This lot (London UK based) - are commercial but have some interesting thoughts never the less - CAD gets a brief mention

The Culture & Politics of Innovation: When a revolution is required

Just an excerpt or two - and maybe we could categorise our innovation suggestions along these lines as a way to move forward.

Normal innovation’ vs. ‘Revolutionary innovation’
In order to identify ‘revolutionary innovations’, we first need to understand what makes up the huge range of activities that could be referred to normal innovation:

• Improving existing business processes.
  • Fine-tuning an existing process – the improved efficiencies that businesses need to find year in, year out.
  • More radical approaches to cost saving – like moving your factories to Taipei, or adopting lean approaches like agile or Six Sigma.
  • Creating a whole new way to get things done – the way CAD changed manufacturing or desktop publishing changed newspapers.
• Taking existing products to new markets.
  • Whether it’s selling into a new market or to a new demographic, the ability to rethink proposition, marketing and application can be hugely demanding.
• Marketing products in new ways.
  • Using a content or social-driven marketing approach to offer a wider appeal;
  • Creating multiple price tiers and product configurations.
• Adding new promotional packages – free trials, etc.
• Reconfiguring freemium models.

And maybe relevant to us:

'And what we know for sure is that while existing teams can often deliver ‘normal’ innovation – especially of the incremental kind – they struggle to deliver on ‘revolutionary’ invention. The teams at the coal-face when it comes to operating today’s products are almost always the best placed to find efficiencies and make recommendations for making those products better. Robinson & Schroeder, in their book The Idea-Driven Organisation, argue that 80% of the value that is delivered in terms of operational improvement, comes from grass-roots ideas. However, and maybe because of how close they are to today’s operations, these teams often struggle to find the next product that may take the market by storm.'

'What we seen is that for revolutionary innovation to succeed, it is often the deep-seated structures inside the companies themselves which will need to change. The deadlock we want to break is the one where companies know that their current proposition (their products and services) will not provide them with a long-term reason to exist, and yet they decide, for whatever reason, to stick with them anyway.'