CNBC - The Business of Innovation

The week before last, I taped an appearance with CNBC on an upcoming prime time five part show, "The Business of Innovation," hosted by Maria Bartiromo.

The show is set to aiir, as I understand it, February 25th at 9pm EST March 4, at 9PM EST, and again at midnight. It will air in Europe and Asia subsequent to that. on March 1st.

I was part of a three person "panel of innovation experts" for the third part of the show. The first segments featured the insight of such folks as Vinod Khosla co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Cathleen Black, President of Hearst Magazines, and Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO of ING Direct.

After thinking about it for a a while, my thoughts that have resulted from doing the show are this:

• when it comes to innovation, there too many people limit their thinking to innovation as being 'all about new product'
  
• some people think that only 'special people' with 'special skills' can "do innovation."
  
• worse yet, some people who are "innovators" actually have attitudes that would, from my humble perspective, dissuade any common folk from even thinking about innovation
  
• the high velocity economy demands that every person in every organization be as innovative as heck
  

There's sort of a disconnect here, isn't there?

I told my wife after the taping that I'll either end up looking like a complete idiot, or a genius, or perhaps an idiotic genius. It will be interesting to watch.

The phrase that formed in my mind, both during and after the show, are that there are too many "innovation elitists" out there. And that's just quite wrong: I've often explained that innovation of any sort is set to fail, as soon as we make it special.

In any event, I'm sure that I'll be posting more on my thoughts on this closer to air date.