Hargraves Innovation Conference 2009

The Hargraves Institute is a think tank comprised of member organisations committed to success through innovation. I was fortunate enough to be invited to provide a keynote speech at their conference this year. The conference was well attended with over 200 registrants, demonstrating that despite the current financial climate, innovation is seen as critical to both survival and thriving longer term. In fact as Optimice we played a more active role than previously. My business partner, Cai Kjaer, conducted a short interest profile of the registrants and then created a large affinity map showing how the registrants were related to each other via common interests. The map was a huge success and a real conversation piece. We intend to replicate this for other events now.

On the conference itself I was pleased to see that networks figured prominantly and that many of the 1st day speakers provided an excellent entre to my own opening speech for day 2. Narelle Kennedy from the Australian Business Foundation reported on a significant research study on common attributes of a successful innovation. The critical elements like being people centric, people networks, tacit knowledge flows etc.. aligned wonderfully with my own topic on trust networks and the speed of trust in innovation.

Daryl Mann from Systematic Innovations spoke of innovations occurring at the point of contradiction i.e. solutions that solve contradictions tend to be the most successful innovations. Daryl noted that the ipod had demonstrated this and did not require major market research to achieve this. I view organisational network analysis as solving the contradiction between top down and peer to peer management.

John Russell from Russell Mineral Equipment gave a very earthy (excuse the pun) talk on how his company had achieved award winning innovations. Of note to me was the critical innovation brokering role that his chief engineer played. The chief engineer has no direct reports yet is one of the highest paid employees that he has. Congratulations to John for recognising the value of the broker/bridge.

This is just a snippet of all the good talks and discussion had. Congratulations to Hargraves for anothe wonderful conference and learning experience. We should have both my own and Cai's presentations up on our web site shortly. The talks were all filmed by Hargraves so perhaps you will also have access to this online soon.