Innovation drives the automotive industry today, spurring automakers and their suppliers to deliver differentiated products that increase performance, reliability, safety, and comfort.

By Mark E. Atkins, Chairman, President & CEO, Invention Machine

It’s estimated that up to 85 percent of all information is unstructured - data not stored in databases or indexed in document management systems - but exchanged via email and memos, in field reports and notes from call centers, in surveys and reports, in chats and wikis, in RSS feeds, social media, journals, presentations and Web pages.  Analysts such as Gartner expect this trend to continue, with the volume of data exploding by 800 percent over the next five years alone.

Capgemini Consulting and the IESE Business School recently released their annual global Innovation Leadership Study examining innovation management strategies at organizations around the world.

Over the weekend, in observation of Earth Day (celebrated globally in more than 175 countries), a flurry of articles and blog posts heralded eco-friendly innovation and green innovations ‘to watch’. However, many articles rightly pointed out the amount of lip service companies give to sustainability far exceeds the number of committed sustainability programs. One such article pointed out that, despite all the green talk,  ‘green innovations’ only make up 3% of global patents registered – one measure of innovation progress – and that companies being celebrated as top innovators (i.e. Apple) are far from tops when it comes to being ‘green’.

At his Strata keynote on the Big Data Imperative last month, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik revisited former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's now infamous 2002 statement:

One of the greatest challenges facing innovation and knowledge workers – those folks in your organization tasked with developing new products, finding new markets, and improving existing products – is accessing the information they need in order to solve problems and make decisions.

Real-time information and collaboration are key to innovation and growth, but poor decision-making environments are being cited as a critical barrier to growth by manufacturers across the globe.

Every year the Conference Board, a global research association, issues a CEO challenge survey asking hundreds of senior executives from around the world to identify and rank their most pressing concerns.

by Mark E. Atkins

In a move to stave off competition and “drum up interest in its shares, which are down about 4% this year”, last week Google announced that it will be adding semantic search technology to its popular keyword search system in the hopes of providing smarter, more relevant results to search queries.