Manoj and I have worked together at Webify.  Many of the lessons we learned and ideas about how to bring innovations to market were developed at Webify, and are foundations of what we practice at techTribe and it was my pleasure to have him as our first interview for the book.

There are two ways to look at innovation. One is from a corporate point of view, the other from an individual point of view. At the corporate level I think it’s the ability to be able to either invent a new business process, product or service offering and the ability to commercialize the invention in a profitable manner. Many people think of innovation and invention as the same thing, but in my mind, innovation is the successful commercialization of an invention. The invention doesn’t have to be a technology or product invention, but can be a process or business model invention. That’s one approach at a corporate level.
 
At an individual level, it basically boils down to an ability to approach problems and market opportunities in new and different ways and do that successfully from the standpoint of getting the professional financial reward out of it. It’s trying new and different ways to solve problems or to capitalize on market opportunities.

The whole relationship network is a very important undercurrent.  If you look at innovation as a process, there are a couple of areas.  If you look at how innovative ideas come about, one is the area of identification or the germ of an idea that comes together, the aha moment.
 
The second is being able to take a particular notion and be able to get the right level of resources around it, the people resources and financial resources and most importantly being able to validate that particular concept against the market.
 
All of these require a heavy interaction with a set of people; the idea place you see that is in the generation or idea phase.
 
In 3M, most of the innovative products came about with people that were collaborating—the famous scotch guard: it fell on someone’s shoe and that portion of the shoe never got dirty, she started talking to her other colleagues, and they brought it out to market.
 
Being able to talk to each other, particularly in the area of Web 2.0 is key.
 
One of the reasons I believe Silicon Valley is as successful as it is is because of that whole informal network of people and relationships that are leveraged and can take an idea and, get the resources and the market validation.