"Innovation is an art, but it is an art where “managerial” interventions can accelerate or retard the rate of progress. Much of this concerns the sources from which ideas originate, the speed by which ideas move through an organization, the invitations to participate, the attitudes of the key decision-makers and the sources of inspiration that they draw from."
- Bill Fischer, The Virtues of Having Strange People Close By, Forbes.com, May 17, 2012
New customers, partners, and commitment to open standards drive innovation and growth.
Hippo, the open source web content management company is very proud to announce that record growth continues. The revenue in 2011 was the highest ever and through the first quarter of 2012 the revenue continues to grow. This announcement comes on the heels of Hippo being selected as a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Europe winner.
Hippo enjoyed a 75% CAGR growth in the first quarter of 2011, as compared to the same period last year. This quarter's growth represents the highest in the company's history.
The company was proud to make this announcement immediately after being honored with the Red Herring's Top 100 Europe award. This list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entprepreneurs. As Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring said: "after rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Hippo embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Hippo should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was the strongest it has ever been."
Hippo, the company setting new standards for how Commercial Open Source Web Content Management can empower audiences and change the way organizations manage Web content is very proud to announce today that it has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe award. This award honors the year’s most promising private technology companies from all throughout Europe.
"It's often the employees--rather than outside consultants--who know a company's products and processes best. According to management experts, many of the most innovative companies tend to solicit ideas from staff throughout the organization, not just the executive ranks."
-Rachel Emma Silverman, "For Bright Ideas, Ask the Staff", The Wall Street Jorunal, October 17, 2011.
XOOPS Community voted and the winners of 2008/2009 "Marcello Brandao XOOPS Innovation Award" have been announced:
"Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents."
"This new environment also has big implications for managers. Simply put, bosses must be prepared to give up some control. With testing so cheap, easy and accessible, there's less need to ration it as they have in the past. Managers used to directing the company's innovation efforts must give their workers the freedom to come up with ideas on their own and pursue them without lots of red tape."
"Some of the best experiments come from outside the chain of command."
"Not only do we expect managers to solicit and welcome more ideas from lower down in the ranks, we expect that lots more people will be invited to review experiments and make changes."
-Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Schrage, "The New, Faster Face of Innovation", The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2009
Silicon.com: Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas and while those that are generated may not be all IT-related, it will do the CIO no harm to be seen to be leading on innovation.
I don't have the complete answer to this but I would like to throw out some thoughts about how to collect those new ideas:"
Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation. The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.
Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies. Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.
What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.
As the two companies started working together, the gulf between them quickly became apparent. In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G's Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn't invited any "motherhood" bloggers -- women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing -- to attend the press conference.
"Where are the bloggers?" asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present.
For their part, P&G employees gasped in surprise during a Tide brand meeting when a Google job-swapper apparently didn't realize that Tide's signature orange-colored packaging is a key part of the brand's image.
I'm one of those people that get nervous when I see two opposing cultures trying to connect with each other. I am much more comfortable to read about such stories in the safe confines of my home office. I also get a little giddy when I hear of success in the bridging of two enterprise cultures. I wonder if Google would ever like to swap one of their employees for my federal IT job? I could use a little bit of innovation know how...
Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?
There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.
XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.
So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.
"We’re now at the point where the most innovative technology for users really is being created in the nonbusiness space. Corporate IT has become the prisoner of legacy technology, and the result isn’t just stodginess — we’re missing out on innovation that could make our users more productive, more effective and more successful."
--Frank Hayes, "Prisoners of Legacy", ComputerWorld, January 7, 2008
