The likely response is a swift “are you mad?” as the leadership looks at you with that funny expression you expect when you’ve done something which is not quite socially right.

There is, however, an emerging movement in the innovation space called Open Innovation which suggests you do just this.

The thinking is, if you have unused intellectual property or uniqueness, your best economic interests are served by licensing that to competitors who might make use of it, rather than let it sit idle. And, in reverse, if competitors have something of value you need, that you reach some accommodation with them that lets you make use of it .

Open Innovation is one of the ramifications of the Innovation Economy which is based on the premise that competitive advantage derives from how well you use know-how, not what know-how you have. Knowing how to use know-how well in a particular problem space is a hard to replicate capability that requires development, investment, and (more often than not) long and sustained effort. This is why it is a source of competitive advantage.

Open Innovation is currently a very fashionable business model for innovators working in many different sectors. It is especially popular in industries where products do not have very great levels of differentiation, like fast moving consumer goods. It is also well adopted in industries where the products are very differentiated, such as aerospace.

On the other hand, companies that have chosen not to pursue Open Innovation are tending to lag competitors. This is because they are forced to rely only on their own R&D efforts, rather than taking what’s best from industry around them. Failing to share is turning out to be a significant competitive dis-advantage.

Open Innovation is a methodology that innovators are regularly using to create new value in their businesses. To find out how you can use it it too, read James Gardner’s free, online innovation book.

Beauty may be the new feature, but it is hardly the technological high-ground in the design stakes. That honor goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Apparently, when you have something that is “magical”, you’ve really just trumped all competition. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn’t even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being. Even for Apple, that’s a pretty big jump. The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won’t have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

Anyway, there is a point to all this, and it is this: we in large IT organizations always find that whatever feature the consumer has now, they will demand in the workplace in the next two years. Consequently, I’m predicting that we’ll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we’ll be rubbish at it when it happens. We are always surprised when stuff makes the jump from consumer to enterprise, and we never learn each time it happens.

Therefore, in just a few years, we’re going to be make a pretty big decision. Is it the right thing to design “beautiful experiences” for staff, when this will obviously add cost to systems? Let’s face it, it is not like large organizations have service designers who just sit around idle, and neither do they generally have a design mentality when technology is built. This is all stuff which will cost more, at least at the start.

It will be so simple and easy to cut such features as “not essential”.

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the “beauty-feature” becomes a main differentiator. It won’t matter if our systems are “magical’ in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

My prediction is that there will be further deterioration in the perception of users of their IT suppliers, namely that they can’t deliver to save themselves.

The Beauty-Feature is something that has occupied those working in Innovation Management for some time now. For a detailed examination of this, and other things that concern organizational innovators, read the free, online innovation book by the author of this article.

Before it released the iPad, it had a product called Newton, a digital assistant that promised the world and bombed badly. Prior to Mac, there was Lisa which was technically superior, but performed so poorly that Apple dumped its excess stock in landfill to get a tax break.

More recently, there’s been Apple TV, which Steve Jobs himself has described as a “hobby”, a product that hasn’t (at least at this stage) radically redefined anything very much.

Granted, it is still early days for the iPad, which could fail to live up to its transformational expectations as well.

The point is Apple has taken some calculated risks with its product, and as a result it has certainly had its share of product failures.

But those who look at companies like Apple with their string of hits almost always conveniently forget the failures still occur, and they happen with a regularity that makes focusing on big hits a very risky business.

In between big hit products, however, Apple spends its time investing in traditional product development using incremental innovations. It has, for example, a backup device called Time Machine. It builds Airport Express, making it simple to set up wireless networks. They are both boring products that pay the bills reliably.

The success of Apple comes not from hits, but because it has a balanced portfolio of innovation. It doesn’t put all its eggs in the transformational product basket, because it knows this results in a very significant concentration of risk. Creating an innovation portfolio with care has resulted in a company which has come back from the dead to challenge powerful players in at least three key markets.

In less than 10 years, Apple has become the leading consumer electronics products company in the world. Innovation portfolios work, and they are one of the only ways to drive reliable growth.

Get predictable growth for your organisation by creating an innovation portfolio. James Gardner’s online, free innovation book will show you how to do it.

