Where do you allow for crazy ideas in your company?

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|September 18, 2012

“The day before something is truly a break through, it’s a crazy idea,” says Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of XPRIZE Foundation. At XPrize, Diamandis is championing innovations in areas as diverse as robotics, life sciences, education and health care. What can you do in your company to create a similar culture of [...]

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Innovation, 5 monkeys, and SAS High-Performance Analytics

David Pope
David Pope|August 20, 2012

At the beginning of a recent customer meeting I was involved in, I mentioned how easy it is to shut down idea generation by judging too soon or too harshly, to which a CIO at the meeting shared this story about five monkeys in a cage. You may have heard [...]

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This week in blogs: abbreviations, innovation and the holidays

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|November 18, 2011

Really, the hardest part of writing these weekly recaps is narrowing down the great list of SAS blog posts we publish every week and picking just a few to highlight. This is a bit of an estimate, but I’ve been telling people that we publish an average of eight posts [...]

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Strategy is innovation

Peter Dorrington
Peter Dorrington|October 28, 2011

When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically focus all of their time and energy on a feverish quest for the big breakthrough idea. But that initial spark of inspiration is merely a starting point. The real innovation challenge lies beyond the idea, in a long, complex journey from imagination to [...]

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Doing your own thing reaps innovative results in SAS R&D

Alison Bolen
Alison Bolen|June 24, 2011

Contributed by Bruce Kitto, Director, SAS R&D We recently introduced a concept called “Do Your Own Thing” day in the Customer Intelligence Division of SAS R&D, and I wanted to tell you a little about it. Like most R&D divisions at most companies, our employees are focused most of the [...]

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Four drivers for innovation and how IT will get you there

Anna Brown
Anna Brown|April 6, 2011

“It is the dawning of the age of the digital, age of the digital!” I couldn’t help humming the 1969 tune after attending Erik Brynjolfsson’s presentation at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference 2011 in Las Vegas. As Director for the MIT Center for Digital Business, Erik lives and breathes [...]

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Need help being innovative? Stick a flower in your shoe!

Shannon Heath
Shannon Heath|April 5, 2011

A common question from customers is, “How do we become more innovative?” In response, Teradata’s Bill Franks and Emdeon’s Kyle Cheek simplified the innovation process on Tuesday at SAS Global Forum by breaking it down into three steps: Break out of the box. Ride the ripple effects. Align all eyes [...]

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Sense and Adjust v Optimize and Innovate

Jonathan Hornby
Jonathan Hornby|July 16, 2010

Which is better – sense and adjust or optimize and innovate? I believe it’s the latter. More further down. Sense and adjust I read “It makes sense to adjust” in the summer edition of Strategy+business. Basic premise is that business transformation happens faster than ever (due to market events) but [...]

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Taking lessons from civil servants

Peter Dorrington
Peter Dorrington|June 23, 2010

In his introductory address, public sector session moderator Thomas Spiller of SAS neatly summed up some of the biggest challenges faced by national governments: dealing with the current economic climate and managing a crisis of confidence within their governments. In his experience, government responses seem to fall in to three [...]

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When did you stop innovating?

Peter Dorrington
Peter Dorrington|June 22, 2010

In a thought-provoking keynote speech at The Premier Business Leadership Series in Berlin, Soumitra Dutta asked, “Are we born to innovative?” The answer, according to Dutta and a majority of hands raised in the audience is, Yes. Children, for example, experiment, ask questions, observe and tolerate a high-level of risk, [...]

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