As you may have noticed, we’re in the process of moving our two WordPress blogs, What’s Innovation Got to Do with It? and PR and Marketing Mentor™ to our own company domains, respectively:

http://www.CreativeSage.com and http://www.CathrynHrudicka.com

Instead of a smooth, overnight corporate transition, I have purposely allowed this one to be a bit messy, for a reason. I wanted to have the freedom to experiment a bit with the two blogs and figure out how each one would work in the context of an entire site; and most of all, I wanted your input, as a reader.

With the help of a designer and programmer, we ultimately are planning to customize the two blogs on our domains and further develop the content on the side pages, as well as the main blog pages. We’re also planning to add some specific products and services that will be available through an attached shopping cart, and we’ll probably change the widgets and some other features. Through this whole process, which could take a few months, I would like your input. When you see or read something and have an opinion about it, I would appreciate your comments, providing they are relevant to the topic at hand and are respectful of other readers. Honesty with respect is all I ask.

The main content of the two blogs will continue to be informational, and they will not turn into mere marketing vehicles. If the blog content interests you in finding out more about the services or other products we offer, you are free to check out the side pages and contact us for more information (or not).

Since many of our readers are getting feeds of the two blogs from the WordPress.com sites, you will have to change your feed URLs, unfortunately—WordPress Support told me there’s no way around this, but we’re also going to leave the WordPress.com blogs up for a while, with links to the new blogs on our domains. You’ll be able to read the first few lines of each post on the old WordPress.com blogs, and follow a link to the new domain to read the entire post. If you want to change your feeds from either blog, we’ll have RSS links for you to do it on our own domains.

In the spirit of Open Innovation, I have concurred that we need and want input from our readers, clients and friends. If you have any other questions or private thoughts, do not hesitate to contact me. I look forward to bringing our loyal and growing community of readers along with us, as I think the new domains will eventually offer even more useful information and content. Thanks for your patience and feedback during this process.

You can also read this post here. Our other WordPress blog, PR & Marketing Mentor™, has moved here.

~Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage™/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates

For those of you who are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, you may want to join us at this month’s meeting hosted by the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute:

Turning Vision into Value:

SVII “First Wednesday”
Innovation Society Meeting

July 11, 2007, 6:00 – 9:30 pm

Join us once again for great company and great conversation.
Feel free to bring a friend!

Web 2.0 and its Applications
by Vitaly Golomb,
with contribution from The Society

Vitaly Golomb is CEO of SputnikSF, a privately held company providing design and technology infrastructure since 1998. Web 2.0, now in common vernacular, refers to the second generation of web-based communities and hosted services. Vitaly will offer his experience and perspectives on Web 2.0 and its ability to support business and more. We invite you to be prepared to let us know about your own favorite Web 2.0 applications, and participate in a discussion about how it can support innovation.

Program Schedule:

6:00-6:45: Informal networking
6:45: Opening remarks and invitations
7:00: Community dinner and pre-presentation
7:40: Feature Presentation, participation, conversation.

Location:

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant 134 Castro Street, Mountain View
(between Villa and Central, kitty-korner from the Train Station)
650-964-8881
Come directly to the private room upstairs.

There will be a $20 charge to cover the food. Drinks are available on a no-host basis. Please be sure to RSVP by email. Need to reach us at the last minute? Call 415-307-0645.

SVII First Wednesday of each month—Upcoming Programs:

August: Innovation Society Roundtable

September: How Art Informs Innovation

October: Innovations in Facilities Design

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The SVII is planning some really innovative programs—come join us and suggest topics and speakers you would like to see at future meetings and special events.

Journalism Driving Innovation…

Innovation Driving Journalism

KEYNOTES:

DOUGLAS ENGELBART/ Introduced by JOHN MARKOFF: Augmenting the collective IQ of writers and readers.

Doug Engelbart is known as the father of the concept of the personal computer, and inventor of the computer mouse. He is a proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to build collective intelligence that can solve the world’s problems. (Read more in Wikipedia.)

John Markoff is a senior writer for The New York Times. (Read his bio.)

CURTIS CARLSON: The discipline of innovation
Curtis Carlson is the president of SRI International. (Read bio.)

• Do journalists understand innovation concepts, processes, and ecosystems?
• Is the newsroom organized to cover innovation?
• Is innovation in journalism a prerequisite for journalism about innovation?

