Innovation market most innovative of 2008

You can imagine how thrilled my team and I were when we discovered that FinExtra, in its newly launched Innovation Showcase, has decided that our Innovation Market was one of the most innovative developments in financial services in 2008.

At a future time, I'll write a more comprehensive post about Innovation Market, much more detailed than the one where I leaked it. It wasn't really a leak, of course, and I use that term for dramatic effect. We actually told everyone about it a month or two before at the Financial Innovation Awards, where it won Most Innovative IT Project.

Innovation Market isn't really about IT, of course. Its about people, and motivating them to do innovation without relying on a core team to do things for them. As long as you have a central function that does innovation, your capacity to try new things will necessarily be limited by budgets and bandwidth. With thousands of new ideas arriving every month, there was no way my team and I were ever going to be able to do everything that we wanted.

Innovation Market, we hope, will change that. What we're trying to achieve is the set of circumstances that will empower people with the ideas to implement them themselves.

So far, it appears to be working.

Comments

[Colin Henderson]

Congratulations James and the team!

[Prashanth Bhat]

Congratulations james. just wondering if adam smith's invisible hand works in the case of ideas ? what's good for individual ultimately is good for the society at large. but as we know people tend to have a heard mentality, my friend spending his beans on a popular idea may influence me too to buy that idea. how do you statistically make sure that good ideas always get to the top, because seeing it work is a better measure of success right ?

[Neil Robinson]

Great news for you James. Well done to your team, too.

These are challenging times and to be recognised publicly for doing something so positive can only help cement your team's position within the banking infrastructure.

Keep your steady course, we out in the wider blogosphere admire your efforts.

[James Gardner]

Neil: Thanks for your kind words. I really appreciate them.

Prashanth: we definitely see herd mentality at work in ideas. We do score ideas independently of what the crowd thinks, but ultimately, the ideas that the crowd likes are the ones that are most likely to get implemented. A great idea that we can't implement (for whatever reason) is not much use, even if is genius. We see that a lot, actually. Really, truly, inspirational things which just are never going to go anywhere. That's the life of an innovator, unfortunately.

[Jean-Pierre Batier]

hello from France,
I'm not let's say completly fluent in english but i wanted to tell you that make a great job on this blog and congratulations. Beside that i wish you the best for THE book.

concerning that post i did not completely understand how the innovation market works. A part of it seems close from the "nosco idea-exchange" but your process seems much "deeper" (by including 1 selection before the stockmarket) and by rewarding people working on the ideas (how ?).

Is there somewhere a white paper or presentation of this process saying more than your post "introducing innovation market"?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

[Photography Dissertation]

Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!