innovation | Social Signal

Today's Digital Economy conference has surfaced the hunger for a serious effort at moving Canada back into a leadership position in the global digital economy. As the day has unfolded, many people have noted that we need to meet that hunger with a concrete action plan. Here's my first crack at a set of recommendations, guided by our experience in the emergent field of social media, for both action and further dialogue.

Recommendations for future action:

1. Marry hardware and software. One of Canada's great success stories, RIM (of Blackberry fame) is here today. Another great success -- Flickr -- is absent. But Flickr shows what Canadians can do when they take the infrastructure of the web (mobile, wireles or wired) and marry it with our traditional strengths in community and content creation. Twinning hardware innovators with software innovators would be a great way to inspire software innovators to develop tools and business models that make the most of next-generation hardware, and vice versa.

Last week I heard Guy Kawasaki speak at the JFSA Innovators' lunch. (Thanks to Raquel Hirsch of WiderFunnel for the kind invitation.) Hearing Guy on the Art of Innovation reminded me of a blog post I wrote last year after attending a talk by Michael Axelin, V.P.