• Innovation in Journalism

• The new New Journalism: How innovation is driving the development of journalism
• Examining the innovation ecosystem of the media

• Journalism about Innovation

• Differences between writing about science, R&D, and business, and writing about innovation
• Covering the stages of the innovation process
• Finding key sources for different aspects of the innovation ecosystem
• Soundbites: interacting with communicators
• Telling the story: narratives for innovation

• Publishing Innovation Journalism

• Business Models
• Pushing the boundaries: new frontiers in publishing
• Building an audience: how do people want their news?

• Understanding the relationship between journalism and innovation ecosystems

• How does journalism influence innovation ecosystems?
• Why innovations systems and journalists need each other
• Codes and ethics in a brave new world

Pre-Conference Workshops

May 21.

• WORKSHOP A: The Basics of Innovation – What a journalist needs to know
• WORKSHOP B: Innovation Journalism and Public Innovation Policy

Conference Executive Committee:

• David Nordfors, Conference Chair / Publisher of proceedings
• Thomas Frostberg, Journalism
• Erika Ingvald, Journalism
• Jan Sandred, Journalism, Public Policy
• Alisa Weinstein, Journalism, Public Policy
• Turo Uskali, Research, Editor – academic papers
• Johanna Mansor, logistics
• Laurie Richard, registration of participants

The conference is free of charge, but seats are limited. If they run out of space, priority will be given to journalism professionals and people associated with innovation journalism initiatives.

To register, go here. If you’re from out of town and need a hotel, go here.

It should be a very illuminating conference, and I plan to be there!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

I am on the advisory board, and my company, Creative Sage/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates, is a partner in the following innovative Social Entrepreneur/corporate philanthropy programs that serve people on local and international levels. Here is the announcement for an upcoming event in San Francisco that we are co-producing, and the Web links:

http://givefoundationonline.blogspot.com/

Global Initiative to Advance Entrepreneurship

Event: May 10, 2007
Alleviating Poverty Through Microfinance:
Three Bay Area Programs Initiate Social Change

Location:

Hotel Rex
562 Sutter Street (at Mason)
San Francisco, CA 94102
P: 415.433.4434

Time: 6:00 pm check in; 6:30pm-8:00pm program
Cost: $30.00/includes dinner
Register in advance at: http://sfmicrocredit.eventbrite.com/

Microcredit is breaking the cycle of poverty. By providing credit via small loans to the poor, microcredit programs are transforming the lives of millions of families and communities around the world. Based on the idea that the poor have the capacity to improve their own situations, microfinance programs help impoverished people build viable businesses and create their own economic opportunities.

Alleviating Poverty Through Microfinance, the first event in the Social Entrepreneurship Lecture Series, will showcase three Bay Area microcredit initiatives. Three featured speakers include:

Vijay Kapoor, I Create India. I Create, Inc., provides Integrated Entrepreneurship Training to disadvantaged communities in India. Vijay will discuss how I Create is working with Bay Area nonprofits to “adopt” villages in low-income areas in northern India and providing training and seed money to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Bob Graham, NamasteDirect. Bob is founder and Chief Executive Officer of NamasteDirect, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focusing on microcredit in Central America by providing small loans to first time women borrowers. Bob will discuss opportunities to provide microcredit to underserved communities in Central America.

Keith Axtell, Rotary International District 5150. Keith is World Community Service Chair for Rotary District 5150, serving the greater San Francisco Bay Area. He will discuss local Rotary microcredit programs in Guayaquil, Ecuador, resulting in three hundred small businesses in one of the poorest areas of the country.

Who Should Attend?

This two hour event is for anyone interested in the exciting field of microfinance, including nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and members of the business community. The event will encourage innovation among organizations already participating in microfinance programs, and provide opportunities to form strategic partnerships to build and expand the outreach and success of microcredit and microfinance.

Sponsored by Rotary Club San Francisco Golden Gate, Global Initiative to Advance Entrepreneurship, Creative Sage and other nonprofit and business partners, this is the first of an ongoing series showcasing social entrepreneurship initiatives in the Bay Area and around the world. This series will be comprised of speakers, expert panels and film screenings that showcase the emerging field of social entrepreneurship. To learn more, visit http://www.givefoundationonline.org.

Just a quick post to let our community of readers know that we’re offering a great prize to FIVE WINNERS who become the 20,000—20,004th reader hits for our sister blog, Creativity and Innovation Notations…read about it at the Creativity and Innovation Notations blog. Since many of you here also read that blog, I wanted to give you a heads-up that this is happening right now, so YOU have a shot at winning one of the five prizes!

This prize requires doing a wee bit of homework, so go over there now and follow the instructions—you can win a great bonus prize for yourself or your organization (for-profit or non-profit)! If this is successful, I may offer a similar prize again on this blog—keep watching for announcements.

~Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer, Creative Sage™ / Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates

Once in awhile, someone relatively unknown or “outside of the box” will do something spectacularly creative that deserves all of our attention. Today, I discovered that someone—Gus Bitdinger, a Stanford graduate student who wrote a primo song about Innovation in large organizations, “Back to Orbit.” Gus’s professor, Robert Sutton, was so impressed with the song, which was Gus’s final project for Sutton’s class, that Mr. Sutton posted a YouTube video of Bitdinger playing his song on the Harvard Business Review web site, in his “The Working Life” column.

Sutton wrote about the innovation class that fellow professor Michael Dearing and he taught to a diverse group of eleven Stanford students, called “Management Science & Engineering 282,” a joint offering of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Stanford (Design) “d.school” class. As Sutton describes it, “We decided to see how creative the students could get by subjecting them to an absurdly hard final exam (suggested by one of the students, Sam Goldman): We asked each one to make a short video that summarized what they learned in the class. We were impressed by how well they all did; but the best one just stunned us: ‘Back to Orbit,’ which you can see as a YouTube video.” You can also see, hear and discuss it The Harvard Business Review Online (the video will pop up here, if you’ve got Snap).

Gus has very creatively used many ideas from the late Gordon MacKenzie’s landmark book, “Orbiting the Giant Hairball,” one of the classics about Creativity and Innovation in organizations. As many of my readers know, Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he co-founded the Center for Work, Technology and Organization. His most recent book is The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Sutton’s personal blog is Work Matters; he also maintains (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) a website focusing on the use of evidence-based management.

You can get this terrific video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrlSHZ0anAM or just click on this link, and the video should pop up here.

You can also see the video clip on our Creativity and Innovations Blog.

I invite you to watch other videos about creativity and innovation on our sidebar on the right, below, as I’ve had some problems embedding them in the main blog pages here. We’ve also gathered innovative PR and Marketing videos on our PR and Marketing Mentor Blog...scroll down to the sidebar there, and keep checking back for VodPod widge video additions on both of my WordPress blogs.

This should be obvious, but…Innovative organizations deserve the most creative and innovative marketing and PR, especially for your organization’s most innovative services and products!

Grant proposals are due May 1st. Let’s revolutionize retirement now, and for future generations, and put those Baby Boomers to work for good causes!

The Community College Encore Career Project is sponsored by Civic Ventures—a think tank and incubator generating ideas and inventing programs to help society achieve the greatest return on experience—and is funded by the MetLife Foundation.

Fast Company magazine selected Civic Ventures as a Winner of its 2007 Social Capitalist Award. To learn more, visit http://www.civicventures.org.

“Innovation is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy.”

–The Economist

News From my colleague, Jeff De Cagna, of Principled Innovation:

Innovation continues to be a top priority for leaders in all sectors of the global economy, yet actually making innovation happen remains a profound challenge for many organizations. What’s more, the new dynamics of a rapidly-changing, Web-enabled global marketplace are shifting how we think about innovation itself.

If you would like to better understand the current state of innovation thinking and practice, as well as the emerging trends that will shape the future of innovation, join some of the Web’s top innovation bloggers for the first-ever Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum on April 26, 2007.

Here is the Forum line-up as of right now, and my colleague, Jeff De Cagna, of Principled Innovation, will be adding more bloggers. I have signed up to participate in the forum, as I’m also an Innovation Journalist, as well as an Innovation program designer, management consultant and executive coach:

Morning Forum Roundtable (11 am EDT)

Renee Hopkins Callahan, IdeaFlow
Chuck Frey, InnovationTools
Jeffrey Phillips, Innovate on Purpose
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World

Afternoon Forum Roundtable (2 pm EDT)

Dominic Basulto, Endless Innovation
Sanjay Dalal, Creativity And Innovation Driving Business
Mark McGuinness, Wishful Thinking
Joyce Wycoff, Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation

Keep checking—we’ll update this list and provide more information about the event as it becomes available. This is a unique opportunity to participate in two outstanding conversations involving many of the blogosphere’s smartest innovation thinkers and practitioners. For more information, read Jeff’s blog. I hope you will be able to join us!

