5 Questions on Innovation
A recent Wharton School conference presented five questions for innovators on blogs, search engines, and innovation online.
A recent Wharton School conference presented five questions for innovators on blogs, search engines, and innovation online.
Last week, I made a mistake that I won’t be able to correct for almost seven months.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania invited me to participate in a panel discussion entitled, “Innovation in Cyberspace: Mining the value of blogs, search engines and insights from front-line innovators.”
The other panelists included: Betsy Book, the director of product management at Makena Technologies, creators of the virtual world There; Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group, and co-author of The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy; Brian Lusk, manager of customer communication at Southwest Airlines and corporate editor of the Nuts About Southwest blog; and Steve Rubel, senior VP in Edelman’s me2revolution practice, who also writes the Micro Persuasion blog and a weekly column for Advertising Age Digital.
The two-hour panel discussion was just part of a three-day Wharton Executive Education Program entitled “Full-Spectrum Innovation: Driving Organic Growth.” I was also offered a seat in the program, which was held at the Steinberg Conference Center in Philadelphia. (I should disclose that the Wharton School is a client.)
I correctly accepted the two-hour “speaking opportunity” on Monday afternoon, June 25, but incorrectly declined the three-day “listening opportunity” which ran June 25-27. That was a big mistake, because this innovative three-day workshop won’t be repeated again until January 28-30, 2008.
Nevertheless, I did get something out of the panel discussion. On Friday, June 22, the moderator of our panel, Professor Peter Fader, e-mailed the panelists “five questions that should generate a healthy discussion.” He asked us to “contemplate this list over the weekend and have some insightful (and/or provocative) answers ready for Monday afternoon.”
The five questions were:
Now, I normally speak at industry conferences, where the audience can learn a lot by listening to the answers from the panelists. But, this was an executive education program, where the panelists could learn a lot by listening to the questions from the audience – because the so-called “students” in this workshop were “front-line innovators” in their organizations.
And their organizations included: AstraZeneca, Caterpillar, The Coca-Cola Company, Computer Sciences Corporation, Disney Consumer Products, DuPont, Ericsson, GE Plastics, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, LexisNexis, Merrill Lynch, Shell Petroleum, Sony, Schick-Wilkinson Sword, and Tyco Electronics, among others.
They had brought their current challenges and opportunities to Wharton – to explore them with thought leaders such as Professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker, who co-authored the ground-breaking book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that Can Make or Break Your Company. Part of the program included new innovation frameworks from Larry Huston, the VP of innovation at Procter & Gamble and the creator of the company’s much-celebrated Connect and Develop innovation strategy. But, I didn’t participate in that part of the program.
I participated in the panel – and quickly learned that I wasn’t one of five speakers; I was one of about 50 participants in a discussion that included virtually everyone in the classroom. After short introductory remarks by the panelists, the Q&A started almost immediately at 4:30 and didn’t end at 6:30 p.m. The discussion continued over dinner from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., and was followed by an informal “Wine and Conversation” session from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Part-way through the process, I realized that I had entered a parallel universe – like Episode 4 in Season 2 of Star Trek – where marketing had been replaced by learning and focus had been replace by peripheral vision. And I kicked myself for not accepting a seat in the full program when it had been offered.
So, all I can share with you today are the five questions about blogs and search engines that I was asked to contemplate before the program started. I mistakenly thought that I had some insightful (and/or provocative) answers until I realized that the five faculty and 40 students in the program had many more and even better questions.
Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm and public relations agency. He is also the news search, blog search and PR correspondent for the Search Engine Watch Blog.
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