2005 Fortune Innovation Conference
30 Nov & 1 Dec New York City
Fortune magazine’s annual conference has focused the last couple of years on the topic of innovation. The first Fortune conference I attended was in NYC back in 2001, just a couple of weeks after the 911 attacks on New York and DC. That conference was all about the busted tech bubble, and featured Gary Hamel, who at the time was heralding Enron as a prototype for a wildly successful firm, one that moves quick to totally dominate new market opportunities.
You don’t hear much from Gary any more…wonder why?
In any case, back to innovation. The event was in the new Jazz Centre at the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle; much better than a hotel ball room. The Fortune staff went out of their way to ensure the two days stayed on time, that all the attendees had fun, and all were well fed. Not an easy feat with 1,000 people in attendance. The topics surrounded every conceivable aspect of innovation, but the speakers themselves could have been much better.
Here’s some of what I took away:
Sir Ken Robinson (http://www.speakers.ca/robinson_ken.aspx) pointed at that all successful organizations put innovation at their core; that when young, people believe much more in themselves and are less self conscious about being wrong; and that everyone is or can become creative (your job title might not make it sound that way, but that’s up to you to rectify the situation).
Change is being driven by technology and demography (the free flow of ideas and of people), and that the hard part of creating an innovation organization is to make these (and other valuable) concepts operational. Ken also said the most obvious but, for some unknown reason hard to grasp in the U.S., concept: education is the key to innovation and one must be careful to not confuse raising standards with standardization (such as standardization through testing).
Many of the speakers, including Fred Smith, FedEx founder & CEO and Scott Cook, Intuit (Quicken and QuickBooks) founder, innovate in the most simple manner. No rocket science nor engineered life forms were required for FedEx to talk the USPS into flying the overnight mail (and saving the Postal Service $300 million a year to boot).
I think the one thing all true innovators have in common is curiosity and a thirst for knowledge…about anything. So think about that the next time one of you guys tells me I’m boring because I know how the best Kona coffee beans have been trained to grow on vines like grapes.
The Fortune conference has inspired me to make innovation something that can be modeled and, more importantly, repeated. I’m fond of saying that marketing is a rigorous science with intentional inputs and predictable outputs. The idea of now modeling the process of innovation fascinates me.
I’ve been going to NYC for business for the last 15 years but, until this trip, hadn’t spent more than a day there in three years. Observations:
New York City isn’t a melting pot, it’s a blender;
The people there work very hard;
It’s as expensive as London (food, transportation, martinis);
New Yawkers are more paranoid than ever (especially after 911).
Fortune magazine’s annual conference has focused the last couple of years on the topic of innovation. The first Fortune conference I attended was in NYC back in 2001, just a couple of weeks after the 911 attacks on New York and DC. That conference was all about the busted tech bubble, and featured Gary Hamel, who at the time was heralding Enron as a prototype for a wildly successful firm, one that moves quick to totally dominate new market opportunities.
You don’t hear much from Gary any more…wonder why?
In any case, back to innovation. The event was in the new Jazz Centre at the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle; much better than a hotel ball room. The Fortune staff went out of their way to ensure the two days stayed on time, that all the attendees had fun, and all were well fed. Not an easy feat with 1,000 people in attendance. The topics surrounded every conceivable aspect of innovation, but the speakers themselves could have been much better.
Here’s some of what I took away:
Sir Ken Robinson (http://www.speakers.ca/robinson_ken.aspx) pointed at that all successful organizations put innovation at their core; that when young, people believe much more in themselves and are less self conscious about being wrong; and that everyone is or can become creative (your job title might not make it sound that way, but that’s up to you to rectify the situation).
Change is being driven by technology and demography (the free flow of ideas and of people), and that the hard part of creating an innovation organization is to make these (and other valuable) concepts operational. Ken also said the most obvious but, for some unknown reason hard to grasp in the U.S., concept: education is the key to innovation and one must be careful to not confuse raising standards with standardization (such as standardization through testing).
Many of the speakers, including Fred Smith, FedEx founder & CEO and Scott Cook, Intuit (Quicken and QuickBooks) founder, innovate in the most simple manner. No rocket science nor engineered life forms were required for FedEx to talk the USPS into flying the overnight mail (and saving the Postal Service $300 million a year to boot).
I think the one thing all true innovators have in common is curiosity and a thirst for knowledge…about anything. So think about that the next time one of you guys tells me I’m boring because I know how the best Kona coffee beans have been trained to grow on vines like grapes.
The Fortune conference has inspired me to make innovation something that can be modeled and, more importantly, repeated. I’m fond of saying that marketing is a rigorous science with intentional inputs and predictable outputs. The idea of now modeling the process of innovation fascinates me.
I’ve been going to NYC for business for the last 15 years but, until this trip, hadn’t spent more than a day there in three years. Observations:
New York City isn’t a melting pot, it’s a blender;
The people there work very hard;
It’s as expensive as London (food, transportation, martinis);
New Yawkers are more paranoid than ever (especially after 911).
posted by Grizz at 16:39
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