It’s late night here at Innovation Central and we just finished out our Blitztime phone networking chat. Got some great feedback on what was essentially business speed-dating on the phone!
Before that we did our level best to bring Twitter to its knees with our August Virtual Mass Innovation Night event — and I think we succeeded. Those last 15 minutes or so we were seeing huge delays in the Twitter conversation.
A Virtual Mass Innovation Night doesn’t give the same rush as the several-hundred-people- in-a-room “real life” Mass Innovation Night but there are some up-sides.
- No parking hassles; no one got lost, or towed…
- No bruises. (Rolling out those tables in the ballroom at CRMI should qualify you for hazard pay. Oh, wait, we don’t get paid, at all. Darn.)
- No unflattering photos — why does everyone take our pictures after we have been rolling tables around and are sweating and look like we have been run over by a herd of turkeys.
- Anyone can join in (we had some left-coasters join in the fun and even our Farthest Flung Fan, from Germany)
We had a couple hundred tweets generated for #MIN5 in less than an hour — even with the Twitter Hassles. (It’s been suggested that Twitter slowed us down “for our own safety.”) I’m hoping to see some blog love for our Innovators. I did see some connections taking place.
We had some great questions from the peanut gallery that came in before the event –
Q1) “What does Innovation mean to you?”
- Getting stuff done –> Success at *delivering* innovation. Delivery is not in and of itself innovation.
- @MichaelGrover: Innovation has a lot to do with just getting something done
Q2) @corum wanted to know “who’s hiring?” (This question was on a lot of minds.) On a more serious note, “What selection criteria do you use when screening?”
- @dlane: #1 hiring crit is entrepreneurial mind-set. Startups are a different animal, & you need to have the “fire in your belly.”
- @tsummit: simple & powerful job screening can be accomplished by evaluating work history/what companies the candidate has worked
- @NovellMBAJobs Hard work isn’t enough. Skillz count.
Q3) Do you agree that 21st century innovation remains 99% perspiration?
- At the end of the day, if you don’t have a great idea, all of the perspiration in the world is not going to get you over the hump.
- perspiration = execution of innovation. But even process can be innovative.
- perspiration could have negative connotation but it also could mean hard work
Q4) From @kfl007. How do you continuously foster innovation in your organization? And balance it with getting daily work done?
- Chip away waste and innovation emerges
- Whatever you are doing (marketing, writing SW, etc), don’t just settle for doing it the way it’s always been done.
Innovator Break: We also asked each of our Innovators what made their product innovative:
- The genealogical database of companies and our “affinity matching” using the professional graph, makes Genotrope.com unique
- SharedSchool creates a discovery engine for lesson plans
- Validize — Our innovation is that we allow individuals and businesses to share their true identity anywhere online – a safer internet.
- Virtual Computer uses transformational technology to make it as easy for IT to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage 1.
- Virtual Computer — We also do some neat tricks for the end-user, like personal OS and corporate OS on the same PC – fully isolated.
And, thanks a ton, Mike from Blitztime. It truly was a hassle-free way to network on the phone and brought an element of fun and surprise into the mix.
