In this podcast, Koulopoulos talks about the types of innovations we will see coming out of this recession, the CIOs role in building an innovation zone, the role social media will play in the innovation process, some of the ways to effectively measure innovation, and the use of smartsouring to describe the impact of technology on business.

Many business gurus consider relentless innovation to be the United States’ only remaining edge in a global marketplace marked by labor arbitrage and the competitive threats posed by exploding economies in China and elsewhere.

Tom Koulopoulos, the author of a new book, The Innovation Zone, and the founder of the Delphi Group, says, “While some progress is being made on the innovation front, too many U.S. companies still are underperforming when it comes to driving the type of sustained innovation needed to meet this competitive threat.
 
In his book, Koulopoulos demonstrates how organizations can create and sustain a culture of innovation.  Koulopoulos, who writes a blog called The Innovation Zone (http://www.tomkoulopoulos.com) says that if public and private organizations are serious about taking the lead in innovation and re-invigorating the marketplace and U.S. economy, they must move behind the hype of innovation and apply proven techniques and processes. His book provides a how-to-do blueprint for innovation process methods that organizations can put into practice. He says, “We need to stop singing innovation kumbaya and start delving into the practice and science of innovation.”

Koulopoulos’ insights about innovation have received wide praise from luminaries such as Peter Drucker, dee Hock, and Tom Peters who called Tom Koulopoulos' writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.”  According to Peter Drucker, Tom's writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”  He is also editor of the Delphi Report, a quarterly journal for business and technology leaders.

He sees signs that organizations are embedding innovation in their business practices, and that they have devoted both financial and staff resources to innovation. He says, “It’s surprising to me that more companies actually are putting people in positions of authority with respect to innovation. They are not necessarily new people; they are folks that are already on staff, but they also are carrying that [innovation] badge.”

Some of Tom Koulopoulos’s Innovation Zone Takeaways
 
Why Recession is an Opportune Time for Innovation

• There are more smart people out of work who will inevitably find themselves trying out ideas that may not have been embraced by their previous employers.
• Large companies that may have previously threatened start-ups by trampling on their innovative ideas are not preoccupied with larger issues of survival and tend to stay out of the way.
• Labor, office space, supplies – nearly everything you need to start a business – costs much less now.
• Technology has made it much easier for entrepreneurs to build a business and market their products or services.
• There are more unemployed individuals willing to take risks because they have nothing to lose.

Bio
Tom Koulopoulos is the founder of the Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based thought leadership firm providing advice on leading edge technologies to global 2000 organizations and government. He sold Delphi to Perot Systems in 2004 and today serves as managing director of a global innovation lab.
 
During the past two decades Tom Koulopoulos' works have introduced core industry concepts, frameworks, and vernacular that describe the impact of technology on business. These things include Single Point of Access, Touch Points, Digital Control Rooms, Business Operating Systems, Corporate IQ, Information Value Chains, and Smartsourcing.

InformationWeek named him one of the industry's most influential information management consultants. Koulopoulos’ insights on the implications of IT on global organizations frequently appear in national and international print and broadcast media, such as BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, CNBC, CNN and NPR.

Tom Koulopoulos' eight books include: Smartsourcing, Corporate Instinct, Smart Companies, Smart Tools, and The X-economy.

Tom Koulopoulos has also been an adjunct professor at the Boston College Wallace E. Carroll Graduate School of Management and a guest lecturer at the Boston University School of management and Harvard University. He is the former director of the Babson Center for Business Innovation.

Resources
Podcast -Tom Koulopoulos on Unemployment, Innovation & the PUMA Personal Transportation Vehicle from Segway & GM - The Wall Street Journal Online
Outsourcing According to Tom Koulopoulos - Wisconsin Technology Network
Architecture & Process keynote: Tom Koulopoulos

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Brian Scudamore talks about the transition to Web-based marketing, and the business benefit of using social media.

The Dr. Phil Show. The New York Times. Oprah. The media spotlight shines brightly on 1-800-Got-Junk?  and its 1,000  big blue shiny trucks. Since it started in 1989, 1-800-Got-Junk? has hauled way more than one million truckloads of refuse from home and businesses. In fact, 1-800-Got-Junk? has become one of the North America’s fastest growing companies with 335 franchise locations in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The recipe for 1-800-Got-Junk?’s success includes a touch of Horatio Alger, a dash of best practices from well-known companies much as McDonalds, a blue-ribbon workplace, and a blend of the right Web-based tools and technologies, including social media.

