Some interesting articles from the past week:

• This piece looks at some of the reasons that innovation efforts can fail in organisations. Just as with any individual innovation, attention needs to be paid to sustaining an innovation drive and ensuring it ‘sticks’.
• This piece provides some tips for change agents. As the piece notes, making change happen can be difficult and it is valuable to think about the broader context and what you may need to do to support the case for change.

• In this post Jeffrey Phillips looks at parallels between social media and innovation, and how the size of the community involved will affect the depth and direction of the discussion. “The greater the number of people involved in the dialog, the more likely the conversation is to turn to topical or incremental issues” ¹. When looking at the problem at hand for which you need an innovative solution, this raises the question – do you need an incremental or a more radical innovation? Depending on the answer it may affect how you get stakeholders to participate and at what stage of the innovation process.
• This piece by Scott Anthony looks at the four factors that innovators (in the private sector) need to identify – “population, penetration, price, and purchase frequency”. What might be the simple questions that can guide public sector innovators in considering the potential of their idea?

 
And a couple of interesting US Government initiatives:

• The US Army wants to develop a virtual world. While this is an interesting Gov 2.0 development, it’s also interesting to consider the potential for such simulations to assist in innovation in other areas. Simulations can be a very useful means of testing innovations with reduced risk and cost compared to a ‘real-world’ test.
• The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has entered into a no-cost, two-year agreeement with Google to make bulk electronic patent and trademark public data available to the public in bulk form.