Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

One of my favorite strategic analogies is based on the concept of ships and castles. These two artifacts represent the extreme options for “offense” and “defense” in a war, but I think may also provide deeper insight into our focus for innovation in North Carolina.

All innovation is not in new products or technologies, and all innovation is not at new companies. A good deal of innovation takes place within existing companies, and much of it occurs as companies find ways to innovate in their processes — the way they structure and organize their work. In this post, David Boulay, [...]

In spite of what you might have heard (or thought you saw when you looked at the word), there is no “I” in innovation. But we sure act like there is.
In one of my favorite books, Ripples from the Zambezi, Italian consultant Ernesto Sirolli shares one of his key findings after 30 years of working [...]

As a red-blooded adult male, I try to limit my crying to the biggies: birth of children, the Olympic theme song, and AT&T commercials.
As a policy wonk, I try to set similarly high standards: to make me cry, data has to 1) tell me something I don’t know; 2) anticipate all the questions I will [...]

In the Bay Area in early April, I could hear the sounds of slippage. Silicon Valley gurus are worried about getting knocked off the top of the innovation food chain. In the past couple of years the area has witnessed a decline in patents, equity investments and personal income, while losing a reported 90,000 jobs. [...]

It’s been a career week for capital in NC, and the combination of announcements should make birthing, incubating and growing innovative companies in North Carolina a lot easier.
On Monday, State Treasurer Janet Cowell announced she was hiring Credit Suisse to make up to $230 million (by my calculations, about 0.34% of the state’s pension fund) [...]

In previous posts we looked at how government needs to adapt (see Papers 8, 9 and 10) and how businesses need to do a better job of integrating design thinking into their business planning and operations (see Papers 6 and 7). In this guest post, NC DOT Deputy Secretary for Communication Ted Vaden makes some observations of relevance to both government agencies and businesses based on what he heard at last month’s Emerging Issues Forum on creativity.

How do you think about innovation in tough economic times? During its meeting in Williamston last Thursday, the North Carolina Innovation Council got a look at the two very different ways it will need to answer that question: one could be called the regional challenge (with micro answers), with the other being the statewide challenge [...]

Google’s announcement that the company is considering providing somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 people across the United States broadband Internet access with a speed of a gigabit per second starting (maybe) later this year. It’s a reminder of the arms race going on with broadband speed.
If the “giga” prefix sends you to Wikipedia or your [...]

In this interview, Anita Brown-Graham, director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, explains the importance of creativity to innovation and North Carolina.