There was a great Business Week article recently on Innovation. It came just at the right time for me: I have been thinking about and discussing various aspects of innovation these past few weeks, trying to craft a personal view of innovation and how I could lead the creation of mobile lifestyle products and services.
As you might know, when the Nokia Lifeblog team moved on to bigger and better things, I stayed on at Nokia Ventures Organization (NVO) to look for my next gig. I have been venturing in one form or another for many, many years and now see that I am a junkie for early-stage stuff and creating nifty products. And, after spending my summer holiday thinking of what to do next, I am sure I want to do continue doing something creative, innovative, and disruptive (that’s why I’ve changed my tagline, above, to better reflect where I’m heading).
As I said I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately, mostly about networked innovation, strategic business development, community involvement, risk taking, and the creative economy (the one that comes after the knowledge economy). And, just like last summer, when Business Week came out with an article to support my crazy anti-mass-marketing ideas, this summer Business Week gives me something, once more, (a whole site!) to support my crazy collaborative innovation ideas.
In the past year or so, I tried some things that were slightly out of my scope as a marketing and sales dude, things that were more biz dev and partner collaboration. Partly because these activities were out of my scope, I wasn’t able to give them the attention or structure I wanted. But, now that I am free of my marketing and sales duties, I think it’s time to delve deeper into collaborative business development.
I have also realized that what I saw as simply ‘collaborating to create cool stuff’ was actually my way of playing to discover and tease out innovative products and services using a network of companies and people. Furthermore, what to me was just a way of creating something, is really my personal design strategy of what makes a cool product.
So, in the end, I have a better idea of what I did, what I thought was a type of collaborative business development, and that where I am heading is related to networked innovation, design strategies, and the future of the mobile lifestyle.
Now to write all this down in full and find someone to support me. 😉
