How innovation is handled is of course quite different depending on which country you live in. To try out new things in China or India is so much more the norm than in industrialized countries like Germany, France, UK or - where we are based - Switzerland where long time existent processes demand to be followed and the need to do something new is not seen daily. There is probably only one place in the West where that might be different and that is Silicon Valley in California.

The success of any company largely depends on how much better they can bring new or improved things to the market. This is not a sole function of product management and R&D in product and service innovation though but actually of everybody in a company since there are so many touch points with employees, clients, partners, products, services etc. that can be improved and lead to competitive advantages.

In fact I am convinced that the future in about just any industry in light of the strong competition from Asia and here of course in particular China is how well one can motivate and leverage each employees know-how and skill towards a joint goal: innovating better and faster. Innovation has to be seen in a broader sense here encompassing all company functions but of course products and service innovation are key since they pay the bills.

But as it turns out in day-to-day business these improvements, ideas or innovations are difficult to collect and often even difficult to create in many in particular big companies. So how could one revive or jump start an internal process that leads to a culture where people love to come up with new ideas? Before being able to answer such a question I collected some of the reasons why it is difficult for so many companies to innovate, here are some:

• there is simply no time set aside for employees to collect ideas or even communicate them
• there are no or only hardly achievable incentives defined in case someone has a nice idea
• how decisions and new products/services are created is a non-transparent process and only clear to a few
• hierarchical barriers make it difficult for lower ranked employees or departments with less visibility to communicate ideas up, one might simply not listen to them
• innovation is in the hands of a few so called experts and not a grassroots motivated approach
• being wrong with an idea does not mean that was bad, in contrary it needs to be made clear that it is much better to be wrong many times trying than not proposing anything at all, unfortunately too many companies are still not encouraging to try out something new
• there are no software tools available on companies and made part of every employee’s work tool that foster an innovation culture

This is a very small list. A bigger (50) and more comprehensive, also with a positive angle, list you can find here: 50 WAYS TO FOSTER A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

With the launch of Google’s Nexus One mobile phone and a lot of blog posts trying to make sense of what they have seen (or actually not really have seen yet but just read about themselves) it is good timing that real statistics on the development of the mobile web came out as well. BTW, there were also two blog posts out there on the Nexus One that I found most knowledgeable and making the most sense: I, Cringely (as usual is right on it) and NYT (quite unusual actually ).

Read Quantcast’s statistics and you know more details about how the mobile web developed in 2009. There are a few spots in the world where cheap phones and with that NOKIA still dominates. Mostly it is all iPhone and iPod Touch dominated already.

It is the time again when you can read “smart” predictions for the coming year. One risks being wrong more than correct but “no risk, no fun”, I guess, so I am putting my thoughts into it too; so here are three quite safe bets:

• Apple enters the e-book reader game and might well kick e-books into the mainstream. I hinted about this quite some time ago but with the Apple tablet rumors getting quite concrete one target market seems the e-book and with that a new category, the multimedia e-book. To use e-ink readers with b&w only always seemed dull.

• social communications for the enterprise is a hot new subject. What Apple is for consumers, salesforce.com is (a little bit) for enterprise. Constantly trying to innovate, in salesforce.com’s case more re-coining the same buzzwords (SaaS, cloud). But with its latest announcement, to offer social collaboration capability starting some time in Q1 2010, this will get high visibility, and enterprise CIOs, productivity experts, online channel experts as well as marketing&communication departments will have something to talk about and do.

• the mobile Web will grow even more. With Apple’s iPhone the whole mobile phone industry dramatically changed. Suddenly the mobile Web was not only talked about but became a reality. Fast mobile data networks are becoming a necessity to be able to serve these power users. Blackberry e-mail push like services have worked with simple GPRS quite well for a long time already but mobile Web surfing not, and that requires fast mobile network infrastructure. Interesting to see that also here Apple is shaking up an industry that they have not served at all in the past. Nokia and all other mobile vendors will come under tremendous pressure and with Google entering with its own phone (selling it directly and via a few operators) this will only intensify. But most importantly with the growth of the mobile Web (eBay had record Christmas sales for mobiles) enterprises need to make their websites mobile ready and keep them up to date with new mobile browser developments as well.

Today I came across this Google banner ad for Google Apps on a ZDNet blog. The first time that I saw Google using such a relatively direct product marketing tool. I think this is a nice way to do it for them although there must be something wrong with its calculator (50 employees lead to $37k savings while 1000 to only $84k):

I was quite surprised when I saw this chart today as there are a few companies in this top ten list of biggest corporate R&D investors that I would not have expected. I expected Toyota there, the Swiss pharmaceutical companies Roche and Novartis but for sure not GM and Ford. Guess they kept it a secret what they all do with this huge amount of R&D money. Also surprising was Nokia being ranked second even. Also here the pure amount of the investments says nothing about its quality and success.

On my trip to the US I could not resist the saving potential buying a MacBook. I got the lowest cost model as I did not see any real difference to a MacBook Pro and I looked into all the details. All in all with some software I saved about 500 USD compared with what I would pay in Switzerland. Not bad when the total amount was only 1500 USD.

Now after I set up all my SaaS links, imported my contacts, synced the calendar with the Mac iCal and put all my PC data onto a 2.5″ super small portable hard disk from where I will use it in the next few weeks whenever needed, I was ready to go. I did not think a VMware installation would be necessary to make the switch from Windows.

