In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School describes the theory of how large outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” The innovator’s dilemma, according to Christensen, affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation. In this post, we’ll review the evolution of “innovation management” and how social media has a significant role to play. This is one area where social media can “move the needle” for large enterprises and help them change the very nature of the firm.

This article also describes what the Innovation 3.0 is.

I would argue that Innovation 3.0 should not only include social media enabled outside of the company idea harvesting channels but also the inside of the company ones.

A few months ago I invited Tad Milbourn from Intuit to give Silicon Valley Executives an overview of the tool Intuit is using to enable company employees to participate in innovation process. His talk has generated lots of discussions. And that’s the reason we decided to expand on it and discuss the overall process of harvesting and enabling innovations within and outside of enterprises.

Here is an abstract of our upcoming meetup on this topic:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Please share with your success stories and lessons learned – how is your company using the power of communities, their ideas to create new, innovative products and offerings.

Top executives from Bay Area will tackle this subject at the upcoming event.

Our distinguished panel:

Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand - VP CRM Product Management, SAP

Volker Hildebrand is Vice President of CRM Product Management at SAP. He has global responsibility for go-to-market, business development and product strategy for the CRM product line. He has been with SAP for eleven years, building momentum in CRM and E-Commerce in various roles and leadership positions in sales, marketing and product management. Volker was instrumental in building a successful CRM sales team at SAP Germany when he joined in 1998. In 2000 he took over responsibility for SAP’s Internet Sales product and later joined SAP Markets to lead the product management team in Palo Alto. In 2002 Volker joined the CRM group driving success for the e-commerce product and later CRM partner channel management and CRM sales. An innovative and forward thinking executive he led the efforts to build SAP’s first java business application, the first Web-based user interface, and the first portal-based business application. He also initiated SAP’s entry in the PRM market. Under his helm SAP became a leader in Gartner’s B2B E-Commerce Magic Quadrant and market leader in CRM based on market share.

Mitch Lieberman, VP Strategy, SugarCRM

Mr. Lieberman is a senior software industry veteran whose career spans 15 years with experience in software architecture, management and a broad spectrum of transactional business applications. Building on his career experiences in product management, system architecture, implementation services and technical sales leadership, Mr. Lieberman is able to offer a unique perspective in the current technological landscape; such as Software as a Service (Saas), open source strategy as well as the up-and-coming Cloud Computing deployment alternatives. Mitch has spent the past 10 years focusing on CRM initiatives across many industries, and the past 3 years with SugarCRM.

Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit

From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.

Moderator: Esteban Kolsky, Principal & Founder, ThinkJar

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.