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Have a read of the excellent discussion going on around whether or not Open Innovation is actually “over”. Read here.
The Year in Innovation – from Business Week
The innovation industry took a hit this year, as executives dialed back on initiatives—and paid the price. But some encouraging trends also emerged
By Michael Arndt
In 2009 the world was no longer flat; much of it was flat broke. Deflated by slumping sales and income, companies roundly did what innovation consultants say they never should—they cut spending on research and development. The U.S. drug industry, historically one of the most lavish spenders on research and development, announced the elimination of a record 69,000 jobs this year, up 60% from 2008. At many companies, quick hits and line extensions replaced more costly, though potentially more rewarding, investments in game-changing inventions. Read complete story.
CNN reports that the US patent Office has come out saying tht U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years as the recession cut into budgets, and costs to protect inventions rose.
The number of patent filings in the United States fell 2.3% in 2009 to 485,500 from 496,886 last year, according to a preliminary estimate by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That makes 2009 the first year since 1996 in which businesses and inventors filed fewer patents year over year.
“That’s unfortunate because [patent filings] are a reflection of innovation,” said David Kappos, director of the Patent Office. “Innovation creates so many jobs and so much opportunity for our country. It is absolutely key to our long-term success in the global economy.”
At the same time, U.S. patents issued to inventors and businesses in foreign nations jumped 6.3% for the year. That’s a worry for Silicon Valley, which has been a global leader for decades.
Most blame the recession for the drop in U.S. filings. As a result, many companies are opting to hold off on bringing new ideas to market until the economy improves substantially.
“Our patent filings were down 25% this year, and it was a direct macroeconomic issue,” said Joe FitzGerald, deputy general counsel for tech security firm Symantec. “The overall company reduced spending, and patent filings are a very controllable expense. We might have filed four patents, but we filed three and made sure they were strategically significant.”
Excellent paper from Harvard on the paradigm shift from closed to open innovation. Points made include the following. Full text here.
- When it is technologically feasible, the transition from closed producer innovation or single user innovation to open single user or open collaborative innovation is desirable in terms of social welfare and is worthy of support by policymakers.
- Free dissemination of innovation designs is associated with the open model. Open innovation generates innovation without exclusivity or monopoly, and so should improve social welfare, other things being equal.
- Intellectual property rights grants can be used as the basis for licenses that help keep innovation open as well as closed.
- Policymakers should seek out and eliminate points of conflict between present intellectual property policies designed to support closed innovation that at the same time inadvertently interfere with open innovation.
- As design costs fall, many more innovations will originate with single users.
- Open collaborative innovation projects thrive on low communication costs.
If you are new to open innovation, have a look at the following video. The music becomes a little tedious, but it is a great place to start.
Great article about how Bangalore’s innovation capability is accelerating. Key points as follows:
- Google’s Map Maker, Intel’s six-core Xeon processor, Microsoft’s search engine Bing and HP’s Dynamic Smart Cooling Technology have all been designed or have key components built in the city. IBM and Microsoft have tens of thousands of employees based in Bangalore. Cisco is developing next-gen intelligent networking technologies in the city.
- About 60 per cent of the country’s R&D talent is based in Bangalore. Many of the nearly 700 India-based captive multinational R&D centres are located in the city. That is not counting the R&D outsourced to large Indian software companies such as Wipro Ltd and Infosys Technologies, both headquartered in the tech hub.
- 3M, General Electric and Honeywell see a 15 to 20 per cent revenue growth in the Asia-Pacific geographies in the next three to five years
- The swing to greater research happened a couple of years ago when Cisco set up its globalisation centre in Bangalore, making the city virtually its second headquarters outside its base in Silicon Valley. In an unprecedented move, the company then relocated its number two executive, the Dutch-born Wim Elfrink to Bangalore. Companies like Cisco and Nokia are not just shifting R&D to India, they are also shifting R&D management to India and that is the game-changer, says Navi Radjou, executive director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
- Costs in Bangalore are still comparable to other global R&D centres such as Shanghai in China, the Ukraine and Russia. An analysis of cost per fulltime R&D employee in Bangalore and Shanghai showed Bangalore holding a 15 to 17 per cent cost advantage.
The Strategy Group consults on the process of Innovation, Collaboration and Globalization.
