New Business Technology: Sourcing Innovation

Posted by admin on Nov 12th, 2010 in Finance | 0 comments

Steven Johnson centres on business innovation in his latest book Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation. He has written seven books on how science, technology and human experience interact. Johnson identifies the theory of innovation and attempts to find the source of break through ideas and cultivate them. He notes that ‘when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples’ ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems.’ In terms of business and new technologies Johnson discusses the value that social media and network platforms have on gathering good ideas; in these environments trends and cultures of people can be identified. Businesses can generate commercial value from the behaviours and hobbies of their staff and apply this to consumers. Johnson goes on to suggest that ‘there’s this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that’s certainly true in many cases there’s also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.