Technological innovation often comes when your hunch collides with someone else's hunch, says best-selling author Steven Johnson. Open collaborative spaces are vital to allowing those hunches to mature into breakthrough moments.
Apple's developer website is finally fixed after nearly a month of disruption. Then came Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's doomsday prediction on the eve of Apple's big fall product launch, followed by billionaire investor Carl Icahn showering Apple with some love. It's getting crazy in Cupertino.
Like it or not, CIOs and other IT leaders will have to deal with a digital disrupter who wins over suppliers and customers by wringing out inefficiencies in the market. Mobile startups like Hailo and Uber, which match up passengers with transportation, are turning the industry on its ear.
City officials and local tech entrepreneurs weigh efforts to transform the nation's capital into a haven for angel-backed, emerging tech ventures by pointing out the shifting dynamics of the model for funding startup tech ventures, with cloud computing, open source software and other industry trends lowering the cost of setting up a business, potentially diminishing the importance of the traditional venture capitalist. However, this is at odds with a city, that while trying to cultivate this tech hub, is also struggling to improve a public school system so as not to lose the middle-class.
"Follow the money" is classic advice for investigative journalists, auditors and entrepreneurs. But for CIOs? That doesn't quite compute. If anything, CIOs have a reputation for being risk-averse and hypercautious with corporate dollars-just ask any hot-eyed startup CEO who's ever pitched to one of you.
Getting maximum results from innovative IT investments is an art. Business users may need incentives to take advantage of new capabilities that wait to be exploited.
Are today's CIOs more innovative than they were 10 years ago?