction assumes that some or all of the expectations of the user will
fail. If the new interaction may work better than the old one, why not try
it? If indeed this new interaction is better, it is possible only because
the "never fail user expectations" idea was ignored.

A case in study is the Wii-mote. In the interview Iwata Asks...

Innovation in design (was: RFID and other fads)

Here is something to look into, for anyone who cares about having
an inventor's mind - TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving),
a methodology for creative engineering design developed in the
1960s. This is one of the great timeless things, similar to
McLuhan's "Understanding media" and Ashby's "Introduction to
cybernetics". TRIZ has a fairly solid background - it took
200,000 patents to analyse to discover and describe how innovation
takes place.