From Business Week - January 2, 2008

"The bulk of innovation is low-amplitude and takes place over a long period. Companies should focus on refining existing technologies as much as on creation"

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.

Here is an interesting blog post and slideshow from Indris Mootee on the design thinking and strategic business innovation.

Here's a quote from the post that sums up Indris' thinking:

"I was often asked the question of what "design thinking" has to do with business strategy. When talked about "design thinking" people refer to asthetics (mainly high stlye design or usability) and generally they cannot relate to strategy (strategy means spreadsheet). I explained to them that “design thinking” is crucial to any innovation effort if a company wants to break out of its current competitive structure."

And here is his slideshow with the 10 principles for strategic business innovation:

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"It’s a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience."

In this article in the NY Times, Janet Rae-Dupree discusses innovation and the curse of knowledge.  Sje also references a book called "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Fail".

This article from InformationWeek discusses innovation with WaMu's e-commerce team.  "Every executive, every leader recognizes that in order to be successful, our technology has to be very, very strong," says Debora Horvath, executive VP and CIO.

They do it by working with customers and technology vendors to spec out projects, build prototypes in as little as 48 hours, then pushing forward into development and testing.

This is a presentation by Google CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google from August 1, 2007.

Latency and speed matters.  How fast is fast?  In Google's mind, speed is a response rate of < 400ms.  User experience is also very important to Google, especially if users are not getting what they are trying to do.