Patrick Lefler

Everyone talks about the need for creativity and great ideas. It’s become the ‘fad of the month’ with entire industries now devoted to idea generation. Innovation labs and teams are the new thing and are popping up all over. And these new innovation labs have their own set of rules; white boards and post-it notes are mandatory; go for quantity and encourage wild ideas; be visual; number your ideas; twenty-five ideas per hour is good, fifty ideas per hour is the sign of good brainstorming (and I suppose that a hundred ideas an hour is like...nirvana!).

Separate spaces are created for these special innovation teams. Members are encourages to ‘drop in’ whenever they feel creative. Markers of every color are supplied along with storyboard frames. Create! create! create! is the mantra but very rarely do we know...

Nobutoshi Kihara, the man behind most of Sony’s wildly successful consumer products recently passed away on February 13th. He was 84 and spent his entire career with Sony. Known by many as “the wizard of Sony” because of his engineering prowess, Kihara was the genius behind some of Sony’s most innovative products. His early work on transistor radios and the miniaturization of components made Sony a household name and Japan the world’s leading electronics maker.

According to The Telegraph of London:

Tape recorders and radios were then cumbersome, power-thirsty and too expensive for widespread use. When Sony’s founders realized that to attract customers they needed to shrink the devices, make them affordable and reduce their power consumption, they called on Kihara .

Though a simple concept, this was extremely difficult to achieve. Many suppliers of components complained that it was impossible to shrink parts to the extent...

This past week, one of the blogs featured in the Harvard Business Review’s The Conversation featured a story about recent efforts of Kentucky’s two largest cities--Louisville and Lexington--to promote innovation. In a post titled Will the Sun Shine Bright on Kentucky Innovation?, author Saul Kaplan highlighted a recent visit to the Bluegrass region of Kentucky where he spoke with local entrepreneurs and community leaders about what it takes to spur innovation and entrepreneurship in the region.

One of the points made by the author was that it was vital to think about the challenge of fostering entrepreneurship and innovation at the city level - and that these two cities (Louisville and Lexington) have the potential to lead the way by becoming innovation hotspots. What the author fails to communicate is...

Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Company (DEC) and one of the great entrepreneurs of our lifetime passed away earlier in the week at the age of 84.

Since its founding in 1957 and for most of its 40 year history, DEC was considered one of the great innovative success stories. At its inception, DEC became the first computer company to be funded primarily with venture capital money.  A $70,000 investment by American Research and Development Corporation (AR&D) allowed Olsen and his two partners to begin operations in a Civil War era textile mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.

Their business plan was remarkably simple. The fledgling company outlined a two-phase road to profitability. The first phase involved manufacturing computer modules which were simply a selection of independent electronic circuits that were packaged into a circuit board needed at the time for basic functionality of computers. If the company could successfully execute the first phase and...