Kiho Sohn, Chief Knowledge Officer for Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne raised an interesting question: why, at KM conferences, do we talk about innovation, but at innovation conferences there’s no mention of KM? Hm….. at PWR the expertise is in-house — not too many other companies are designing rocket engines.  So they’ve concentrated on helping employees generate ideas that lead to solutions — and out of this they’ve developed many new patents, using the TRIZ method within a 2 day innovation workshop.

TRIZ is founded by a Russian scientist — the practitioners of TRIZ will say it’s the greatest method out there. It relies on a semantics-based technology which has the logic built in.  While listening to Kiho, I checked out TRIZ on wikipedia - TRIZ is the theory of solving inventor’s problems” or “The theory of inventor’s problem solving”. It was developed by a Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues starting in 1946. It has been evolving ever since.

Interesting - I’m going to follow-up with Kiho after today’s sessions to get a better understanding.

Kiho Sohn overview of innovation process at KMWorld 2009

“Adopting technologies without a strategy results in wasted time & effort”.  How many times have you said this?  Check out KMWorld 2009 keynote speaker Charlene Li’s slides.   Some great tips.  Her theme, “the future of business requires a holistic approach to adopting and integrating emerging technologies” is the same message Rebecca and I use with our clients –  Organizations have to have a big detailed picture of where they are going before the strategies to get there can be put in place.  And that’s way before technology, people and other structures are put in place.

I love Charlene’s slide of 4 focus areas surrounding the client: enterprise strategy, customer strategy, leadership & management, innovation & practices.  Her tips, which I think apply more broadly than just tech planning:

* Leaders must let go of control but not relinquish command, create sandbox convenants to allow risk taking, creat a culture of sharing & model it

* organizations must connect to customers on their own terms, develop internal processes to connect with customers in real time, integrate the customer voice across the whole enterprise

* enterprises must allow all units to pilot new technologies & processes, design process scenarios around user roles, invest in innovation

* to innovate, organizations must fail fast & fail smart, inject fresh external thinking, enable safe places where mistakes and learning is encouraged.

I am sure you will enjoy her presentation on Wednesday November 18 in San Jose at KMWorld 2009. In the meantime, on the KMWorld 2009 conference blog yesterday I pointed to a podcast of Charlene Li. Check it out too!

During the presentation of innovation awards at FASTForward ‘09 there were some interesting comments about what search is.  Help me make a longer list by adding comments to this post!

Search is

• shortening the distance between users & offerings
• all about information management and information enables business
• a high end productivity tool

John Kao opened KMWorld & Intranets 2008 in San Jose this morning and drew lots of blog attention at the new KMWorldblog. Also check out comments from other bloggers at the conference.

I loved John’s definition of innovation: a set of capabilities that allows continuous realization of a desired future. Some of his quotes: “Innovation drives, and is an enabler of, transformation, giving it a goal or desired direction.” “Innovation blossoms in diverse settings.” “Innovation comes through conversations in different disciplines.” Scientists, designers, and many others are “actors in a value chain for innovation.” It’s the “business processes that take innovation from the lab into the business.” And I really look forward to his Harvard Business Review article coming out early in the new year on new business models using systems integrators — the systems integrator model for building new businesses — a “born global strategy” where parts of the organization are decentralized all over the world. “Units of action are decentralized from a global array of resources.” It will be a “fundamental transformation in the way ventures are formed.”