How to win the idea lottery, Innovation Tools
As always, those guys at Innovation Tools found some interesting innovation blog entries.  This one points to a couple of interesting links on the Idea Champions site: Improve Your Innovation Odds: How to Win the Idea Lottery and The Idea Lottery.  Interesting quote from the first link:

What most of us think of as "innovation" is really just the elegant combination of two (or more) pre-existing elements resulting in the creation of a new, value-added product or service.

Innovating with Intent, Jeffery Phillips
Wow, this one is a good one ... especially if you work in the innovation division of a larger company (like I do).  His first point caught my attention (especially since I just started reading The Game Changer, by A.G. Lafley & Ram Charan), which points out that organic growth comes from "selling existing stuff to new customer or new things to existing and/or new customers".  If innovation is suppose to drive the organic growth, he then has some great questions to ask:

1. Should the innovation team focus on developing ideas to better position the existing products for new customers?
2. Should the innovation team focus on incremental but new ideas for the business to create?
3. Should the innovation team seek methods or process improvements to dramatically cut costs (thus increasing profits)?
4. Should the innovation team consider reworking the business model of the organization (using Dell as an example and changing the predominant industry paradigm)?
5. Should the innovation team consider radical or disruptive product innovation?

After all, what does the management team actually want? If you have this knowledge, we call this strategic intent. Innovation is a good set of tools and capabilities, but needs to be guided by the strategy of the business and clarity in what the management team wants and expects.

Well stated.... the entry is definitely worth a read!

M&A Innovation, Drew Boyd
This one goes with the previous item (Innovating with Intent) because Drew talks about the other type of growth - buying it.  Discusses how to determine what company to buy.  Links to Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), someone I had heard of ... and now figure I should look into them a bit more.

Recommended reading on Innovation, Meg
Seems like a nice list of books.  I've only read two of them and am currently reading another one.

Red Hat Looks at Innovation in a Different Way, Jennifer
Discusses how Red Hat approaches innovation using the communities they touch.  Links to an article in PC World: Building IT Support for Open-Source Model.  This one caught my attention because I just finished reading The Opposable Mind, by Roger Martin (I hopefully with get a book review out soon on this one), in which one of the people interviewed for the research was Bob Young of Red Hat ... which is a completely different story.