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.

My 9-year-old son nearly caused a single car accident last week. On the way to a basketball game, he asked the question every Psych-English major parent dreads: “How does chemistry work, Dad?” As someone who hangs out with scientists sometimes during the day, I felt the pressure: I had to get this one right.  My [...]

Ouch. North Carolina has just blown through a couple of Maginot lines we really didn’t want to cross. We’ve just crossed the 500,000 unemployed mark — a half million people who want work can’t find it. And unemployment jumped north of 11% on Friday — to a 30-year high.
With more than 90% of our jobs [...]

The January 14 first meeting of the Governor’s Innovation Council showed the promise and the challenge of such councils.
On the one hand, there was a good chunk of energy in the room as a mix of big and small businessmen and women, elected officials, government types, higher ed folks, venture capitalists, nonprofit leaders and others [...]

This Thursday the Governor’s Innovation Council will kick off what appears to be a couple of year’s worth of meetings, 9:00 am- 12:30 pm at the NC Museum of Natural Science in downtown Raleigh.
The Council, co-chaired by Steve Nelson of the Wakefield Group and Al Delia, the Governor’s Senior Policy Advisor, looks to have 30 [...]

‘Tis the season – for resolutions. We love to make em; we tend to break ‘em. But what if people got a gift to help them keep their resolution? We’ve arranged ten gifts with ten key NC innovation players for 2010 in mix ‘n match format.

The efforts of other states confirm what we already knew. To grow more innovative companies that create more and better jobs, North Carolina will have to address some of our capital gaps.

Now the good news: we in North Carolina are not alone. Some other states are smacking their foreheads too (and other nations, as well, as noted in Paper 02 and here), and the sorts of things they are trying as they recover from their head slaps can give us some good ideas about what works and what doesn’t.

David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times December 8 takes a look at President Obama’s “national innovation agenda,” and highlights nine things the columnist thinks are important about it. Whether you agree or not with what his  nine things are, the op-ed is valuable mostly as a reminder that there is a developing “national [...]

In this paper, guest poster Ted Zoller, associate professor for entrepreneurship at Kenan-Flagler Business School and Executive Director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, makes a key distinction between two creative parts of what we have defined as innovation (See Paper 02): invention – the act of creating a new technology, product, process or [...]

Profiles in Innovation is a developing series of imagined “case studies,” looking at what could happen in North Carolina if we change nothing OR if we take steps to become the most innovative place in the world.

Note: Are nonprofits under the same pressure to innovate as businesses, education and state and local government? Can they get the resources they need to innovate? How? And what does the state of NC get in return if they are successful? Guest poster Todd Cohen, publisher of the North Carolina-based Philanthropy Journal, looks at which [...]

In previous papers, we’ve looked at why it is essential that government become dramatically more innovative in its own internal operations and programs delivery, to better “translate new ideas and technologies into new systems, products and services.” We’ve looked at some areas where businesses have been innovating, with the idea that government might look to [...]

Innovation in the government space may be the greatest — and most important — opportunity for NC over the next ten years. Seriously.

Innovation, which we define as the translation of “new ideas and technologies into new systems, products and services,” has come to business in six broad areas over the past twenty years. Each of those areas raises some possible areas government might look for progress over the next ten (or twenty) years.

Gov. Perdue announced the formation of the NC Innovation Council on Monday, November 16.

“We need to ensure that our people understand innovation and understand why it is very important for kids in North Carolina to learn in a different way and think in a different way,” Perdue said. “Their lives are going to be very different from the lives of the 1990s student. The economic edge they are going to have to have to be globally competitive is wrapped around curiosity, invention and innovation.”

Well, amen. And yahoo!

Government can innovate. New technology makes it possible and smart people make it probable – if we can turn them loose on solving the problems – if we can let them innovate.

How do we turn open source, creative thinking theory into practice? And how do we do it with speed, flexibility and confidence?

North Carolina is well positioned to benefit from two emerging trends: design thinking and open source.

Profiles in Innovation is a developing series of case studies, imagining what North Carolina could look like if we change nothing OR if we take steps to become the most innovative place in the world.

For those of you who don’t have time to sort through all the comments we have had so far, we’ve pulled together a summary of what we have heard in the first month of the blog. The comments fall fairly easy into the four categories we laid out in Paper 03, where we compared growing innovation in the state to growing a crop.

So what kinds of ideas could the Council recommend that would really move things along, help develop NC’s innovation soil/ecosystem/infrastructure, build understanding and momentum?

We have three starter ideas that just might be the right size for a Council to get behind. They could set the stage for a bunch of other good things to happen, and could show people what an innovation-driven state would look, feel and act like.

The moon is in the 7th house. Jupiter is aligned with Mars. It’s the dawning of the age of… innovation in North Carolina. Maybe.

If North Carolina is going to have a conversion experience and drink the sweet tea of innovationalism, there’s plenty of work to do and plenty of ways to imagine organizing the work.

Why should we change anything in North Carolina?

OK. Here’s the challenge: to figure out how North Carolina can become the most innovative place in the world.