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We’ve heard it said that innovation generally happens all around us, often in places we never would have thought to look. That’s often true. But innovation also can happen at your own organization; in fact, you yourself can be an innovator.
In order to be successful in this new-generation economy, companies need to provide environments that enable and promote free thought and idea creation; they also must be able to expect and withstand failure of ideas and projects that ultimately don’t work.
Sometime this can be more difficult than one might think, especially for an older, more established enterprise that has experienced success in providing products and/or services in a certain manner over a period of time.
But, as the poet Bob Dylan once wrote, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” These words are especially relevant in 2014, as new ideas are being created and promulgated faster than ever before through real-time networks.
Event Scheduled for Thursday, March 13
With this as background, eWEEK is hosting a special live, interactive Executive Roundtable discussion session Thursday, March 13, at noon PDT/3 p.m. EDT. It’s titled “Where Innovation Takes Root, Smart Companies Grow,” and it promises to provide a great deal of valuable information about innovation—how to recognize it, how to cultivate it and how to turn it into a successful business.
Featured speakers in the live, interactive “radio talk show”-type format will be Sandy Carter, IBM general manager of Ecosystem Development; Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of the AlwaysOn Network; and James Staten, Forrester analyst, specializing in emerging IT.
Chris Preimesberger, editor of Features and Analysis at eWEEK, will serve as moderator.
Carter is responsible for IBM’s worldwide relationship with independent software vendors (ISVs), which contribute to approximately one-third of IBM’s revenue. She manages key partnerships with the development, academic and venture capital communities, which comprise IBM’s industry-leading ecosystem of influencers and is focused on critical areas of business ecosystems such as big data, cloud, mobile, social and analytics.
“It is estimated that these segments represent in excess of half a trillion dollars of opportunity by 2015,” Carter said in her LinkedIn profile.
Startups Being Hatched in Key Market Sectors
All of these key market areas are where IT startups are being hatched.
Perkins knows innovation when he sees it. He is a venture partner with DFJ Frontier. He also is the creator and former editor in chief of Red Herring magazine and the CEO of AlwaysOn, an interactive online network for technology insiders. Perkins co-authored “The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks,” a book that foretold the dot-com bust.
Perkins served on President George W. Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Council, and he was the founding chairman of the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, Calif., for which he received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
He has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Media Leaders group since 1996. Perkins was also founder and CEO of Upside Publishing and vice president of business development at Silicon Valley Bank.
Staten is one of the best IT analysts in the business. He provides insights into and best-practice use of cloud computing and next-generation, collaborative business intelligence. As the content lead for Forrester’s Cloud Computing Playbook, he advises IT leaders on public cloud platforms, CIO-level cloud investment strategies, cloud economics, hybrid cloud and cloud outsourcing (strategic rightsourcing), IT cloud readiness, and business and developer engagement on cloud.
Staten a Top-Rated Cloud IT Analyst
Staten has been named a top cloud computing analyst each of the last five years by leading industry associations including Web Hosting Industry Review (2009), Apollo Research (2010-11) and Wired (2012). He is also the 2011 recipient of the Forrester Bill Bluestein Award, given to the analyst whose body of work continually inspires Forrester’s clients and guides their decisions to be great.
Preimesberger is in his 20th year as a writer, researcher and publication editor in the IT journalism sector. He has covered storage, cloud computing and green IT for eWEEK since 2006 and serves as a featured speaker or panel moderator at eight to 12 events per year. He has won several national awards for his writing and research work.
Some of the topics to be covered include the following:
–How companies in 2014 can best provide the culture, the tools and the corporate faith in their employees to not only stay competitive but to break out of the competitive pack and succeed beyond everybody’s expectations;
–How enterprises and investment people can recognize innovation when they see it;
–How innovation talent can be incubated and connected with the right help in order for the ideas and products to come to full market fruition;
–How an enterprise can develop an environment of innovation that allows it to thrive and create positive impact in all areas;
–How to establish the value of a multidisciplinary approach in realizing and enabling innovation;
–How CIO and CMO roles intersect to drive improvements in customer experience and business efficiencies; and
–How to put the digital innovation at the center of new business development.
Plan to spend an hour on this topic. It promises to be well worth the time investment.