Results tagged “innovation” from Trends in the Living Networks

I recently spent three days in Kuala Lumpur, running a two-day workshop for a client and meeting a number of very interesting people. I hadn’t been to Malaysia for six years, so it was great to get back. I thought it was worth sharing a few top-of-mind impressions and thoughts from my brief time there.

The first impression is how rapidly KL has developed in the last years. The glamorous new airport, wide highways everywhere, and the extraordinary Putrajaya area, which houses the federal government, are testament to the massive investment in infrastructure over the last years.

However traffic in KL remains abominable at rush hour. People sometimes choose to wait a couple of hours before driving home, and expect to get home at the same time anyway.

Pic: CEO and PA of Malaysia Industry-Government Group for High Technology, Ross Dawson, Nik Hasyudeen, with Putrajaya landmarks in the background

I was very fortunate to have Nik Hasyudeen, the former president of the Malaysian Institute of Accountants and recently announced executive chairman of the Audit Oversight Board, as my guide for part of the trip. Nik is a connector extraordinaire, and adds to his broad experience in business strategy a great appetite for innovation.

I’m at Tech23, probably the biggest and best showcase so far of Australian upcoming tech companies. After creating the list of Top Web 2.0 Apps in Australia list last year and in 2007 and organizing the associated Web 2.0 in Australia events, I had originally envisaged that we would organize a broad information technology showcase event this year. However this did not manage to fit into our very packed priority list, and as it happens others are taking on the task of bringing attention to the best of emerging Australian tech. Rachel Slattery of SlatteryIT, who has long been running events for Australia’s tech community, has done a great job in creating Tech23.

Frankly, one of the challenges in running tech showcases in Australia is finding a sufficiently deep and broad pool of excellent early-stage companies. Overall I have been very encouraged by the pace at which new companies have emerged over the last two years, though there is still further to go. There were some great companies at Tech23, but I imagine that it would be harder to find another 23 hot emerging companies. By the time this event runs next year, and hopefully other tech showcases emerge, the signs are that the pool will be considerably deeper.

Unfortunately I am not able to spend the whole day at the event, but below are some quick notes from some of the more interesting companies that I managed to catch this morning. [UPDATE:] See also my notes from the SaaS/ In the Cloud panel and presentations.

Unfortunately posting this a bit late, but there is still time to submit your awesome intranet work to the Intranet Innovation Awards - the deadline is May 1.

The awards are run annually by StepTwo Designs, and for the last two years have featured some fantastic examples of innovation in internal web initiatives.

One of my favorites from the winners is Janssen-Cilag. Nathan Wallace, who spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum both this year and last year, shares his story in this video.

Advanced Human Technologies is an awards supporter, so we'll be sharing more when the winners are announced later this year.

A few days ago I attended a morning of the second Adtech Sydney, after last year chairing the keynote panel on the new media mix and the panel on blogs as a marketing tool last year. The event has progressed over its very promising start last year, with apparently around 30% more attendees, and an exhibition sprawling into new rooms. It is certainly a major convening point for the industry in Australia, with most of the major players involved or attending.

I spoke on the panel session on Innovation in the Digital Marketplace, together with Karim Temsamani, General Manager of Google Australia/ NZ, Simon Smith, Managing Director of eBay Australia, and Warren Lee, CEO of APN Online. Matt Whale, Director of ?WhatIf!, moderated the panel. I think it was a good session, with us managing to address some of the important points in what is a rather sprawling topic, though perhaps we agreed a bit too much…

A few of the points that I made were:

* Levels of innovation. There is much focus on innovation at the product (new services) and channel (new uses of combinations of digital channels for marketing such as Coke Studios, linking outdoor with SMS, Dell’s Ideastorm etc.) levels. However all of this happens in the context of business model innovation, and ultimately industry structure innovation (for example the shift of the primary platform to social networks). While only a few are able to play effectively at the industry structure level, actually changing the game, any innovation at lower levels needs to take into account the state of industry structure or platform innovation.