Friday, November 18, 2011

The key to innovation: Open ears, and a nimble mind

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Today’s entrepreneurs are taking the “I” out of innovation, preferring to collaborate, especially with potential customers using social media, to move new ideas forward rather than going it alone.

Francy Wade
For Rising Star Francy Wade, director of InkHouse Public Relations in Waltham, innovation is finding ways to improve on the present. “InkHouse is constantly evolving and innovating the way we handle stories for clients,” she said. “Whether it’s social media, print, TV or radio, we consider each new story an opportunity for finding new and creative ways to spread the word.”
 

Mike Salguero
“We innovate in that we talk with hundreds of consumers and makers every week to get feedback and iterate our product towards that feedback,” Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder of CustomMade Ventures Corp. of Cambridge, told Mass High Tech. CustomMade is an online service to connect skilled makers with shoppers looking for custom home furnishings and other personalized items.

For Salguero and other young entrepreneurs, innovation is not necessarily the traditional light bulb idea in the inventor’s head that revolutionizes technology. It can be a more measured, and collaborative, advance.
“Innovation is the intersection of rigid consumer research and rapid iteration,” said Salguero, who is one of 15 “Rising Stars in Business” under age 30 named by the Boston Business Journal along with 15 “Tech All-Stars” named by Mass High Tech in 2011 who will be honored on Nov. 16 at the House of Blues in Boston. “I participate as a mentor in Mass Challenge, and I let everyone who I talk to know that innovation starts with an open mind and open ears.”


David Stone
Tech All-Star David Stone, co-founder and CEO of CashStar Inc., an e-gift card company in Portland, Maine, said innovation fundamentally changes markets, the way people work, play, communicate, live and produce, among other things. “CashStar is changing the world of gifting as we know it, from physical to digital,” he said. “Our mission is to allow a consumer or business executive to send a gift or incentive anytime, anywhere, in any amount from any device and have it arrive instantly with the best experience possible.”

While Stone says he learned from watching Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley marketing “guru” Regis McKenna, among others, he mostly found his own way in business, learning from the school of hard knocks. “I did learn a lot from others I worked for whose startups failed, and I learned so much about what not to do. It wouldn’t be right to mention them here though.”

Jeff Seibert
Rising Star Jeff Seibert, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Crashlytics, a software crash reporting system, said innovation is the creative exploration of solutions to a problem. “Almost every challenge people face has many solutions, many of which are often obvious. Few of those are often good. Innovation is the evaluation of the whole realm of possible solutions and the search for one that exemplifies the traits that the innovator seeks to focus on,” he said in an email.

In his case, those traits are simplicity and elegance. “My goal is for the product to be so ‘obvious’ that people can’t help but use it,” he said. Crashlytics looks at software crashes and tries to reveal exactly what happened in a way that is accessible to novice programmers. “We’ve then completely automated the solution so they have no work to do — they get an email alert when their app has crashed that tells them the exact line number of code they need to fix. I believe we’ve made great strides in innovating towards a simple and elegant solution, but we will always have a long way to go.”
 

Jennifer Camacho
Tech All-Star Jennifer Camacho, shareholder in Greenberg Traurig LLP, in Boston, notes that while the term “innovation” is often used synonymously with “invention,” as a patent lawyer, she views them from different perspectives. “I define innovation as the introduction of new ideas, methods, compositions, etc., that provide an economic benefit to those who implement them,” she said.

She cites several local entrepreneurs as inspirations, including George Church of Harvard, Joe Jacobson and Drew Endy of MIT, Samir Kaul of Khosla Ventures, and Brian Baynes of Flagship Ventures. She also serves as a mentor. “Over the past two years, I have been involved in MassChallenge as both a judge and mentor. As a mentor, I get to work with people who are entrepreneurs at heart, but who sometimes have not fully developed a compelling story for their new company. I help them focus their innovative spirit in a direction that will better define a competitive and economic advantage that will resonate with potential investors.”


Janelle Woods-McNish
Rising Star Janelle Woods-McNish, community relations specialist with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation, sees innovation as any action or item that brings new promise/better solutions. “Through the Harvard Pilgrim Foundation, I am able to witness innovation in many wonderful forms: cleaning, landscaping and painting a local school so that the students have a new and improved place to learn and play; strengthening bonds and skills between colleagues during a department-wide service day; or giving a grant that provides cultural competency training to a local health center so that they can better serve new populations,” she emailed. “I try to be innovative each day by looking at old problems in a new light.” Among other programs she cites as innovative, the foundation provides Mini-Grants, a program that lets each of its approximately 1,200 employees give $500 each year to an organization of their choice.


Steve Nash
For Rising Star Steve Nash, CEO of Boston Web Marketing, innovation is the betterment or refinement of an idea or process. “Specifically, a way to solve a deficiency through more effective means,” he wrote in an email. Like CashStar, his company aims to get more specific results for customers.

“Boston Web Marketing has taken a holistic approach to web marketing, combining expertise in search engine optimization, social media optimization, video optimization, blogging, social bookmarking, and listing sites,” he said. “Every client is assigned an account representative who does an in depth report on their current web presence, and that account rep then takes the deficiencies highlighted in that report and begins to eliminate them. We have taken the guessing for businesses out of the equation.” Tech All-Star Bobbie Carlton, founder of Carlton PR & Marketing and Mass Innovation Nights, which holds monthly product launch parties, said innovation isn’t limited to high tech. “Mass Innovation Nights are open to people with gourmet dog food, iPhone apps, Popsicle drip catchers, and even catnip cards,” she said. “There are different types of innovation, from brand new products to new ways of looking at things going to market.”