We deliver end-to-end value from thought leadership to implementation in these leading edge arenas. It’s all about the “how”.
It is very interesting to see company after company add innovation programs to their agendas. I don’t mean paying lip service to innovation – I mean really meaningful programs. We all know the success of P&G’s programs, and following them many companies have embraced “programs” around innovation – most of which have been successful.
Pitney Bowes is one such company. It believes that innovation is core to how they build the creative and financial capacity to invest in new market opportunities and new ways to deliver products and services. That’s why they’ve chosen to increase our innovation spending in this economic downturn. In 2008, Pitney Bowes generated just under US$900 million in free cash flow on $6.3 billion in sales. As it became clear that a recession was coming, and that it was going to be deep and potentially long, they realized they had the financial capacity to continue to invest in the business. They saw the recession as an opportunity to increase our innovation investment as a percentage of revenue so that we could be even better positioned to take advantage of market opportunities.
It will be fascinating to see how the return on investment of many of these programs turns out. Especially those investments made in the midst of a downturn. My guess is that they will be game-changing for most, successful for others, and will fail for a very few. Culture change, which goes hand-in-hand with innovation, is a catalyst for “turning the titanic” at any time.
A new report from Grant Thornton International Ltd reveals that customers and in-house R&D teams are now the leading source of innovation for U.S. businesses, while globally customers are an organization’s best source of innovation. When asked to name the origin of the best innovation ideas, U.S. business owners named customers (37%) and in house R&D teams (37%) as their leading sources of innovations followed by heads of business units (34%) and employees (32%). Globally, 41 percent of businesses say that customers are their leading source for innovation.
“In recent history the tech boom and the creation of internet social networking sites brought innovation and entrepreneurship into every American home,” said Harris Smith, Grant Thornton LLP’s managing partner for Private Equity and the Audit practice leader of the firm’s Southern California offices. “Without entrepreneurs and innovation, America couldn’t thrive.”
Regionally the report reveals that in Asia Pacific customer focus is a particular source of innovative ideas and products with nearly half of businesses (48%) citing customers as the source of the best innovative ideas, compared with 40 percent in Western Europe and 35 percent in North America.
In addition, more than three in four businesses globally (78%) believe that the U.S. is the easiest country to create innovative products, services and business. The U.S. is the clear leader in this, with the next highest countries being China (22%), India (22%) and the U.K. (21%). Regionally, the U.S. is also seen as the leading country with 77 percent of Asian-Pacific businesses, 84 percent of North American businesses and 71 percent of European businesses saying it is the easiest country to create innovative products, services and business in.
“With the history of innovation in the U.S. spanning from the country’s earliest beginnings, it’s not hard to understand why businesses around the globe see America as the land of innovation,” said Smith.
To read the full Grant Thornton International global innovation report, Innovation: the key to future success?, or the North American, European or Asia-Pacific regional innovation reports, please go here.
More buzzwords? Policy 2.0? Well, its all about breaking down the barriers and enhancing collaboration. Hope Street Group believes that new online collaboration tools have an important role to play in surfacing new ideas and voices to make a positive difference on many issues, including teacher effectiveness. To that end, this summer Hope Street Group launched a virtual education policy team using Policy 2.0, their collaborative web platform. They recruited a diverse policy team of educators and professionals from the private and civic sectors across 17 states. Through an in-depth process of discovery and research over three months, the policy team devised targeted recommendations for improving teacher evaluation systems. Policy 2.0 allowed for connectivity between busy practitioners from across the country to a library of resources, to national experts, and to each other, through a tool that gave them a unique platform for engaging in education policy, with far-reaching implications.
They then documented their findings and took it to the White House.
Booze&Co has released it’s report on global innovation, and it’s certainly interesting. Download it here. Some points worth noting:
- In 2007, the top 80 U.S. corporate R&D spenders deployed an estimated US$80.1 billion of their $146 billion R&D funds overseas. The top 50 European companies spent $51.4 billion of their $117 billion total outside the continent. In Japan, the top 43 Japanese firms exported $40.4 billion of their total $71.6 billion to other countries
- Companies that invest wisely in a multinational innovation footprint are gaining far better returns on their R&D investment than companies that exclusively keep their laboratories at home
- Booze Allen identified the 1,000 public corporations worldwide that spend the most on researching and developing products and services for their marketplaces. Those 1,000 companies spent a total of $492 billion in 2007 on R&D, a 10 percent increase over the prior year, and, once again, they found no statistically significant evidence that higher levels of spending guarantee better results.
