I had the privilege today of sharing some ideas on innovation at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference.  The two points of my talk were:

1. Companies should spend more time solving problems and less time coming up with brand new ideas.  There are plenty of good ideas already brewing in the minds of employees, customers, vendors and universities – it’s a matter of tapping into them.
2. There are (at least) 4 things you have to get right to pave the way for any of the ideas to make it to prime time – positioning and alignment with leadership, explicit channels established to learn what’s possible, get the right people into the right roles at the right time and persistence in managing and executing.

I’ll spend the next week or two writing a few posts describing these ideas more fully.  Also, you will see that there are a few questions throughout where I asked the audience to weigh in interactively – I’ll post the results from those too as soon as I can.