Roo and Darren On Innovation

Yesterday, Roo and I went to New Place to talk to a group of IBMers about innovation. It was quite odd for us to be back at New Place, both of us had spent two days there in the olden days (1997 and 1998) for our IBM assessment center, to see if we were good enough to work here.

We found the easiest way to talk about innovation is just to give examples of how we work and projects that we’d worked on that we thought were cool. Picking User Generated Content as our theme we showed the trend going from user generated content to user generated applications (mashups) through to user generated universes (Second Life) and how projects we’ve worked on fitted in to these areas. We also talked about how we all have stuff that we’re interested in that we end up spending a lot of our personal time on and occasionally one of these ideas will take off and we can convert it into a proper funded IBM project. Also how we’re very much into trying things out and not worrying too much about if they’ll come off or not.

Of course, Roo’s Second Life demo stole the show. To people who haven’t seen it before, it’s something that always grabs their attention and Roo has become a real expert in explaining the idea and how it relates to IBM.