- Between 2004 and 2007, global multinationals increased their total R&D sites by 6 percent, and of those new sites, 83 percent were in China and India. They also increased R&D staff by 22 percent; 91 percent of that increase was in China and India.
- Cost reduction is not the most important of the several reasons that multinationals are moving their R&D facilities abroad. Furthermore, it is receding in significance.
- Many companies are heading overseas in search of access to the burgeoning numbers of talented engineers and scientists around the world, and to the ideas that they are generating
- Global companies are learning quickly that specific countries are gaining specific skills (automotive engineering in India, electronics in China), and they are chasing that talent accordingly
- As companies sell their products and services in markets around the world, they find it valuable to site R&D closer to those growing markets
- Overall, their analysis suggests that companies taking a more aggressive posture in globalizing their R&D footprint enjoy stronger sustained financial performance. Of the 184 top spenders that they studied closely, those that deployed more than 60 percent of their R&D outside their home countries tended to perform better, over the past three years, on several performance indicators, including operating margin, total shareholder return, market cap growth, and return on assets. These results
indicate that for these companies there is a payoff from greater deployment of capabilities and capacity on a global scale, and greater success in serving local market
needs
Booze&Co’s top innovation 20
Great example of the intersection of design, innovation and crowdsourcing on a national scale! Australia’s highest circulating advertising and marketing magazine B&T and crowdsourcing firm DesignBay are launching a competition to find a logo and tagline that could represent Brand Australia. It’s national branding on steroids. See brief here.
The competition is in response to the Australian Government’s recent announcement that it is looking for an agency to develop a new brand identity to embody Australia in the 21st century. The government through the Australian Trade Commission has set aside a budget of $20 million over four years to promote Brand Australia internationally.
The B&T/DesignBay competition, which is open to anyone anywhere in the world, will run over two weeks, with the winners and short-listed entrants announced in B&T magazine in November. The winning entry will receive a $2000 prize, with cash prizes also given to second and third-placed entrants.
A public vote together with the expert opinions of industry professionals and those of B&T’s editorial team and DesignBay staff will decide the winning entry.
Visit www.designbay.com/brand-australia-contest and complete the free registration process where a brief can be found. Anyone wishing to view the entries as they come in can do so at the same URL. The competition is open from 4pm on October 13, 2009, closing at 5pm on October 29, 2009.
B&T editor Tim Addington said: “We wanted to cast the net as wide as possible to get a fresh perspective on what a brand identity for Australia might look like in 2009, and which captures the essence of the nation as a great place for living, education, business, manufacturing and investment.”
DesignBay founder Alec Lynch said: “Australia’s brand is important. We want to find the best logo and tagline ideas that Australia’s creative talent and the world can come up with and we’re going to offer them, for free, to the government. We want to give people the opportunity to contribute to Australia’s brand and we want Australia’s brand to be the best it can be.”
I want to alert you to an recent excellent report on the “how” of Open Innovation. The report is a product of two years work within the Cambridge Open Innovation Network. This network is funded by Unilever and the Cambridge Integrated Knowledge Centre. The report aims to answer the question “I want to implement Open Innovation – where should I start and what should I do?”. It provides and overview of existing approaches to Open Innovation and outlines how a company can start to implement a strategy to match the organisation’s needs.
Unilever has been a long-standing proponent of Open Innovation. Not only does this report talk about the theory of Open Innovation, but it draws on Unilever’s experience, and contains the results of 36 interviews and workshops.
An excellent document. Download it now.
Excellent articles worth reading. The first talks about how we measure innovation. Always a difficult topic. Can innovation be measured? “Yes, yes and Yes” sites the author. McKinsey argues that innovation impact can be measured, and even provides some metrics.
The second article talks about the potential need for a national strategy on Innovation. To quote:
With a national strategy, as well as efforts to seed creative chaos from the bottom up, the Obama administration could put America on the right path for the long term. Unleashing, channeling, and connecting millions of innovative minds across all regions, all disciplines, and all walks of life is the most important form of long-term stimulus the president can provide. It is the key to nurturing our national coral reef.
