Prairie Dogging Innovation

It seems to me that the speed of innovation is accelerating and I'm not sure businesses are prepared to leverage that fact.

It was a scant two years ago, for example, that the iPhone was introduced. Two years later, there are over 20,000 apps available for it.

But who has the time to understand what they all do? Fact is that more apps are introduced each day than we can keep track of. Some would write off many applications as flashlight apps (basically screensavers), some will use a selection of productivity applications.

But others might uncover opportunities to innovate at the speed of light.

Let me cite a personal example. Our sales manager wanted to create a contest to engage everyday shoppers around the world to help our company spot marketing opportunities. Basically the goal of this contest is lead generation.

It is a radically different idea than we've ever tried before.

Unfortunately, we were struggling with the technology to achieve it. We didn't want to spend too much money or time to put it all together. So we put the idea on the back burner.

Yesterday I was reading one of my favourite tech blogs, where they profiled a new iPhone application, so I thought I'd check it out. Turns out this application provides us with about 90% of the functionality we need to execute our new lead generation idea.

So, about 30 minutes after the technical article had been published, I was able to download, test and evaluate the application, then write it's author to setup a meeting for next week. Probably with a few hours coding, we could have exactly what we need.

All of this activity happened between 7 am and 8 am on a Saturday morning.

The point of all this, is that it can't happen unless your organization has "Prairie Dogs", who pop their heads up from time to time to stay alert to new innovations, technologies and possibilities.

Secondly, they need to be "turned on" (engaged), with what your company is trying to achieve.

If you have these two ingredients, plus some freedom to execute, there's no telling how quickly your company will be able to innovate.