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Degrees of Innovation
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The Wall Street Journal has selected Sun Microsystem’s DTrace Open Source Software as their Gold Award winner in the WSJ 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. For the second time in two years the top award has gone to Sun. The competition included entries from the following categories: medicine and medical devices, wireless, security, consumer electronics, software, and semiconductors.
Hats off to Sun and Jonathan Schwartz. Other recent financial news also shows that Sun seems to be making a turnaround. An earlier discussion in this Blog about Sun can be found here. |
Sun’s DTrace is a scriptable dynamic tracing utility that lets you observe low-level Operating System and Application behavior to assist with performance analysis, troubleshooting, and debugging. Here is an interesting discussion about why and how DTrace was created. The software runs on UNIX/Linux class machines, and it has been incorporated into Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard.
Innovation, or perhaps successful innovation, has been receiving a lot of press. And success is usually accompanied by lists. There is the list of top Innovators under 35, Innovation Leaders in the EU, IBM’s survey of 765 CEOs on Innovation, 3M’s Seven Pillars of Innovation, and others.
Innovation comes in many forms and can be transformative in an enterprise. Most industry-leader companies are innovative in some component of their business.
In an interesting contrarian view of innovation as always being a positive, in a side-panel accompanying article to the WSJ list of Tech innovators, Nicholas Carr, author of the Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”, questions business attempts to innovate at every level.
Carr sees full-scale innovation as risky and expensive. He sees successful companies as those that select or limit the components of their business where they adopt innovation.
For example, in the computer industry, Carr sees Dell as being innovative in the area of cost reduction of basic business processes, but not that innovative in terms of their products sold. Apple, as another success story, is 180 degrees opposite to Dell, being very innovative in product design but adopting standard business processes. Gateway is the example of a company that tried to embrace innovation at both the product and process level, but didn’t succeed in getting the formula right in either category. Carr sees focusing on being innovative in a single competancy as being a more successful strategy.
Interesting thoughts. More of something isn’t always better. Ben Franklin’s 13-point plan for living, emphasizing moderation, may be useful advice for businesses too.
