Innovating For the Numerator

The National Academy of Engineering identified fourteen “Grand Challenges for Engineering” that must be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable, economically robust, and politically stable future. (see the full list here) The challenges are a call-to-action for solutions to some of the most pressing issues in the 21st century: identifying safe and clean energy resources; providing for human health, nutrition and security; restoring and reinventing infrastructure for urban habitation; advancing computing power and capabilities; and developing new tools for teaching, learning, medicine and scientific discovery.

How to Harness the Power of Process Innovation

All employees need to feel that it is part of their job to constantly come up with new ways of doing things to make them better so that process innovation becomes just a way of doing business.

So how can you achieve this? Innovation must become a core part of your leadership agenda. Training employees on how to innovate processes becomes the vehicle through which you can spread the methods and ways of thinking. Then the corporate culture must continue to reinforce the message. On a practical level, maybe this means starting each day with a discussion of what we could do better.

The Red Queen Economy, Running in Place Faster

The Red Queen gets an undeservedly bad rap in most modern theatrical presentations.

Remember though, she is still a queen, able to move in any direction over the entire surface of the chess board, and despite all this talk of running in place, she is there at the end to celebrate Alice’s own promotion to queen as she reaches the edge of the board. This treadmill economy won’t last forever, and with proper preparation, you may even be able to step off yourself before the rest of your industry catches on.

Quantum Physics for Dummies…or…How the Higgs Boson Can Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe

Last week, the world’s most wanted particle - the elusive Higgs boson - was discovered, hailing a major breakthrough in particle physics. The particle now completes the standard model, so does that mean there’s nothing left to discover?

Not exactly. In this animation, see why finding the Higgs is just the beginning and how it could be key to unlocking mysteries about our universe. The particle could help explain dark matter or gravity and could help test other theories like supersymmetry. It’s even possible that it’s part of a clique: there could be up to five different types of Higgs bosons.

One Hundred Days To Disruption

The concepts of disruptive innovation are powerful tools with which to spot high-potential opportunities. Whenever we run an idea-generation session, we are struck by how intuitive and powerful people find the core disruptive concepts. They allow managers in even the most moribund of industries to quickly envision entirely new, fertile fields of growth.

The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies- 32: Gogo

Every time someone on Twitter brags, “I’m on a plane!” a Gogo engineer’s ears pop. The Illinois startup commands the market for in-flight Wi-Fi: It now serves more than 1,300 commercial flights and controls 85% of Wi-Fi-equipped planes. In the first nine months of 2011, Gogo reported $113.8 million in revenue, and the company is now taxiing to a 2012 IPO. It will use the funds to upgrade its network and in-flight platforms.