You know, and I know, that without the right culture of innovation in an organization, the push to become more innovative will undoubtedly fail. You have seen this happen, and so have I. But building a successful culture of innovation is very difficult – only a few companies have been successful where many have failed.
With the release of the Nano, the Tata group has recently been in the “innovation spotlight”. I love what Tata has done in terms of really disruptive innovation – very few companies would have the audacity to attempt what they have. And it turns out that the culture of innovation at Tata is one of their many strengths.
Today Frost & Sullivan reports that online collaboration is proving to be an effective way for businesses to save time and money on travel, while maintaining high level of productivity. The arising trend indicates that companies who discovered the advantages of online collaboration are unlikely to return to old ways of conducting business when the economic conditions improve. In addition, collaborating on the web improves the ‘green’ image of companies, as more firms are looking into ways to reduce the usage of limited resources, and are striving to become environmentally conscious.
The question in my mind is: is everyone “really” collaborating? By what measure? To what effect?
At a recent course I ran on Connected Innovation, i took a “hands up” poll. There were twenty people in the room. I asked only two questions. The first was “How many of you work for organizations where the mantra is “collaborate” and the CEO talks about how collaborative the organization is?”. Almost twenty people put up their hand.
I then asked: “And how many of you feel that you really are collaborating with your peers, sharing, and effectively solving problems together?”. Only TWO put up their hands!
We jump very quickly from “Let’s collaborate” to the technology of “collaboration”. But we ignore the governance models that are essential for true collaboration. Without these models, the use of technology is probably 50% effective, at best.
Its is really interesting to see the press coverage China is receiving in the Innovation space. In this article from Forbes, the following statement is made:
“My hunch says that in the future anything that has to do with scale will likely come out of China or even India.”
Other points are:
- If you combine the mobile access, people getting into the system, and the database 51Job has for employment opportunities, the numbers of the largest player in Japan or Monster.com look like peanuts.
- What is the one core competence that China has which will drive innovation? One answer is scale.
- I think that there will be some cleantech deployments that China might experience earlier and faster. Wind power is certainly one, as is the use of LED lights to reduce energy requirements. That may lead to innovation
There is a huge amount of activity taking place in China with respect to Innovation – especially Open Innovation. See other entries on this blog.
You should read the entire article from Forbes.
It’s very interesting to see the number of governments focussing on Government 2.0. Its refreshing really – policy makers stopping to think about how the recent trends in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing can impact the way policy is defined. In my own country, the government has set up a specific Gov 2.0 committee. In the US, the talk is around openness and collaboration. It will be extremely interesting to see where this debate takes us, and whether an true Open Innovation approach can be adopted. To quote a recent Forbes article on this topic:
The White House is telling its agencies to pursue an ” open innovation“-approach to government, be visionary in their spending requests, and focus on “transformative” projects that help the climate, energy, life expectancy and the economy.
Worth watching this interesting and short video from Guy Kawasaki. Always entertaining.
Excellent discussion on Innovation from McKinsey.
Robert Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and Iqbal Quadir, founder of MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, debate where innovation is moving in the 21st century. At the same time, McKinsey’s Jonathan Bays and Paul Jansendescribe the use of prizes as a way to spur solutions to intractable problems, while Peter Diamandis, founder of the X PRIZE Foundation, shares his perspective on the same subject in an audio interview. There’s much more, including an excerpt from Richard Florida’s newest book, Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
Netflix uses crowdsourcing to boost growth. Another excellent example of harnessing the ecosystem for innovation. Read more.
Innovation and technology will be key to emergence from the global economic crisis, according to speakers at a recent United Nations conference on innovation-based competitiveness. However, innovation should be collaborative and involve resources inside and outside companies and institutions.
The “International Conference on Technological Readiness for Innovation-based Competitiveness” was organised by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) on 29-30 June. Read more…
During a recent conference at the Mack Center for Technological Innovation, academics and business leaders argued that, rather than going back to the drawing board, companies should go outside their walls and tap into “innovation networks.” Read more….
