Five Ideas: Innovation
How to develop a good idea for today's market.
July 2009
“The most important thing is to really develop and ability to burrow into the mind of the customer and experience life the way they experience life. In many companies, people are being told to do more with less. But if you don’t understand the customer and how they define more, what you end up doing is less with less. You have to figure out what matters to the customer, what do they really care about, what job are they trying to get done, what dimensions of performance are absolutely critical—and what doesn’t actually matter to them very much. This allows you to innovate more effectively, more efficiently and more affordably." —The Silver Lining author Scott Anthony
“If you go out in the world with a genuinely inquisitive mind and you work hard at coming up with the right way to ask the right question,
the answers that you’re going to get are going to be surprising and fresh and interesting. Asking good questions is really how you pop
that bubble you’re living in. And how you open up your culture and your structure of your organization—and you own mind—to new answers and new experiences that are blocked from your line of site."— Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber, author of Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths For Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself
“Any time you get into an organization that has a 'not invented here' mentality, it tends to squelch innovation because people aren't
willing to take ideas from other places and apply them in unique ways. You really need to have openness to new ideas, regardless of where
they come from." —Gretchen Alarcon, vice president of product Strategy, Oracle Fusion Strategy
“The best companies use economic downturns as a time to innovate and make strategic investments. In a downturn, conventional wisdom suggests cutting costs and reducing expenses while compromising on innovation. But conventional wisdom is wrong."—Maneesh Joshi, senior group manager, product marketing for SOA
“Innovation was certainly one of [Oracle's founding principles] —Oracle has been innovative from the very beginning. Creating a relational
database as a commercial product hadn't been done before....We're always pushing the envelope, making the products perform better, exploiting new kinds of architectured... I think Oracle has always been an innovator. I think the world recognizes this—and that our customers and our company both benefit from our continued investment in keeping our technology fresh and continuing to develop it. That's
what we've always done—and that's what we'll always do." —Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy
