Yahoo! is planning to shut down Brickhouse, the business unit I loved then and home to cool innovations like Yahoo! Pipes and FireEagle. Sad news, I always thought this to be an interesting innovation environment (think Allen curve , i.e. avoiding “the exponential drop of frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases.”). Well, enhancing collaboration and spreading of ideas will benefit from IT collaboration infrastructure, yet having functional areas designed into innovative work environments remains a good idea in my book.

Meanwhile Procter & Gamble and Google are doing a job-exchange program, where employees from the two companies spend weeks in each other’s staff training programs and meetings at the other company. Nice idea, this friendly (and cost-effective) consulting by people working in similar fields without being direct competitors (learning in best practices programs might achieve the same but is probably less flexible and somehow so old-school). And Clay Christensen argues in an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Martha Mangelsdorf (“How Hard Times Can Drive Innovation“) that the economic downturn will have a positive effect on the environment for innovation:

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend. And, statistically, 93% of all innovations that ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you’ll get it right the first time out of the gate is very low.

So, if you give people a lot of money, it gives them the privilege of pursuing the wrong strategy for a very long time. In an environment where you’ve got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you’ll be successful is actually much higher.

Time to Rethink Strategy? Here’s an Urgent Memo to the CEO by Paul Branstad, Bill Jackson, and Shumeet Banerji on how corporate leaders can move aggressively to seize new opportunities:

we are [...] entering a period during which the value of being able to act strategically and decisively for the long term will increase enormously. Preparing for this moment of opportunity is of paramount importance for your businesses’ position for years to come

Reasons for this include a lack of experience with radical innovation projects at senior levels, a growing mismatch between R&D productivity and cost, and a disparity between how long innovation takes and the immediate demands for ROIs. Added to this are common excuses used to stonewall innovation, from the ever faithful tyranny of current strategy (“it’s not core”), to arbitrary financial hurdles (“it’s not worth our time”). Even if your innovation manages to navigate this minefield, it often receives the coup de grace from internal politics or simple fear.

Jeff Bezos talks about innovating under constraints, customer needs and fear of failure:

Amazon.com’s founder discusses his approach to innovation – both how to do it and how to stay focused when critics question high-risk projects

Via the Complexity and Social Networks Blog I learned of “Design and the Elastic Mind“, an exhibition at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. Impressive website, check it out, especially if you’re into neologisms (anyone care for Existenzmaximum XMX?) . Here’s the abstract:

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration (sic!). Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

OK, now back to business where Yahoo! has refused to Microsofts charms, we’ll see how this turns out for them, take a look at the cheat sheet to the aftermath. There’s no doubt that Yahoo! needs to (but maybe can’t …) unwind some innovative ideas soon to validate this decision. Maybe more “elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration” is needed …

So Microsoft and Yahoo are at it again. Speculation is running wild on whether the deal, that some have valued at $50 billion, will actually go down. But if it does, will a Microsoft and Yahoo marriage go down in flames ala AOL and Time Warner? Or is this the start of beautiful relationship filled with harmonious synergies?

But Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research says it best:

[...] First, we don’t discuss rumors. Sure it’s fun to speculate but in particular, this is a rumor we’ve heard before. [...] Like most things, the details are what matters in something like this and details are the one thing most folks seem to be short on. When and if something happens, we’ll have a lot more to say. Could a deal make sense? Sure, under the right circumstances but it could also be a mess as well. Stay tuned.

Next topic please …

Zusammenfassend kann man sagen, dass Yahoo! mit Pipes ein großer Wurf gelungen ist, der zeigt, was uns die Zukunft im Web noch alles bringen wird. Bisher waren Mashups ja nur was für Script-Hacker. Aber mit Pipes können eigene Web-Dienste ins Leben gerufen werden, die sich zahlreicher Feeds und etablierter Dienste bedient und damit neue Sichten auf Vorhandenes liefern wird. Und ich denke auch, daß damit erst der Anfang gemacht ist und wir in Zukunft noch viele weitere Dienste sehen werden, die sich an dem Yahoo Dienst messen werden.

Golem eher nüchtern … aber mit interessanter Diskussion, bspw. hier:

Yahoo! schafft sich damit wieder ein besseres Image bei den Web-Entwicklern und erhofft sich indirekt eine größere Verwendung der Yahoo Developer Resources (http://developer.yahoo.com/)

Ist sicher nicht falsch, in letzter Zeit hatte Yahoo! eher eine schlechte Presse, zum einen natürlich business-seitig (“spread like peanut butter”), wohl aber auch bei Entwicklern, die große Würfe vermissten. Das könnte sich mit dem heutigen Tag geändert haben und Einträge wie dieser oder dieser sind sicher Balsam auf die Seelen vieler Yahoo!-Leute (nicht wahr Dan?)

