It is late, nearly midnight, and I just returned from the The Economist  magazine's Innovation Award Ceremony, here in London, England. I am here because PMI is a co-sponsor of the event. Specifically, we sponsor the award on Innovation in Business Processes. It may surprise you, but the recipient of that award was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Interesting guy...he invented the third most sought after website in the world. Yet, the business model was to make a product from a not-for-profit organization. Yep, he runs a not-for-profit with an annual budget of $4 million USD. Remarkable innovation, considering it is now in 250 languages (all active languages) with more than 100,000 volunteers managing over 10 million articles.

What was so amazing about Jimmy Wales (other than the fact that he was born, raised and educated in Alabama, in the USA!) was that he is well known for innovation, yet he didn't invent technology. In fact, he himself admits he invented a new way to "socialize." He considers his creation of Wikipedia as a social network invention.  He could easily have won the Social and Economic Award tonight. Yet I think when most people think about innovation, they think about technology first: electric vehicles, mobile communications devices, cures for cancer, etc.

In fact, one of the most fantastic innovations ever was the micro-loan. Economist Muhammad Yunus came up with the idea of micro-credit in 1974, after giving a woman in the village of Jobra, Bangladesh, $27 from his own pocket to help her make bamboo furniture. Previously, women in a village like Jobra either had no access to capital or they had to pay usurious rates to local loan sharks. Realizing that poor women were actually excellent credit risks and that giving them small loans could transform an entire local economy, Yunus formed Grameen Bank in 1976 to institutionalize what he called micro-credit. The bank has now loaned more than $6 billion to more than 7 million borrowers, and Yunus took home a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in recognition of his innovative efforts

John Kao, the noted author and lecturer on innovation (Jamming: the Art and Discipline of Business Creativity; and Innovation Nation) spoke about this at the recent Forbes Magazine Leadership Network meeting in Palo Alto, California, in the USA. He stressed that innovation must go beyond technological constraints and consider all disciplines. He also stressed that innovation was about implementation (Go Project Management!). 

More importantly, he stressed that the next version of innovation ("game changing" innovation) needed to tackle what he called the list of "wicked problems," such as AIDS, climate change, energy independence, etc. To do so, he said we needed a really high-level strategic road map, one which only nations could develop, and in some cases, only leagues of nations. In other words, nations need to develop strategies that embraced innovation, specifically targeted at "wicked problems." The reason, John explained, was to ensure that we could take the "big bets" and the "very high risk" solutions to solve the problems. He said -- and I agree -- that the world has the creative talent and technology now to attack the wicked list of problems

Tonight, there were many examples of great innovation leaders that received awards. However, something different struck me during the program that related back to what John Kao said. More specifically, an individual and a company received awards that had several things in common. The individual was Matti Makkonen, creator of Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, while the company that received the award for a sustainable innovation culture was Nokia. The first thing that they had in common was that they both represent the telecommunications industry. In fact, Matti, after spending much of his career with Sonera (Formerly P&T, the telecom and postal authority of Finland), went to work for Nokia.

However, there is another important factor that they have in common: their home country of Finland. You see, Finland is a unique country in that they have a national strategy for innovation. John Kao repeatedly used Finland as an example of a nation that literally builds innovation into its culture, and they provide the policies and infrastructure to encourage companies and individuals alike to push the envelope of change. Remember too that it was Finland that "gave" (literally) the world a Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) in 1985, and empowered Nokia to go on and become the world's leading supplier of cellular communications devices producing more than 500 million handsets per year. UNBELIEVABLE!

Yes, we need innovation as a strategy, especially to tackle our problems. And we need Project Management to make sure that we deliver on this strategy. No one at the ceremony avoided the importance on execution of strategy and delivering the innovation.  And yet, I am both excited and worried at the same time. Will this financial crisis be the great global distraction that I mentioned before? There are already signs that projects are being pulled back and budgets cut. I hate to think that we will take our eye off the prize, focus on cost rather than value, and stop thinking about innovation...taking the low risk path. Do we have that much time to wait to solve the "wicked list" of global problems?

More tomorrow.