A little while ago - I wrote a paper on IT Innovation for my company. This was at the request of the CFO to help facilitate a path towards IT innovation within the IS department. For the benefit of others I have posted to my blog under a dedicated page on IT Innovation.

As a follow-up to my post on Microsoft not innovating - the following insight by Scott Berke on innovation at Microsoft was passed onto me. Scott used to work for Microsoft and appears to have a very successful track record during his time there.  

Personally reading his analysis - I feel it's really important to distingush "Innovation" from "Invention". Invention is thinking up great ideas. Innovation is turning these ideas into something useful – i.e. a commercial success or what ever is your measure of "useful".

I think “Innovation” as a word is often used when people really mean “Invention”. If everyone used Innovation as “ideas that are turned into something useful” the word would have much more currency.

A really interesting and thought provoking article from Crunchgear on Microsoft and it's failure to be innovative in recent times. It makes a good point the word "innovation" these days is overused and could be used for any large tech company. It also talks in depth about some ideas for Microsoft, ideas for the rest of the world to compete with Microsoft and a really good treatment on some great ideas from Microsoft that just have not seen the light of day. Very interesting analysis!