I think doing something with Grails is a good start, but not when you’re hiding the truth about that project. It’s the last part that bothers me. That’s legacy enterprise vendor thinking, the very thing we want to change.

Unfortunately, sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the Web.

Vinnie- SAP is a customer… you mean companies that don’t sell IT hardware, services or software, right? i like sugared water-best with lemon juice. i much prefer it to milk, actually.

what jake said- sugar milk. i make that for my son sometimes.

Thomas- nice keyword “series”. i plan more of this - especially given our book next year “Lower Barriers” - which is going to look at innovation and community building and 21st century networked economics. You’re absolutely right to call out the different kinds of innovation- innovation by incremental process improvement can be powerful. its just not breakthrough- won’t *remake* an entire industry, but might change market share in one.

I’ve been reading a bit lately on innovation theory, and there is a lot more to it than customers doing cool stuff.

Take Archimedes in the bath. Without him having tried for years to figure out density first, his bath moment would have just been a puddle on the floor.

Metacool recently spoke at a conference on innovation, wish I’d attended. http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2007/12/creativity-entr.html

A prof involved the event posted this description.

One highly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur will ask whether management is a net positive or negative in fostering creativity and invention. He will cite a growing body of evidence that suggests that bottom-up “discovery” has a superior record in comparison with “top down ‘deliberate’ strategies from headquarters.” He asks whether companies should call a halt to managing the innovation process, “intentionally abandoning control of their scarcest resources.”

He goes on….

All ask whether management, as it is currently practiced, has much to contribute to innovation and creativity. If the answer is little, one might ask what kinds of changes will be necessary to allow managers, particularly in larger organizations, to add value to the creative process? Or is it more productive to explore ways of providing incentives to the innovators of the world, largely outside large organizations, possibly by facilitating the market that mediates resources between investors and innovators?

Figuring out innovation isn’t easy. I also wish it had been a bigger part of my business school studies in the the early 1990’s. Thanks to the innovationzen blog, I’ve just come across Utterback and Abernathy’s paper, A Dynamic Model of Product and Process innovation, published in 1975. (Better late than never)

Much to learn and ponder.

It is one thing to have a serendipitous moment, it is another step up to actually focus and execute on it.

IBM seems to somehow get this.

http://www.florence20.typepad.com

and see what UPS, Hertz, Jetblue, NFL, SF Giants, and countless other companies are doing.

So called innovation by vendors is sugared water, those by customers is mother’s milk!!

One unexpected perk of the job is meeting people who have encountered the same challenges and being asked to share experiences with people in similar situations.

Driving change is hard, so it’s nice to have an ad hoc support group that can understand and contribute thoughts. That’s why Paul started The Working Group (workinggroup.ning.com).

Hidden demand is gravy inside the enterprise b/c it’s the most effective way to get people thinking about new web and using it. The principles bleed over into everyday work then, e.g. my product really should have this feature.

As you say, this benefits customers.

The official name of the project is “Composition on Rails”, even though it doesn’t use Rails but Grails, and they refer to Grails as “Rails-Like”.

So it’s a project that boldly lies about what it is, yet shamelessly promotes a ‘me-too’ architecture. Now particularly inspiring.

On the other hand, the ‘influenced by 37Signals UI’ that you mentioned in your post (great read, btw) is inspiring. Yes, it’s SAP copying 37Signals, but that’s what good artists do. And they’re straight forward about it, and they’re starting at the top, not from second best.