Last week, at HICSS-39, I attended an interesting session on innovation and innovation management. In that session, John Seely Brown made two interesting observations. The first one was on juming ecologies. He said that many academic frameworks focus attention on current capabilities and experiences of current customers. This, he believed, led to competencies traps and no cross pollination of capabilities. He said that in many instances companies benefited by jumping ecologies. This happens when we take a multi-disciplinary approach to research.
The second point he made was about the paradox of protecting intellectual property. Companies spend a great deal of time and effort to protect IP from leaking out. If they get good at this, an interesting side effect is that they prevent leak in of ideas too!