The search giant Google, for example, is a company that’s kept current primarily through repeated incremental innovations.

Apart from the business model innovation created with pay-per-click ads (which incidentally, it did not invent in the first place anyway), Google has spent a great deal of its time innovating in the one thing it does very well.

PageRank, the algorithm that first propelled its success, by making search results results better than competitors, was only an incremental improvement on the search engines of the time. Google has continued its leadership in the area, though, by tweaking and enhancing what it already knows how to do. It has proved a very successful strategy indeed.

Naturally, it is stupid to argue that big hits from radical innovation are always failures. Furthermore, not all firms have had to manage the long series of failures that companies such as Apple have had to endure in order to create those few, golden hit products.

However, the evidence is that those lucky companies which have done this are few and far between. The chances that your company will be similarly lucky are rather slim.

For some people, buying a lottery ticket is a little like an idiot-tax. The ticket is bought in the hope it will win, but in order to secure the win, people have only to put a little change across the counter. They’re buying hope, but more often than not, they experience disappointment when most of the time, they don’t win anything at all.

A focus on radical innovation in the hope it will create a hit product is an idiot-tax on your business. It is not a sensible strategy to leave something to luck when it is possible to reduce the risk of a return by creating a balanced portfolio of innovation which contain both radical and incremental components.

The secret to business growth is a balanced portfolio of innovations, one of the techniques of innovation management. James Gardner’s free online innovation book is an excellent resource if you want to know more. This and other unique content ” articles are available with free reprint rights.

This behavior is the sign of a company entrenched in Industrial Age economics. But this has gently been replaced in the years since the Second World War with Knowledge economics which are quite different. In Knowledge Economics, long term value is driven by intellectual, rather than physical assets. Things such as brands, patents, and know-how. This has been a successful formula for a new generation of companies who derive all their value from what they know how to do: Google and Microsoft are two good examples.

In the present, though, organizations are recognizing a new battleground: creating uniqueness in response to uniqueness, and being better at it than everyone else. The reason for this change is the emergence of a new economic imperative: the Innovation Economy. An innovation economy is not built on know-how, but the ability to make use of it in value-creating ways.

For many organizations, though, the reality is still the day to day of the previous transition – from industrial to knowledge economics. The global economic crisis has proved that control of both does not necessarily result in decent performance.

The changes which are happening are occurring because of the democratization of everything. Consumers can now not only consume, they can also produce, and the result is everything has sped up.

Performing organizations are now taking advantage of this be creating processes to let them innovate rapidly and consistently. The are building Innovation Centres which make these processes part of business as usual, and the most successful are beginning to see spectacular returns on their investments in this area.

Innovation Management is the key to future prosperity in the Innovation Economy. James Gardner’s free online innovation book will tell you how to get started.

Innovation trauma happens in the situation when an organization has tried to do something unique and unusual and failed badly at it. Employees decide that they are not able to do new things successfully, and that the only course possible is to return to the safety of business-as-usual. The result is their organizations stagnate because everyone is so scared they’ll have another costly mistake.

There are many signs of innovation trauma. Some of these include an unwillingness to invest in new businesses, skepticism that internal delivery capabilities are up to the task of doing unusual things, and genuine disbelief that a company can be innovative.

Sun Microsystems are an excellent example of what happens to companies when they experience innovation trauma. The company released a device called “SunRay”, which was a network computer quite ahead of its time. The device’s promise was to reduce dramatically the amount of money IT departments would need to make their technology work. It would be simpler, easier to use, and much more flexible.

When SunRay eventually shipped it did none of these things. But customers had already made plans based on future promises from the company, and they turned on their account managers. Feeling the pain directly in the pocket, the salespeople of Sun demanded that from then on they be given evidence that products were fit for purpose. They insisted that they’d not be embarrassed in front of their customers again by “innovation”, and Sun was hamstrung for years afterward.

Whether or not there are signs of innovation trauma, one thing is certain. People will not usually believe innovation can create decent returns reliably until they are shown it is possible to do so. Demonstrating reliability is really a matter of creating a decent track record of success with unique propositions so staff have evidence on which to base their beliefs.

