Rendez

Between April 26 and 28, the "Innovation in Services" Conference was hosted at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. Academics were invited from around the world to attend this event sponsored by Tekes.

Henry Chesbrough hosted the event.

David Teece gave the lead-off presentation on "Managing Dynamic Capabilities and Expert Talent in Today's Global Economy".

Jim Spohrer closed the first day with a talk on "Steps Toward a Science of Service Systems".

The second day burrowed more deeply into academic work, presenting and discussing papers contributed to the conference.

David Ing attended the meeting, and has posted digests of the presentations on the web. Digital audio (MP3) recordings of the talks are available from him, on request.

On March 13, 2007, presentations on ongoing research leading to dissertations were presented.

Minna Takala is in the later stages of completing her dissertation. She spoke on "Innovation - expanding definitions, measures and measurement".

David Ing is in the early stages of preparing his dissertation. He spoke on "Emergent Innovation across open source communities, companies, and business ecosystems".

Digital audio (MP3) recordings of the talks are available on request from David Ing.

In the beginning of May  Business Week and Boston Consulting Group
have ranked  again the most innovative companies.

The top three were  Apple, Google and Toyota.  Business Week has
a special report  related to innovation, and
the survey is available  from the Boston Consulting Groups innovation pages.

US government is currently focusing on innovation measurement development in their initiative
"Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy"

There was an open call for comments to individuals, academics, business and government.
All comments are available on the website. There are very interesting comments related to changing definitions of innovation and the effect to innovation measurement.

 Interesting activities emerging related to idea collection and open innovation:Dell launched a public idea aggregator website in February 2007. Their site seems to work well and they are receiving many ideas from the customers. You can also see how ideas are preceeding, through screening to development. More information from here http://www.dellideastorm.com and http://www.dellideastorm.com/about. Dell's approach is open for 24-7, for all ideas andfor anyone. The IBM World Jam is also used for idea collection. IBM's Jams are typically collaborative events, that run over a certain period of time, for selected audiences and searching ideas in specific areas.   - Minna

On January 11, executive sponsors of the Rendez project were invited to attend a workshop at the Linna Hotel.

Introduction by Taina Tukiainen, Stadia

The meeting opened with a presentation by Taina Tukianen outlining the background and directions for the Rendez project.

Taina emphasized the importance of industry-academia co-operation and she warmly welcomed company people and international guests
to the workshop.

"Leading an Organization Where Innovation Matters" by Marianne Kosits

Marianne Kosits, an executive consultant with IBM from New Jersey, U.S.A., covered two major topics. Firstly, from an employee's point of view, she described how IBM communicates that innovation matters. Then, with her experience as a leader in IBM's Relationship Alignment practice, she reviewed how "sustainable innovation" was established in an interorganizational context.

"Leading Innovation" by Gary S. Metcalf

Gary Metcalf, president of Interconnections LLC from Kentucky, U.S.A. spoke about innovation from a systemic perspective, and potential ways to overcome barriers to innovation.

"3D Virtual Worlds for Business" by Minna Takala

Minna Takala, from Nokia Corporation, described how advances in technology such as virtual worlds provide paths for innovation. She presented examples from virtual ideas into innovations (Tucker car, IWATSW band, and Second Life virtual on-line game) to stimulate discussion in parallel sessions.

 

After these presentations, the group divided up into two parallel sessions to discuss the content at greater depth. The meeting closed with the group rejoined to discuss key ideas generated during the workshop.

Presentations from the meeting are attached below.

From the January 25, 2007 issue of the International Herald Tribune ....

The world's biggest source of employment is for the first time the services sector, rather than agriculture and industry, a UN report said Thursday.

Some 40 percent of global workers are employed in the services sector, compared with 38.7 percent in agriculture and 21.3 in industry, the United Nations' International Labor Organization said in its annual report. Ten years ago, 43.1 percent of employees worked in agriculture, and 35.5 percent in services.

There may be a jump in developing countries directly from agricultural to services (without industrial as an intermediate step.

The trend toward work shifting from agriculture to services was particularly pronounced in Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.

Read the full article at the International Herald Tribune.

European Union publishes The European Innovation Scoreboard related to innovation trend at national level. The next results will be published on February 15th, 2007. In their website there is also an interesting paper related to measurement of innovation in service sector.  Yours,Minna 

Since June 2006 Business Week has been publishing special issues on innovation on quarterly basis (June, September, December...) . There are recent examples, development trends and good discussions related to innovation management and measures for innovation at their web site. Please visit www.businessweek.com/innovation . The results of the innovation survey related to the most innovative companies conducted by Boston Consulting Group Innovation Institute is expected to be published in March 2007.Minna

Timo Hämäläinen, research director at Sitra, gave a talk in yesterday's class that may have been the best presentation that I've heard in Finland. It probably was the best presentation that I've heard in a year.

Clearly, he has depth on the subject of social innovation, based on his 2003 book on National Competitiveness and Economic Growth. I was impressed by his reading of Karl Marx on technological determinism, because the mention of Karl Marx tends to turn off North American audiences. (Timo said that Marx's ideas on communism didn't work out, but the ideas on technological determinism have proved to be useful and durable.)

In addition to describing a detailed framework towards a social innovation policy for Finland, he outlined a review of Europe in the Golden Age, a recently published book by Anthony Giddens. Unfortunately, Timo said that his review was written only in Finnish. (I'd like to see it in English).

The slides are attached below, but it was a lot easier to learn from Timo's talk. (It's too bad that I didn't bring a recorder!)

A highlight of the visit of the NJIT students to Finland was a cocktail party with Stadia students, hosted by Taina Tukiainen.

Executive MBA students from the New Jersey Institute of Technology visited Helsinki as the first stop of a study tour in Europe.

Some Stadia students welcomed their NJIT counterparts to Finland with a dinner at the Russian restaurant, Saslik.

The first course was blini with caviar.

The "Services Science, Management and Engineering — Education for the 21st Century" Conference was held at IBM Palisades on October 6 and 7, 2006.

Taina Tukiainen was a featured speaker at the event. Slides and a digest of the presentation are available on rendez.org.

What are these students looking at?

These are some of the candidates for the Master's degree in International Service Business Management at the Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia, in the first week of the class.

In the lecture on October 27 on Chinese style business, we had a high-level economic discussion of China's rising economy, as well as some discussion of business practices.

For a first-hand account of a westerner's view of China, take a look at the blog on The Global Silk Road. This blog is written by Brian Hilton, who I've seen frequently at annual meetings of the International Society for the Systems Sciences.

In particular, read the entry on Welcoming WuHu: Anhui Province??, China??. Wuhu City Online says that that it has a "population of whole city is 2,202,600 and that of downtown is 658,800". This isn't a city on the scale of Shanghai or Beijing that makes the daily newspaper, but Brian's description certainly names companies that you might see as prominent in the future.

Brian is co-author of a book titled "The Global Silk Road" that you can view on Amazon.