My first working experience was awesome. The screen is a beauty and so are every other detail. Hard to understand why it took me so long to switch.

The Safari browser is quite fast which is important for me since I have lots of software in the cloud. I don’t see the need for any other browser - sorry Chrome and Mozilla. Now I am thinking to maybe get MobileMe so my iPod Touch and MacBook stay automatically synced and data is stored in the cloud as well. The only thing I did linking me back to the MSFT world was to buy Office for Mac as I don’t think Apple’s office suite will guarantee 100% backwards compatibility to my long list of MSFT Office files. So that’s it. I think Apple will make life for MSFT, PC vendors and mostly mobile phone vendors a tough one in the coming years.

Just came back from a week long trip to the heart of the tech world, Silicon Valley. It was unusually cold for December, at night even freezing. Now back in Zurich, it is snowing right now, which is more normal weather here for this time of the year. So what is going on in Silicon Valley? Following are a few personal impressions and views:

Startups continue to have a hard time getting funding, in particular if they are with more unknown VCs, as those might simply not get new funds from their institutional investors anymore who prefer to use the money for something else. If you are with a top VC firm, though, there should not be a problem. Focus is on getting revenue and with that proving that you have a viable business. Not so exotic for the rest of the world of course. It seems that Silicon Valley is becoming more mainstream.

There is still very interesting stuff being done that will surface in a few months from now and IPOs are being prepared as well, although not knowing if they will then really pull the trigger and go public. I have also seen startups who have just received a new round of funding and are now super busy with tons of work racing to be first in the market with new features. Such setups are fun to work for and reminded me of the high (and unreal as it turned out then) times end of 1999.

There are still the smartest and most ambitious entrepreneurs to be found here, it seems, but you also meet people who feel tired of the constant rush and begin to wonder if there are better things to do in heir lives than work.

Now if you are ambitious and love technology I am sure there are great opportunities and some that one only finds here. Being asked what they think about Europe, most will tell you that the focus is on Asia and China, and Europe is often seen as second priority. Of course this entirely depends on the product market, where some require a more mature customer base or where the conservative approach in Europe towards adopting new technology is easier to deal with than the super cheap but maybe not that advanced competition in China who can still sell there but not in Europe.

On a personal level I had some funny experiences. E.g. I clearly had the impression that food has got better. It is still about one third to half the price of what you pay in Switzerland and, when you choose to go to an expensive place, it will be a very pleasant surprise to get really excellent food. Competition and fewer people going out has led to this positive effect, I guess. I also discovered more of San Francisco on this trip. It is technically speaking not Silicon Valley of course but has now some also interesting startups and some tech companies (Adobe) who tap more into designer types than engineers. I really like the office space there in SOMA which are old totally renovated brick warehouses with wooden beams inside, which makes for a very pleasant working atmosphere. And one really funny fact I heard from an ex-colleague who works in San Jose but lives in San Francisco. He said that for a man looking for women you need to go to San Francisco as the ratio of men to women is still healthy there, while in Silicon Valley you find many more men than women, which also has a certain negative effect on their attitudes (details of that I won’t reveal here but I am sure you can guess :-))

:/urlfan is a website that is “currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,936,519 blog posts from 5,970,548 blog feeds”.

So instead of looking how many people go to a site, this list counts the number of blog posts that mention those sites. The thinking behind this is that since bloggers are influential this translates into real popularity. I think this makes sense and also makes the analytics manageable without needing a supercomputer to do it fast. Blog sites themselves start btw at position  22 with Techcrunch. We just hope Michael A. has not also invested into this site here.

The site also shows the most popular Buzzwords “parsing 154,527 blog posts”. The Obamas made it three times into the top 10 (”Barack Obama”, “Michelle Obama”, “President Obama”) and “Sarah Palin” at position 10. So this one is definitely not interesting outside of the US.

I am sure you noticed it too. In times of economic challenges surprisingly many new things pop up around us. One might call it innovations but often it is simply using existing technology for the first time  and making it accessible to employees or customers. This is only at first sight surprising as one might think that companies put new things on hold right now having more pressing issues.
Probably most do I guess but the leaders actually don’t and use these times to gain some differentiation. Often in markets it seems where it is otherwise difficult to differentiate such as in the telecom industry.

This morning on my flight to Oslo I had such an experience too with an airline. Swiss, the local airline is showing lots of new things and promotes them heavily on billboards at the airport and also insight the planes on the LCD screens. Examples are:
- use of the new A330 fleet on selected routes to the US and Middle East
- super convenient first class experience
- mobile check in with sending your boarding pass that is then scanned in from your phone so no more printing of boarding passes anymore, available also in Germany and soon at man more airports

The mobile check in would have been possible since a long time but now it is introduced during times where also Swiss has to leave planes on the ground. But this is in my opinion the right thing to do especially if your business is in a commodity market. (of course with this service most likely they will save money too I guess by needing less personnel) And who will get out of this market slump stronger I am convinced is clear: the ones who used these times to offer better and differentiating products and services. By the way this does not only apply to products and services but also to the way you do product marketing. There are great new opportunities using online marketing tools such as private social communities to expand your out reach. Now is the time to explore and launch trials that are in full swing when the economy bounces back.