Horse whisperer
From Innovationclass
The Innovative Company I Chose
I've been researching 3M and there are a number of reasons why I'm so impressed with this company. To start, we are all very familiar with many of their brands such as Scotch, Post-it, Scotchgard, Scotch-Brite, Command, etc. To sum up a quote in a BusinessWeek article, 3M produces new and innovative products as if the company was still a startup and they are over 105 years old now! Plus, I find the variety of areas they work in totally fascinating - adhesives, advanced materials, biotechnology, films, nanotechnology, polymer melt processing, etc. My fascination with all these technical and science based areas comes from the fact that I have about 2 years worth of a chemistry/pre-med major under my belt (I think math is fun and chemistry is my favorite science)! Even though I'm a creative advertising major now I still find that I'm very interested in scientific and technological developments, but more as hobby-interest rather than something I'd like to pursue.
Anyway, here are a few links with information about 3M and their innovations:
3M Website
3M Innovation Machine
BusinessWeek Article
RD Mag link
Wikipedia on 3M
Innovation Blogs
What and why: (from the site) The blogger, Sanjay Dalal, is the President and Managing Director of Innovation Index Group, and CEO of Creativity And Innovation Driving Business.
Sanjay introduced The Innovation Index in December 2006 at his blog - Creativity And Innovation Driving Business - and has been publishing regular reports on The Innovation Index. These reports and The Innovation Index have obtained tremendous market coverage by the investment community at large including such websites as: Google Finance Home Page, Google Search (top page), Yahoo! Search (top page) InnovationTools.com, Denver Post, Boston Herald, Houston Chronicle, News.com, About.com, Marketwatch, Kiplinger Finance, Financial Content, Business Innovation Insider and more.
This site has in-depth technological information, rankings and insight on the same companies from the BusinessWeek list. This guy is on top of his game!
What and why: John Seely Brown…his name sounds familiar right (I hope all of you are shaking your heads yes)? Well, he was once the Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Today, he calls himself the “Chief of Confusion,” but after reading some of the stuff on his website I’d say that’s somewhat of a misnomer. Anyway, he has posts about innovation, creation, etc that he writes AND he posts really great stuff that he finds from all sorts of other sources.
What and why: This blog is written by Clayton M. Christensen, a professor of Business Administration at the Harvard B-School. He co-founded Innosight, an organization that through consulting, executive education and research helps other organizations identify and exploit high potential growth opportunities, protect themselves against threats and better manage the process of innovation. Christensen is, also, the author of a number of books on innovation in business that been highly regarded by the business world.
A bonus on this blog is that there are nice categorizations along the side that make searching through the site easy!
What and why: Another champion of innovation, but this time it’s a guy named John Hagel who has quite an impressive educational and business resume. Schooled at Wesleyan, Oxford and Harvard (Law and B-School), he has also written many books, worked for companies such as BCG, McKinsey & Company and is currently heading a yet-to-be-named Silicon Valley start-up. Plus, he’s buddies with John Seely Brown (they seem like partners in crime when you look at his personal website: www.johnhagel.com), so clearly this guy has a lot of knowledge. Like many of the other blogs, his focuses on innovations in business and, also, cites other articles that do the same.
What and why: This site is actually called innovation.net, but that is not the website…funny how that works out. Regardless it is another good source of perspective on ways to innovate, how companies are trying to innovate, how they are succeeding or not and so on. Also, there is a list of great books related to innovation and a list of other innovation blogs on his site. The author’s name is Mike Docherty and he is the CEO of Venture2 Incorporated, a new ventures management company based in Boca Raton, FL. He has worked at a number of other companies in top management positions and has his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg SOM.
What and why: This blog is completely focused on innovation and has been written since at least November 2005. The blogger is Jeffrey Phillips, the VP of Marketing and Sales at Innovate on Purpose, a company focused on innovation and idea management.
What and why: This site, ChangeThis, is an interesting aberration from the others in that there is not one single author who posts. Instead, many different people utilize this blog as a place to post documents/blogs/pdf’s about changes and innovation in virtually any field. It’s a refreshing break from the other blogs I’ve found.
What and why: This blog is called Dealing with Darwin and its tagline is “Business competitiveness in the 21st century with a focus on managing innovation and inertia.” And the blog is exactly that. What’s even more fascinating is that this guy, Geoffrey Moore, seems to have degrees in literature, not a fancy MBA…
BusinessWeek's Innovation Site
What and why: Here’s a no-brainer that I wish I had stumbled upon earlier in my search. This Innovation site by BusinessWeek has their articles on innovation as well as a number of blogs about innovation that are especially relevant to all of us in the J-school. There’s a NEXT blog, media blog, game blog, design blog and brand blog.
What and why: This blog follows the future of advertising in terms of the industry as well as technology. Pretty much everyone in this class is an ad major so we should probably all check in with this blog to see what is cited as the new innovations and trends. Plus, it has roots at MIT.