Ten-Year Forecast by Intuit and Institute for the Future Redefines the Face of Entrepreneurs

MOUNTAIN VIEW—Jan. 24, 2007—The face of small business will dramatically change as seasoned baby boomers, kids fresh out of high school, mid-career women, “mompreneurs” and new immigrants come together to create the most diverse pool of entrepreneurs ever. Those are among the key findings of the groundbreaking Intuit Future of Small Business Report™, a unique study that looks forward 10 years and examines the prospects, influences and profiles of small business.

The first installment of the study, sponsored by Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) and authored by the Institute for the Future, was released today. It focuses on new entrepreneurs who break the mold, the coming proliferation of personal businesses and the emergence of entrepreneurship education. Two upcoming installments will examine the technologies that will propel the small business sector and how small businesses will affect society and the economy through 2017.

Greater Diversity by 2017

The first installment concludes that the newest entrepreneurs will be far more diverse than their predecessors in age, origin and gender. By 2017, the white, middle-aged men who traditionally launch small businesses will be outnumbered by Generation Yers — those born after 1982 — women, immigrants and “un-retiring” baby boomers opting for entrepreneurship as a second career.

The report identifies three major trends: the changing face of small business, the rise of personal business and the emergence of entrepreneurial education. Those trends led to five major findings:

* Entrepreneurs will no longer come predominantly from the middle of the age spectrum, but instead from the edges. People nearing retirement and their children just entering the job market will set the bar as the most entrepreneurial generation ever.

* American entrepreneurship will reflect a huge upswing in the number of women. The glass ceiling that has limited women’s growth in traditional corporate career paths will send a rich talent pool to the small business sector.

* Immigrant entrepreneurs will drive a new wave of globalization. U.S. immigration policy and the outcome of the current immigration debates will affect how this segment performs over the next decade.

* Contract workers, accidental and social entrepreneurs will fuel a proliferation of personal businesses. Economic, social and technological change — and an increased interest in flexible work schedules — will produce a more independent workforce seeking a better work-life balance.

* Entrepreneurship will be a widely adopted curriculum at educational, trade and vocational institutions. As a result, artists, musicians and others not traditionally exposed to business education will learn not just their trade but small-business management skills as well.

“The next decade will see small and personal businesses become increasingly important sources of employment, economic growth and innovation,” said Steve King, senior advisor at the Institute for the Future and study co-author. “Leading small and personal businesses will be a diverse group of Americans, including young adults — even teens, women, immigrants and aging baby boomers.”

The study represents the first time that a wide set of business and demographic trends have been consolidated.

“Until now, the picture for American small businesses has been a fragmented set of statistics and forecasts,” said Brad Smith, senior vice president of Intuit’s small business division. “By putting the pieces together we’ve shown how different this sector may look in the future. These businesses may be small, but the changes in store will be anything but.”

Face of Future Entrepreneurs

Many baby boomers nearing retirement age will launch new businesses in far greater numbers than their counterparts from earlier generations, the study found. Their motivation: diminished job security, disappearing pensions and health benefits, and the need to match savings with longer life expectancies.

Many of their children will follow suit, becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in American history. Generation Yers view entrepreneurship as a way to maintain independence by owning their own careers. They are remarkably well-suited to the emerging entrepreneurial environment in which social and professional networks intermingle, information is ubiquitous, and the inner workings of the economy are far more transparent.

Women will increasingly turn to entrepreneurship. Among them: “mompreneurs” — mothers who start part-time, home-based businesses, often with the help of the Internet. These personal businesses, as the one-person sector is sometimes called, will be launched by people who may not even consider themselves small business owners.

A new breed of immigrant entrepreneurs will turn to the Internet to launch business, using their language skills, strong educations, multi-country contacts and professional experience to form international partnerships.

Shift Away from Traditional Employment

The line between small and large businesses will blur as more entrepreneurs form free-agent contracts with large companies as a natural response to the demise of lifetime employment. By 2017, free agents will thrive with less job security — they will have clients, not employers — but, in trade, will exert far more control over their time and working conditions.

For some professionals, entrepreneurship will complement a corporate career, but not replace it. The reason: Corporations and government agencies will see the entrepreneurial spirit as key to innovation and will train promising candidates accordingly. As a result, professionals will spend their careers alternating between two related worlds, sometimes running their own businesses in the free market and at other times running a virtual business within a larger organization. Experience in the former will help bolster the latter.

Entrepreneurial Education Expands

Entrepreneurial training will begin much earlier in life, with universities, secondary and vocational schools — and even some elementary schools — offering entrepreneurship as a mainstream subject. At the college level, the emphasis will widen, focusing not just on high-growth businesses backed by venture capital, but on small business ownership of all kinds.

“Once taught only in the school of hard knocks, entrepreneurship will become a mainstream subject, as fundamental to business education as accounting,” Smith said. “These courses will help transform the very definition of an entrepreneur to include professionals from all walks of life.”

A PDF file of the complete report is available at http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness, along with visuals, a list of resources and more background material.

About the Institute for the Future

Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers, the Institute for the Future is an independent nonprofit research group working with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. The IFTF takes an explicitly global approach to strategic planning, linking macro trends to local issues in such areas as technology and society, health and health care, and global business trends.
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[Press Release © 2007 Intuit Inc. All rights reserved.]

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These are some trends we all will need to pay increasing attention to, not only for marketing purposes, but for the significant impact they will have on all world cultures, social issues, the environment, and the ways we do business. Entrepreneurs are the first-line innovators…more comments about this to come! Please feel free to add your most intelligently spent two cents to this blog…comments are moderated for relevance and respect demonstrated for other posters. Write on!

–Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer/CEO
Creative Sage™

(Republished January 2007, from the Creative Sage™ Creativity and Innovation Notations Blog)

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Nearly Half of Companies Remain Dissatisfied with Their Return on Innovation Spending; Three out of Four Executives Believe That Breakthrough Innovations Are Essential for Success in Their Industry; Apple, Google, and 3M Ranked “Most Innovative”

Boston (originally released: July 19, 2006) — Seventy-two percent of companies worldwide will increase spending on innovation in 2006-07, and 41 percent will increase spending significantly, according to a recent survey of senior management conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The study’s full set of findings, based on responses from more than 1,000 senior executives from 63 countries and all major industries, is summarized in two new reports, Innovation 2006 and a companion piece on metrics, Measuring Innovation 2006.

The survey also revealed that, despite widespread plans to raise spending, nearly one out of two companies is unhappy with its return on innovation spending.

“These findings highlight the paradox we see all the time in practice. Innovation is such an important priority for companies, and although they continue to spend ever-increasing amounts on it, half of all companies remain unsatisfied with the returns they generate,” said Jim Andrew, a senior vice president at BCG and worldwide leader of its Innovation and Commercialization topic area. “This is a critical issue because the costs are even greater than most companies realize. The costs include not only the money invested, but also the opportunity cost of not generating the growth and returns from innovation that are possible and that companies need to meet the demands of the stock market.”

Other highlights from this BCG research include the following:

Innovation Is a Rising Strategic Priority for the Majority of Businesses

* Consistent with the rise in spending, executives are placing ever-greater strategic emphasis on innovation. Innovation is the number one strategic priority at 40 percent of companies (versus only 19 percent in 2005) and a top-three priority at more than 70 percent. More than 90 percent of executives say that organic growth through innovation is necessary for success in their industry; nearly three out of four feel that breakthrough innovations are required

Companies Spend the Greatest Portion of Their Innovation Dollars on Improvements to Existing Offerings

* While executives say that developing new products or services for existing customers is the most important goal of innovation, companies actually spend most heavily on making incremental improvements to existing offerings

Executives Consider Globalization Both a Major Opportunity and a Major Challenge

* Many companies are accelerating innovation investments in China , India , and other rapidly developing economies (RDEs). Most companies are doing so at a measured pace, however. So far, relatively few have made an aggressive commitment. The primary reasons companies are investing in these countries are to achieve cost savings and gain better access to the local markets

* There are few signs yet of a major shift of higher-value-added jobs—those that pay the highest salaries and are of greatest concern to government policymakers—to RDEs

Apple Computer Is Considered the Most Innovative Company

* For the second straight year, and by a wide margin, executives ranked Apple the most innovative company. Google and 3M were ranked second and third, respectively

Measuring Innovation Is a Significant Challenge for Many Businesses

* Innovation is widely undermeasured, and few firms are confident that their measurement efforts are sufficiently accurate or thorough. Indeed, the majority of companies (63 percent) use only a handful of metrics—five or fewer—to monitor and assess their innovation performance

* The metrics that executives consider most important are time to market, new-product sales, and return on investment

“Innovation is harder to measure than cost reductions, I’ll give you that,” Andrew said. “But a large number of companies don’t even measure it at all. And that means that innovation, a key priority for almost every organization, can’t be managed by many firms. This situation isn’t necessary. There are well-established practices that work. Not measuring is like driving without having your headlights on in the dark: you can’t see where you’re going or even if you’re still on the right road.”
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