[What Up] - News On Innovation
How impassioned student movements for social change can teach executives about innovation
“To transform the core, start at the edge. For many executives, when core business activities require fundamental change, the strong instinct is to embark on massive organizational changes. These organizational transformations rarely succeed. An alternative path is to start on the edge and move back into the core over time. By engaging the edge first, it is often possible to find innovative leaders with energy and passion to try new approaches. Inertial forces are weaker on the edge because there are fewer entrenched interests.”
IBM embraces social media
“So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook.”
Psychologists say ‘Ebreaks’ are good for workers.
“By factoring in ebreaks, bosses are fostering a more trusting working environment, boosting productivity, and ultimately increasing their profit.”
New York Times on bringing brands back from the dead
“A great deal of what happens in the consumer marketplace does not involve brands with zealous loyalists. What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories — and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.”