In his keynote address at the Innovation Conference organized by Yahoo! India R&D in Bangalore, Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief Scientist, Yahoo!, said there is no surefire recipe for innovation but yes, there are ingredients for innovation, namely insights, agility, talent, openness, design, leadership and scalable science.
Elaborating on some:
It’s even more relevant to be agile in today’s times considering the shortening of the attention span of the consumer. Agility ensures quicker and more robust insights into the market. Insights could be aided by understanding scalable sciences and user behavioral data. These days, science is not only about inventions but also the sharing of the scientific literature for others to build upon and come up with new market opportunities, Raghavan said.
Coming to the leadership aspect, Raghavan mentioned that while it’s crucial to assemble talent, the quality of talent makes a difference in most cases, as it’s said “one good engineer is worth a 100 ordinary”. It’s also important for leaders to remove obstacles to agility – whether it needs a congenial environment to enabling rapid product experiments or making tough decisions to stop stuff that doesn’t work.
The keynote also ventured into concepts like Long Tail, the web edition of the 6 degrees concept and understanding competition sociology – for instance, how retweeting can be a measure of influence.
Well, this sounds interesting, tips from Yahoo in public after so long~~
