How to Measure Innovation, Ernest Beck
A British organization - NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) is going to attempt to come up with a way to measure innovation by industry ... sounds like a pretty big challenge to me.  It seems to me that coming up with an accurate way to rank companies and measure their innovative-ness will be hard to not favor brand names and large companies alone ... how do you measure the small companies?  Looking at Businessweek's Global Innovation Index, all I see are brands and large multinationals.  How do you measure the effects of skunk work projects or the small innovation units like Open Seas (surprisingly there is little public information about it) in a companies innovation measurement?

Building an Innovation Engine, UnitedBit.com
This is an interesting view on what it takes to build an effective innovation engine.  A few of the points mentioned are:

• Establish an aggregate project plan
• Train people to distinguish between disruptive and sustaining ideas
• Create processes for shaping disruptive business plans

An interesting quote:

In fact, the executives had actively considered and usually experimented with the disruptions that eventually displaced them. A lack of good ideas is not the problem. The problem is the absence of a robust, repeatable process for creating and nurturing new growth businesses.

Ars Book Review: "Patent Failure", Timothy Lee
This article is a look at a new book by James Bessen and Michael J Meurer: Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Laywers Put Innovators at Risk. It sounds like a pretty detailed and data rich book on patents and the costs that go along with them.  An scary quote from the article:

Most shockingly, Bessen and Meurer's data suggest that outside of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, litigation costs for the average public firm actually exceed profits from their patent portfolio by a wide margin. By 1999, the last year in their sample, defendending against patent lawsuits cost non-chemical public firms about $12 billion, while their patent portfolios generated only about $3 billion in profits.

Guide for developing service innovation initiatives and roadmaps, Thomas J Buckholtz
This is a short blog entry that links to a pdf (Guide Your Service Innovation Initiatives) that is 8 pages long.

Should Successful Companies Bother with Innovation?, Scott Anthony
This article takes a look at innovation from a successful company's perspective... since it is successful why should it innovate - especially since the success rate of innovation is less than 20 percent.  Interesting way to look at it, even though that point of view doesn't make sense to me - it is clearly the way some companies act (most likely a leadership issue).  A good quote from the article:

There is no doubt that innovation remains difficult work, but companies that learn to think, and act, in the right way, can begin to reduce the waste that results from flawed innovation efforts.