Expand Your Mind: Innovative Thoughts

Expand Your Mind: Innovative Thoughts

Post from: MAPpingCompanySuccess

Innovation isn’t always about a new product or service (on or off the web); it applies equally to a change of thinking leading to a new approach.

Venture capitalists have long been known for shunning publicity for themselves, while funding innovation by others—now they are funding both.

Venture capitalists are hiring full-time public relations experts to tell bloggers and reporters of their investing prowess. They publicize their every doing and thought on Twitter and in blog posts.

Adeo Ressi, 40, a serial entrepreneur with eight companies to his credit, started Founder Institute a few years ago with a novel approach to moving new companies forward on a global level.

For tuition of less than $1,000, students attend classes with one goal in mind: to create a fully operational company. In fact, they are required to incorporate before they can graduate.

Utilities are rarely seen as cutting edge when it comes to convincing people to conserve energy; but that’s changing with the use of everything from a fictional family’s story in a series of web videos to social media ego strokes and neighborly competition for bragging rights.

Motivating people to save energy isn’t really about the money, behavior experts say. Successful programs foster a sense of achievement and identity. And competing to beat your friends and neighbors at the savings game doesn’t hurt.

Mention mobile technology to most people and they think of people talking and doing stuff on their smartphones from playing Angry Birds to email to closing deals for their company while on vacation. Talk to the mobile players and they are far more focused on machines talking to machines—no people involved.

Berg Insight, a research firm in Goteborg, Sweden, says the number of machine-to-machine devices using the world’s wireless networks reached 108 million in 2011 and will at least triple that by 2017. Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, sees as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020.

Finally, there is Mandar Apte who, after his CEO laid out a vision of Shell Oil becoming the most innovative energy company, saw his mission as boosting both innovation and innovative leadership.

My day job involves supporting people and ideas that have the potential to change the energy game. It’s about managing disruptive ideas and managing people who have disruptive ideas. In my non-Shell life, I teach leadership development workshops based on meditation practices. (…) I approached my manager and proposed a program that would bring together my innovation management role and my leadership development background. He encouraged me to build an educational curriculum blending the two because innovation begins with an idea in the mind.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

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