Innovation Trauma is easily avoided with the techniques of Innovation Management. James Gardner’s free online innovation book has guidance that will help you avoid this and other pitfalls in your innovation effort.

You also need a process of execution that’s able to turn ideas into real products, services or process improvements. The execution part is where the hard work starts.

Why is it people forget this important detail? The answer is the process of generating ideas is intrinsically creative. It is a fun process, and one gets a feeling of accomplishment just because you’ve dreamed up something unique. Almost everyone has had the experience of a major brainstorming session that’s resulted in a full whiteboard: leaving the room, you feel you’ve accomplished something extraordinary.

Most of the time, though, nothing further ever happens. People are so satisfied with their work in creating new ideas that they allow themselves to forget there’s still much more to do. Then, when someone else not only has the same idea, but executes it will, there is universal teeth gnashing as people wonder “why didn’t we do that?”. Regret is the order of the day, and it is a lesson hard learned. Especially when the opportunity cost turns out to be significant.

The answer is a systematic focus on execution, and the best way to get that is an innovation program. An innovation program allows creative people to focus on ideas, whilst taking away the detail steps of turning those ideas into something practicable. Creating an innovation program isn’t necessarily simple, but it is an investment that reaps significant and sustained rewards over time. And it is an investment many companies are making these days in order to ensure they remain competitive.

Have you got a great idea? Many great ideas? If you want to execute with them, you should consider an innovation program. James Gardner’s free online innovation book will tell you how to start. You can get a unique content version of this article from the Uber Article Directory.

Proctor and Gamble are an example of a company with a Play-2-Win innovation strategy. They know most of their future success will be entirely driven by innovation activities, as it has been in the long history of the company.

The company spends most of its efforts in fast moving consumers goods. There, it operates in five separate categories, searching, always, for the unique propositions that can drive major global brands.

Most large organisation, in order to satisfy shareholders, need to generate between 4 and 6 percent annual growth of their organisations. For Proctor and Gamble, that is equivalent to innovation worth almost $4 billion a year. By 2000, Proctor and Gamble were realising that traditional innovation efforts, comprised of very capital intensive internal research and development, was never going to be able to keep up with this demand for growth.

The problem the company faced was that at that scale, the investments needed to generate a return was increasing faster than the returns on the investments being made. For example, whilst P&G had 7500 researchers, it found that adding more in an attempt to match market expectations was resulting in marginally less productivity each time a new hire came on board.

When an innovation team is responsible for everything, you tend to get scale issues. You have to put more resources into the program in order to get more results, but Proctor and Gamble were finding that even with continual investment, they were not able to outpace the market’s demand for growth.

Their response? To involve not only their employees, but everyone else they had any relationship with in the innovation process as well. They decided they’d aim, from then on, to have 50% of their new innovation come from sources outside the company.

For detailed information on how to create an innovation program which makes your organisation significant returns, read expert James Gardners free, online innovation book.

This, more than any other reason, is why you often see the same idea surfacing in two or more places at once, even when the creative people proposing the solution don’t know each other at all.

It seems logical to conclude, given this, that if you want to increase the success of your innovation efforts, getting more ideas will probably not have the result you’re looking for.

One suggestion is that what’s needed is a programatic processes which allows creative people to build a track record of big product hits. The argument arises from fact that it isn’t ideas which are important to the innovation process, but execution which follows. Clearly, there are limited resources available in any organisation, so a laser sharp focus on what counts is a good idea.

This, of course, is the strategy that’s been followed by Apple, and other companies of its ilk. First, it released iPod, a massive hit that redefined the way that music is sold. Then it released iPhone, a device which redefined the way that people expect to use their mobile by making the competitive game about apps. And recently, it’s released iPad, which it hopes will redefine the way customer acquire and use the products of the liberal arts.

None of these products are especially innovative, and they certainly aren’t category unique. But they are executed beautifully, and each success has built on the previous one.

This, in the end, is the real sign that a company has a successful innovation effort under way.

Do you want to create a track record of hit products? The easiest way to do it is create an innovation program with a systematic focus on what works. James Gardner’s free online innovation book will tell you how.