Originally known as The Rubbish Boys, Brian Scudamore,1-800-Got-Junk?’s
founder and CEO, rebranded the company in 1998 to take advantage of its e-commerce business model, called JunkNet. All of the booking and dispatching task of franchisees’ customer calls go through JunkNet, which acts as a central repository for customers’ information and histories, and manages company accounting functions.  A wireless interface built by 1-800-Got-Junk?’s IT department enables franchisees’ truck drivers to use their cell phones to view bookings in real time throughout the day. As a result, drivers can take on additional jobs.

Now 1-800-Got-Junk? is extending its Web-based reach to use social media to get its marketing message to potential customers, and prospective franchisees, as well as to keep in touch with current franchisees.

Bio
Brian Scudamore is the founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.  He started the company at the age of 18, after seeing an old junk hauling truck in a McDonald’s parking lot. He invested his $700 savings in a truck and started The Rubbish Boys. Ten years later, Scudamore changed the business name to 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and began to franchise as a way to expand operations rapidly across North America. Today, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has more than 335 franchise locations in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

A leading entrepreneur, Scudamore has received wide recognition in the North American media and business community. 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has been featured in over 3,000 news stories, including articles in Fortune Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Business Week, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Scudamore has appeared on Oprah, Dr. Phil Show, Rachael Ray, CNBC, and CNN. He also contributes a monthly column to PROFIT Magazine.

Resources
Entrepreneurial advice from Brian Scudamore - Evan Carmichael
Planning a Vivid Future: Brian Scudamore’s Key Move - www.startupnation.com
Of trash and treasure - The New York Times

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Hitz talks about why some companies succeed and others fail. He also discusses how powerful lessons often come from strange and unexpected places, such as a cattle ranch.

How to Castrate a Bull – Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business might seem like an unlikely title for a business book. But Dave Hitz drew from his ranch hand experience to take NetApp from a startup to a $3.3 billion network storage company. Hitz, a then college dropout who liked to solve puzzles, co-founded NetApp in 1992, along with two other colleagues. His book covers the hard lessons learned during the company’s major business cycles, including the dot.com bust.

It might be hard to believe that NetApp, one of the fastest growing technology companies, began as an idea scribbled on a napkin by Dave Hitz. Risk and ambition permeated the company in the early 1990s. NetApp gave birth to a new storage device category called the network filer. Revenues doubled every year until the company reached $1 billion in revenue in 2001. After the dot.com bust of 2001, NetApp’s revenues quickly declined to $800 million for fiscal 2002 and the stock fell from $150 a share to $6 a share. 

Hitz says, "We had designed NetApp for growth, and when the growth stopped, everything broke, but this time in a bad way.”  He says the company survived the crash because it had diversified its customer base, adding banks, telecom providers, and other enterprises and the federal government. These organizations helped to leverage the impact from the dotcom and tech companies that had provided the bulk of the company's revenues.  NetApp faced other challenges when it moved to direct sales from indirect sales, added support for Windows to a product line based on Unix, and embraced storage area networks when the company was totally focused on network-attached storage devices.

What does Hitz have to say about the current economic downturn?  “The current downturn is creating a similar attitude change. There are some hints in today's tech world that it is going to happen again. We might hear CIOs saying they aren’t going to build another data  center. This downturn will be the catalyst that leads to an even more heated market for data center virtualization and cloud computing.  With that in mind, now is not the time for grandiose plans. Customers are not thinking about grandiose right now. They want to hear about saving some money."

Today, NetApp ranks third in market capitalization in its industry, behind EMC and Seagate Technology and ahead of Western Digital, Brocade, and Quantum. In total revenue, NetApp ranks fourth behind EMC, Seagate, Western Digital. NetApp also has a long history of making “Best Place to Work” lists. For seven years in a row, NetApp has appeared on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

Bio
David Hitz is executive vice president of Net App where he oversees future strategy for the $3.3 billion network storage company.  In 1992 he, along with James Lau and Michael Malcolm, founded NetApp (originally called Network Appliance) with a desire to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking.  Before 1992, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, getting valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.

Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University. His first book is How to Castrate a Bull – Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business.

Resources
Who Wants to Be A Billionaire? - Entrepreneur
Preaching the Mantra of Keep it Simple - Computer Reseller News
How to Castrate a Bull Web Site

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis