There are several societal and technology trends that are fundamentally changing the innovation landscape for many companies. This presentation provides one overview of trends that are affecting the software-intensive systems industry (SoftwareTrends.pdf). These trends form the backdrop for innovation initiatives of any organization. After close to a decade working on innovation in the software-intensive systems industry, I have seen and experienced a variety of approaches, ranging from top-down, strategy-driven to bottom-up, employee-driven innovation initiatives. The key trend in innovation, however, is the increasingly important role of open innovation initiatives where secrecy and not-invented-here make place for transparency and collaboration across organization boundaries.

Over the last year, I have actively worked on open innovation. Some of the results can be found in this presentation:

1. • Introducing Open Innovation at Intuit, chapter in A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing by Paul Sloane (editor) (Kogan Page, London), 2011.
   

2. • Building the 3rd pillar of Growth: Introducing Open Innovation at Intuit, Marcus Evans
     Conference on Open Innovation, April 2010.
   

For more information, see also the following links:

1. • Intuit Entrepreneur Day 2010
   

2. • Intuit’s crowdsourcing website www.intuitcollaboratory.com