Rising expectation in the emerging economies of Asia is poised to prompt a surge in demand and a wave of innovation in healthcare. “This is a huge opportunity for forward-thinking companies,” Helmut Schuhsler, Managing Partner of TVM Capital, told delegates at the recent Science|Business conference, The Innovation Economy. Read more…
Just posted on BusinessWeek – an interesting article on four rules for managing innovation today. Interesting to know what you think of these. I will deliver the headlines with my own view below:
Silos are FINALLY falling (but not in the way you may think: Personally, I do not think silos are falling to any significant extent. I think they need to fall, and I believe that everyone generally realizes this, but silos are unfortunately alive and thriving in large corporates and medium-sized businesses.
Outside-in innovation: Well, my view is that without this you are dead-in-the-water. Why? Because outside-in innovation includes basics like listening to the customer, involving your partners in the process, taking heed of the environment. The days of everyone locked in a room “innovating” are gone.
Social Media as an Innovation Tool: Everyone is struggling with this – mainly because social media is still not alive and well in the Enterprise. But it will be. Give it time! In the meantime, organizations should look to embrace social media as much as possible, and you certainly need to become familiar with it outside the organization, and look for ways in which social media can be used TODAY to drive innovation.
War Games: Well, to me this is guerrilla marketing 101 – keeping ahead of the competition, keeping your finger on the pulse, etc etc. Nothing new here, and not a capability that I would call a “new rule” for innovation.
What do you think?
As I was running on the treadmill this morning, I found myself watching a television advertisement for an Open Innovation competition from Smith’s Snack Foods (in this country the equivalent of Frito-Lay – we all grew up with Smith’s! Indeed, Smith’s Snack Food is owned by PepsiCo). I find this an excellent example of Open Innovation – the contest is for any consumer to come up with the flavour for the next range of chips. There is about two months to go to submit a catch-phrase together with a “creative image”.
What I really like about this venture from Smith’s is the following:
- The competition is backed up by a very meaningful financial incentive – the winner gets $30,000 in cash PLUS 1% of the sales revenue of the brand. Very motivating.
- The website design is excellent – smart, refreshing, web 2.0-like, and inviting. You are not disappointed when you land at the site.
- The campaign is backed up by significant media advertising and exposure. Not only is there paid advertising, but tonight one of Australia’s most popular current affairs shows – A Current Affair – is doing a segment on this campaign. So the marketeers at Smith’s are very smart – they are looking to get this campaign as much publicity as possible.
- The top four flavors will be chosen by a panel of judges, and then these flavors will be put to the public for voting. Just excellent. A combination of seeking the solution to a problem from the consumer, and then involving the consumer in the voting process
- Each week the twenty five most interesting entries will be posted for public discussion. This really will generate ongoing interest in the competition
The ingredients for success (no pun intended) of this promotion are certainly there – Open Innovation, financial reward, clever marketing, ongoing excitement, crowd sourcing in the voting process – and even a pilot trial of the top four contenders.
I will certainly be watching the outcomes from this promotion with great interest.
The upcoming i2i conference at the United Nations on June 8 and 9 will focus on Open Innovation, collaboration and incentivized competition. Great line up of speakers. Keynote address by Ban Ki-moon. Here is the program.
This is truly an excellent example of the intersection of Open Innovation, globalization and technology. I saw it in a SpringWise, a publication reporting on new business ideas. This is a new project that aims to bring income opportunities to those in the developing world using the ubiquitous mobile phone.
Targeting the more than 2 billion literate mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, txteagle aims to help alleviate high unemployment levels in many rural areas of countries like Kenya with a crowdsourcing approach that offers new ways to earn extra money. The service connects corporations with small tasks to be completed—currently, the most common ones include software localization and translation into local dialects for companies like Nokia—and native people who can complete them in minutes by cell phone. Tasks are sent to multiple phone users by text message—”translate the phrase, ‘address book’ into Giriama,” for example—and answers are accepted as accurate when the majority of users provide the same response. Compensation is determined by the number of times an individual’s response agrees with the consensus; penalties are imposed for wrong answers, while “don’t know” responses make no contribution. Over time the system learns a particular user’s expertise, and can actively select the most appropriate tasks for them. It can also weight answers from long-term and historically accurate users higher than others, making it necessary to involve fewer other individuals when those users respond. Payment is made either to a bank account connected with an individual’s phone number—accessible at any post office or local kiosk—or via airtime credit transfers.
