I spoke at an SAP offsite meeting today about web 2.0, community development, innovation and speed. I wish I had read this first. While there may be very innovative things that are going on today inside SAP, I made the point that we are not in the innovation business, we are in the commercialization business. It doesn’t matter how cool the thingamy is that you just created, what does matter is getting it into the hands of people who can use it for some productive purpose. I was excited to hear so much of the discussion about how we compress product cycles, roll out incremental updates that are non-disruptive, and capture collective external innovation just as critically as internal.

As such, businesses need to be architected to leverage the innovation of others. Certainly the multiple benefits – cost, innovation, wealth – standards and open-systems have made possible speak to the value of building businesses that are premised on the axiom of distributed innovation.

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