{"id":62,"date":"2006-09-12T08:56:01","date_gmt":"2006-09-12T16:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=62"},"modified":"2006-09-12T08:56:01","modified_gmt":"2006-09-12T16:56:01","slug":"degrees-of-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/degrees-of-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Degrees of Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\u00a0\"WSJ<\/td>\nThe Wall Street Journal<\/a> has selected Sun Microsystem’s<\/a> DTrace<\/a> Open Source Software as their Gold Award winner in the WSJ 2006 Technology Innovation Awards<\/a> competition.\u00a0 For the second time in two years the top award has gone to Sun.\u00a0 The competition included entries from the following categories: medicine and medical devices, wireless, security, consumer electronics, software, and semiconductors.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hats off to Sun and Jonathan Schwartz<\/a>.\u00a0 Other recent financial news<\/a> also shows that\u00a0Sun\u00a0seems to be\u00a0making a turnaround.\u00a0 An earlier discussion in this Blog about Sun can be found here<\/a>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Sun’s DTrace is a scriptable dynamic tracing utility that lets you\u00a0observe low-level\u00a0Operating System and Application behavior to assist with performance analysis, troubleshooting, and debugging.\u00a0 Here is an interesting discussion about why and how\u00a0DTrace was created<\/a>.\u00a0 The software runs on UNIX\/Linux class machines, and it has been incorporated<\/a> into Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard.<\/p>\n

Innovation, or perhaps successful innovation, has been receiving a lot of press.\u00a0 And success is usually accompanied by lists.\u00a0 There is the list of top Innovators under 35<\/a>, Innovation Leaders in the EU<\/a>, IBM’s survey of 765 CEOs on Innovation<\/a>, 3M’s Seven Pillars of Innovation<\/a>, and others.<\/p>\n

Innovation comes in many forms and can be transformative in an enterprise.\u00a0 Most industry-leader companies\u00a0are innovative in some component of their business.<\/p>\n

In an interesting contrarian\u00a0view of\u00a0innovation as always being a positive,\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

Carr sees full-scale innovation as risky and expensive.\u00a0 He sees successful companies as those that select or limit the components of their business where they adopt innovation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, in the computer industry,\u00a0Carr 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.\u00a0 Apple, as another success story,\u00a0is 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.\u00a0 Carr sees focusing on being innovative in a single competancy\u00a0as being\u00a0a more successful strategy.<\/p>\n

Interesting thoughts.\u00a0 More of something isn’t always better. Ben Franklin’s 13-point plan for living, emphasizing moderation, may be useful advice for businesses too.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For the second time in two years the top award has gone to Sun.\u00a0…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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