Case Study
Ruth & Betty, Home-Maker / Village Phone Operator, Butare, Rwanda. Ruth is the mother of four and while she reads and writes English fluently, she hasn’t been able to find much work in her local village. She’d like to own a phone, but hasn’t been able to save up the money. Betty operates a village phone in Ruth’s village. By ‘renting’ the phone to Ruth for 50 cents/hour during off-peak times when Betty has no other customers, Ruth is able to complete 3 hours of transcription tasks – accumulating $7.50 into her savings account and $1.50 into Betty’s account. A couple of more sessions like that and Ruth will be able to afford her own phone!
Open Innovation is an opportunity. It defines the potential for breaking down the barriers internally within an organization, and externally with that organization’s ecosystem.
In order to realize that potential, however, the entities in the ecosystem need to be connected. I call this Connected Innovation. Connected Innovation is what unlocks the potential of Open Innovation. However, connectedness in itself will deliver the result – its the frameworks that make Connected Innovation real that delivers the power. And technology delivers the scale.
This concept of connectedness has been reinforced just recently at the 3rd Annual Open Innovation Conference in Las Vegas when Jeff Bellairs, G-Win Director for General Mills, said: “Open Innovation is not about being external. It’s about being connected.” Jason Husk, Group Manager Technology Brokerage for Clorox, supported this stance and presented a relationship between technology, consumers, and business results as a model for connection. And Chris Thoen announced P&G’s launch of Connect + Develop 2.0 OI model through which the company will focus on collaborating with partners for mutual value creation.
Recent research undertaken by Computer Weekly in the US as part of a project with BT found that over 67% of respondents expect collaboration to become an important driver of innovation over the next 12 months. This is significant. 83% have sufficient budget to facilitate collaboration within the organisation, and 80% say the collaborative technologies being used have not been impacted by any budgetary changes affecting the wider IT infrastructure. This is also significant in light of the GFC.
In terms of the benefits collaboration brings to the organisation, 93% of respondents said better communication, 83% more effective staff, and 73% improved productivity. Faster innovation was cited by 70%, and lower costs by a similar number. In terms of how collaborative tools and techniques positively benefit innovation, 23% said saving time, 20% said collaboration enables the sharing of ideas, 17% said saving money or reducing costs, and 17% said sharing information over a wider area.
The challenge for these organizations is to build frameworks that allow collaboration to actively facilitate innovation. Most organizations continue to struggle with how to facilitate effective collaboration – just throwing in a bunch of tools usually does not work. It’s the building of frameworks such as Connected Innovation that provides the way forward.
Obama’s pick of the Chief Technology Officer for the USA looks promising from an innovation perspective:
“In choosing Aneesh Chopra to be federal chief technology officer, President Barack Obama tapped one of state government’s more innovative and energetic IT officials. The move, announced Saturday, offers more evidence that Obama is serious about using technology to change the way Washington works.”
…and…
“In Chopra, Obama picked a CTO with a track record of understanding both the power of innovation, and the relationship between technology, education and economic success. That’s not to say Chopra won’t be tested: The federal bureaucracy surely will try his patience. And crucial questions about the reporting relationships and synchronization among the Obama’s CIO, CTO and chief performance officer must be answered.”
Source www.govtech.com
Governments and private entities around the globs have long been struggling to keep healthcare delivery in step with the advances in technology that have occurred over the past years. Most visionaries realize that technology and connectedness are absolutely vital if we are to take healthcare delivery out of the dark ages into the 21st century. Recently the Obama administration has announced very significant funding for the healthcare industry, focussing specifically on the application of technology and the use of online medical records. Companies such as Microsoft and Google are leading the charge in the personal medical record race.
The Economist has just published a 14-page special on innovation, healthcare and technology. Makes for excellent reading. It’s tremendous that at least there is such a focus on how technology and innovation can be used to radically improve the delivery of services to an area that is so important to each of us – our health.
A new turn of phrase has been coined - trickle-up innovation. See the article in Businessweek. Not sure if we need a new catchphrase, but let’s see where it goes. Look also at this blog. My feeling is that this is a new term for something that has been around for a very long time.
However see the most recent story of the success of trickle up innovation from P&G.
