Innovation has become the ultimate buzz word for the 21st Century and beyond. With markets and environments changing at close to warp speed businesses feel that they have no future without a strong focus on this metamorphosing process. However, the fundamental question is whether this “buzz word” is a strategy or a new business paradigm? Does it signify improvement or fundamental change? Can it be boxed and planned or is it simply a radical and irrational phenomena?

There is no guaranteed master key that will turn your successful business into an innovative venture. Innovation, implicitly, is the growing garden; radical and in most part irrational – this is clear as it seems we have to accept failure rate greater than 50% as a road to becoming radical innovators. So why subject ourselves and our businesses to this kind of risk?

The consequential damaged caused by a lack of innovation can be severe; often clearly shown in economic performances – South Africa in the 1960s represented 6% of the world GDP- today the figure is closer to 0.5% – but year on year the South African economy has never shrunk – South Africa has unfortunately been out-innovated by other nations who saw the signs and made the decisions to act. Today half of America’s economic growth comes from products that barely existed a decade ago – the degree to which this happens has become a key measure of national success.

Innovation is an irrational phenomenon as it can lead to decisions and direction that are unpredictable and not forecast-able. Ever wondered how a venerable French water and waste management company transferred itself into a multinational multimedia conglomerate? Welcome to the story of Vivendi Universal. Originally called Compagnie Générale des Eaux, founded by Napoleon III, it grew to encompass everything from waste management to construction to transport to property to communications – all in just one and a half centuries. Then in 1995 it faced debt exceeding $9.6bn and was wallowing under the weight of its own bureaucracy. A change was about to occur. A distillation. A diversion of energies. CGE asked itself – “Water is the source of this company – who says it is the future” – and so from within CGE’s vast network of operations and interests a controlling stake in a small multi-lingual pay television was isolated, invigorated and exposed to the light of new possibilities. And so was born Vivendi Universal using the pay station as a spring board for an intricate series of mergers (the most being with Seagram for $23 billion – “Universal Studios”) and acquisitions, mutations and transformations (removing $25bn of poor-performing holdings).

Final Paper – Regulatory Framework for Cloud Computing

The “power of few” is quite simply the main reason why governments around the world need to look at this phenomena, new industry and paradigm shift known as the “cloud” with a new set of eyes and a new set of values. It is here, it is changing and it will continue to re-shape economies from yesterday to tomorrow.

The power of the few outlines the change – movement from millions of individual units (computers) that are not necessarily linked nor controlled to the cloud where all of them are grouped and huddled… and controlled by a handful of companies. When a nation’s economic agility is thus controlled by a “few” they have power that needs regulation but one that does not cripple innovation or stifle growth.

Give me a shout on what you think…

But rather than bore you with my philosophical ranting here is a quick few lines on what the Annual Meeting of New Champions brought up…

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1. Cloud Computing is firmly in fashion – I sat in a presentation in the “Beta” zone (catchy as to the world the Cloud is Work In Progress) where I could swear the slides shared by some of the panelists that included Clive Selley from BT were music to our ears (here I refer to nivio).

The forum I think has done a great job in brining this mainstream but feel that there could have been more oomph to it and I think more of the debate-able topics – so everyone with low and high involvement walked out learning something new.

My push to the Head of Sales for Akamai would be whether they would exist in the future if regional datacenters would be the way forward – especially given the internet is more than the USA!

2. A great talk by the Chinese Premier – probably one of the best I heard the snippets of (I missed the closing plenary to get onto a plane back home!). But I believe the optimism of growth, the advice to company’s entering China and the potential concerns for the double dip that “could” occur this year/2011 were probably some of the most vibrant views he talked about – I am not sure if anyone asked about the matter of hacking Google but then I think given we were in tianjin it may not have been a wise move

3. The nightcaps – this for all of you that are new to the forum is where everyone speaks off the record, ties get lose, jackets come off and in Davos it get’s even risque but thats more for another post. Imagine having a jamaican band singing Waka Waka in the middle of an Industrial City in China in a party hosted by one of India’s largest Tech/Process firms (GenPact) – Pramod Bhasin is the CEO and put on a real show!

4. The friends you meet and make – this is the real heart of attending the Forum – the likeminded people you meet again and the new and old friends you find. My buddies this year were a blast – the guys from Scribd – humbling to meet them and infact I think they have a great CTO (I made notes whilst talking to him – now if only we could find ourselves another Jared!

5. The meetings – why at the bottom because I think they are important but not the spirit of the Forum and what / why we are there… we met the heads of BT, Akamai, Wipro, Alcatel Lucent and others… by in all – it was clear that our year was going to be busy as long as ship product on time (which thanks to my dedicated and unbelievably resourceful team this may be our first on time ship!)

That’s about all…

More soon… I am trying to be regular!

Some highlights:

- Our social networking endeavours finally taking off
- Rio (our puppy) made his debut visit to Nivio’s london office
- We got a london office!
- Lots of telco partnerships!
- We started the qtr with less than 10% paid and ended the qtr with greater than 90% paid as a sign up rate!

Ok more in a bit better get bk to the poker game im losing!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00jjls6

We got another mention – thank you Peter!

I believe the world sees cloud computing by in large from either an enterprise angle or from a pure web apps play – and that seems to be the be all end all of cloud computing – atleast in the eyes of a lot of the eurozone vcs.

Cloud computing is so much more than just some apps sitting and using storage on an EC3 or azure. Surely the real potential of the “grid”, the “cloud” or the “generators” is to
A) maximise the utilisation of under utilised resources – by that I mean your PC!
B) use the benefits of offloaded processing and subscription based applications to provide computing to the 5bn people that today don’t have access to it.
C) remove all the pain areas associated with running your own “generator” and instead have a steady, controlled service where you get what you want on demand!

I sincerely hope we see more “cloud” initiatives pushing computing to a new generation of users.

Incidentally this is why we created nivio!

Here is our little profil on CNBC!! Shereen rocks!

The experience was exhilirating – they did 3 interviews including one at the World Economic Forum in Davos!

BBC Site – http://odeo.com/episodes/24348394-GlobalBiz-Sachin-Duggal-Tx-23-March-09