In the coming months Yahoo! will formally launch a new idea incubator called Brickhouse, which the company says is meant to give “intrepreneurs” at Yahoo! a chance to turn their great ideas into actual prototypes and products.

And yes, Yahoo! can do amazing stuff …

Yahoo! is transitioning from being a closed-doors ecosystem to an open, developer-friendly, community-based company. It is breaking down the pyramid by eliminating differences between the minority of people – the apex of the pyramid – who create and deliver content, and the bottom of the pyramid – the majority of people who consume the content. Understanding the motivations behind online communalism, the company is exposing their data through their API for various products such as Flickr, delicious, MyWeb, Yahoo! Answers and Upcoming. Many of its executives are beginning to blog. So, why has Yahoo! decided to open up?

Neben einer kurzen Einführung in Ziele und Aufgaben des Yahoo! Developer Networks einige Dinge zum Innovationsmanagement bei Yahoo!, zur Innovationskultur (angeklungen u.a. bei den Beispielen vom Hack Day) und zum weiteren Umfeld von Geschäftsmodellinnovationen:

Mitgenommen habe ich in erster Linie zwei Dinge,
1. Yahoo! kann in das Yahoo! vor dem Flickr-Kauf und danach unterschieden werden (die Akquisition hat der Company einen Schub in Richtung Social Software und Web 2.0 gegeben …)

Interessanter Punkt, gerade in Bezug auf das Innovationsmanagement, hier hat das prima geklappt, Innovationssteigerung durch Zukauf einer kleinen innovativen Firma. Sicherlich spielt hier aber eine Rolle, dass Yahoo! selbst noch eine junge Firma ist und die Abstoßungsmechanismen einer etablierten, erfolgreichen und etwas älteren Firma noch nicht wirken.

2. Neues Wissen rund um die technologischen Hintergründe von Mashups etc.

Da meine eigenen Programmiererfahrungen nun doch lange zurückliegen war das sehr interessant. Merken kann man sich, dass es heute einfacher geworden ist auf der Server-Seite mehrere verschiedene Formate zu unterstützen, d.h. es werden APIs für große , leistungsfähige (Enterprise-)Applikationen genauso möglich wie APIs für kleine, schnelle leichtgewichtige Mashups.

Interessant war auf jeden Fall ein Einblick in die Mechanismen der Entwicklung bei Yahoo!, etwas flapsig formuliert könnte man sagen “man probiert mal vieles aus, spielt, schaut was die Leute nutzen, …” und verfeinert dann u.U. zu “richtigen” Applikationen (ähnlich auch bei den/dem zugehörigen Geschäftsmodell). Yahoos Innovationsprozesse legen so viel Gewicht auf der Förderung serendipidärer, unerwarteter, und eben auch unplanbarer Innovation, auch weil die einzelnen Divisions verteilt und (relativ) unabhängig arbeiten.

Dazu wüsste ich natürlich gerne mehr, insbesondere ob und wie Synergien innerhalb der Firma gefördert werden, inwiefern Yahoo! einen Masterplan im Hinblick auf die verfolgten Geschäftsmodelle bzw. Mashups und Applikationen hat (ein bisschen ist so etwas angeklungen, so in etwa Silent Commerce, aber genaueres leider nicht) und ob und wie Geschäftsmodellinnovationen bei Yahoo! methodisch unterstützt werden …

Read more at Wired

You get YME by starting a trial subscription, and you keep the program if you bail from the service. YME might seem like just another desktop media player, but this program and its development staff remind me of early Winamp products more than anything since those bygone days. In fact the lead developer, Ian Rogers, helped build Winamp. Ian is running the plug-in development and download community with the same gonzo insouciance that characterized Nullsoft.

At the YME Plugins Site (the official unofficial Yahoo! Music Engine plugins site), the plugin development work that has been in progress since March is presented .

The range of enhancements available for this brand new client is astonishing, and the freelance developers haven’t even gotten started yet. Video playback. Multi-room synchornization in the home. Podcast fluency, including spidering and slurping. Smart(er) playlisting. Slideshows. Line-in recording. Unix command lines. New and slick library interfaces. Alternate mini modes [...] Yahoo! Search plug-in. An alarm clock [...] RSS playlist feeds (I mentioned this one yesterday). Library graphical data mining. Web browsing within YME [and on and on].

Brad Hill has got it right:

It’s nearly unbelievable. A major media company releasing an open-platform product in a high-stakes indsutry, developed by a team that seems to be operating with an eye-popping degree of autonomy and personality.