Judy Estrin was on IT Conversations to promote her book, Closing the Innovation Gap. And like most people who do book tours of this short, she stuck to ideas and themes in the book.

  • Failure is a critical component of innovation. You need to accept it.
  • Learn from failure
  • Scale fast, fail fast
  • Fail early, fail often
  • There are 5 core values of innovative environments / people
    • Questioning
    • Vulnerability to risk
    • Openness
    • Patience
    • Trust
  • Talent is one of the most important parts of innovation
  • Turn threats into challenges
  • Innovation comes from groups who are inspired
  • Innovation ecosystem includes following groups:
    • Research – generate new knowledge and train minds; not make money
    • Development – develop new products, services or processes
    • Application – application of science and technology (consumers are in here)
  • All three groups need to interact with the other ones
  • Communities and how they interact
    • Leadership – most important, leads to the next three
    • Funding
    • Policy
    • Education
    • Culture – also really important; works in tandem with Leadership
  • Innovation is bottom-up
  • Having a plan for innovation is not enough. You can’t mandate it. You need a vision and a mandate
  • You are not a personal failure if you professionally fail if you learn from it
  • We’re not planting the seeds of tomorrow’s innovation at the rate we need to be
  • Need to balance short-term needs, and the long-term ones as well
  • It takes a cognitively diverse community to innovate
  • Incremental innovation can be measured you your service levels. Disruptive innovation needs to be measured in hindsight else it will stifle it.