SMEs urged to 'pick up the innovation ball'
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Do or die Innovate or die was the stark warning issued to SMEs by a University of Limerick (UL) professor at a conference in the city on Friday.â¦
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Timing is the bane of those who would be innovators. Get it right and youâll be toasted. Get it wrong and youâre just plain toast.
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A new initiative seeks to improve old products.
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Report recommends private sector input Performance management in local authorities needs more buy-in from across the organisation, concludes a new report from the National Computing Centre.â¦
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Companies that want their IT departments to be innovative had better be prepared to take some risks on technology projects and accept some failures, according to attendees at Computerworld's Premier 100 conference.
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In Europe, industry leaders, government officials and others debate whether patents would hinder or cultivate innovation.
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The CBI says that while many UK firms are positively using the internet, more needs to be done.
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The US must make innovation the top national priority or risk ceding its role as the worldâs foremost economic power, an organisation of top business and academic leaders warned on Wednesday.
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Entrepreneurs discover success requires a little reinvention.
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If a company isn't failing at some things, it probably isn't innovating.
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DTI, Patent Office get started on Gowers A hand-picked group of 40 small businesses in the UK is to be offered "intellectual property health checks" by the Department of Trade and Industry, in line with recommendations laid out in the Gowers review on intellectual property.â¦
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After years of hearing that investing in IT was a smart strategic plan, business executives seem to have gotten the message, according to a new Gartner CIO survey released today -- but only when the dollars are going to technology efforts that have visible benefits for the bottom line, primarily externally facing initiatives involving customers or partners.The good news is that, despite the softening economy, IT budgets are going up 3.3 percent across the nearly 1,500 companies that Gartner surveyed. The data that matters for IT execs: Budgets for companies focused on bottom-line-oriented efforts are increasing 4.9 percent, said Mark McDonald, a Gartner Group vice president. Those organizations whose IT strategy involves only an efficiency focus will typically see budget increases of just 1.7 percent.The survey shows that a sea change has occurred in IT priorities, McDonald noted. The top three priorities in 2008 are improving business processes, attracting and retaining new customers, and creating new products and services. The sea change is the third priority, which was the No. 10 priority in 2007. Gone from the top three is reducing enterprise costs, which has slipped to No. 5. The decline of cost-cutting as a priority and the rise of innovation show the sea change that has occurred, McDonald says.But IT managers hoping for a return to the 1990s glory days of annual budget increases of 15-plus percent will be disappointed, McDonald said. In that era, IT budgets were driven by technology initiatives done almost for their own sake, as businesses both experimented with the new Internet and began to use technology widely within their walls. "Today, it's more about specific business needs," he said, "We're seeing strategies well grounded in business operations changes, not chasing a fad."And it's not CIOs driving the budget growth; it's the C-suite executives who now finally see IT as a business enabler, McDonald added. If anything, CIOs who promote IT as a force for business change were typically dismissed as self-interested. He noted, "Calling attention to yourself is never very positive."Although there is a mounting possibility that the U.S. economy may be entering a recession, McDonald doesn't believe IT will see its budgets slashed, as happened in the 2000-2001 recession. That recession came after years of unbridled IT spending whose specific business benefits were often unclear. The more moderate budget growth predicted for 2008 won't give businesses the same easy cuts they had then, he noted. "If you cut IT's budget by 10 percent, you might just see a 0.2 percent effect on the whole budget," McDonald explained, "You can get more bang for your buck by lowering [overall] operations costs through investing in better IT." That's why businesses are looking to increase IT spending for bottom-line-oriented initiatives, he said.
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Innovation has become an all-purpose tonic, the default prescription for every pain associated with the retrenching American economy. Whatever the problem -- slower growth, global competition, fewer well-paying jobs -- innovating, we are told, is the solution.
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When Paul Brewer, co-founder of high-tech security company ObjectVideo, gave speeches to business school students about how to find funding, he used to focus about 80 percent of his talk on the art of landing venture capital. Now he spends most of his time on how to attract federal government funding, especially through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The managers of the program are more daring than venture capitalists, said Brewer, because they are more likely to fund an idea at its inception, before it has proved anything.
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Almost three quarters of small businesses say the government could do more to help them, a survey finds.
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By Carol Cain, Detroit Free Press  Sep. 18--With so many big companies looking to China to grow their businesses, it's natural that small firms would want a piece of the pie.   David Hemmings has made it his job to at least supply them with the ingredients.
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Sometimes the best way to do good is to use a little entrepreneurial spirit.