By now a lot of you have heard of the latest government initiative in a string of efforts from the Obama administration to push the innovation agenda – Startup America – led by America's new startup czar and AOL cofounder Steve Case. Steve introduces the program via video here, where he also solicits Americans for feedback. So we thought we'd put our comments here on The Innovation Jam. If Steve finds it and reads it, we'll be honored.

Tiny Texas town gets creative

For most companies, the maneuvers leading up to the launch of new innovations are a deadly serious game. But in one Texas town, the innovation process also resonates as an arcade game. And maybe there’s a valuable lesson in that for the rest of us.

As someone whose company mission is helping customers accelerate innovation, I have a keen interested in the ways product companies manage this process. And increasingly over the last few years, more and more companies have found that automated management systems, including my company’s product, Accept360, are helping them to make better, faster, more profitable decisions about products and product features.

That innovation process has grown increasingly chaotic as more people become involved: customers, prospects, analysts, sales reps, channel partners, investors, engineers, and so on. As a result, software that helps companies sort through, analyze, and align ideas has emerged as an essential survival tool.

Join us on December 15 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific for our final webinar of the year (and the last in our New Rules series), Turning Insights into Innovation, featuring Gavin Johnston, Chief Anthropologist of Two West Inc., will provide product teams and developers with a step-by-step guide for turning interesting insights into actionable plans to develop products based on features that customers actually need and will pay for. This webinar will give product managers, marketers and researchers a practical road map to successfully incorporate this innovative approach to help grow their brand.

If you attended our webinar on Wednesday, October 27, 2010, you heard Greg Cohen, Senior Principle, 280 Group talk about driving profitable growth through innovation.

In addition to speaking to your customers, he recommended six other research techniques that can lead to insights that will let you develop products that create significantly more value for the customer and ultimately help you create a lasting competitive advantage in the marketplace.

I highly recommend viewing this webinar especially in the light of today's post-recession economy where customers want to see verifiable value from the products and services they buy. In other words, they expect solutions that demonstrably lower costs, improve efficiencies or increase revenues. This means you need to deliver products and services they are willing to pay for.

Greg shares his insights on how to do it in an actionable, easy to understand style.

It was a very well-attended session with a lot of questions from the audience. Unfortunately, as we ran out of time, here are his responses to the questions we couldn't cover. Hope you find the insights valuable.

Looking forward to seeing you again in one of our future webinars.

We've concluded of the 2011 Innovation Management Priorities and Challenges survey we recently conducted with AIPMM and are currently compiling the results. We be sharing the findings, as well as best practices and insights into what leading companies are doing (and their plans) in the coming year at special West Coast (San Francisco Bay Area) and an East Coast (Boston Area) Breakfast Briefings.

The West Coast briefing is being hosted in Fremont, CA at Mentor Graphics on Tuesday 26 October 2010 from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. The East Coast briefing will be hosted at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. in Chelmsford, MA on Wednesday 3 November 2010, also from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. The content is tailored for both executives and practitioners, and will be beneficial for hearing the study results first-hand while learning how they may affect your corporate and product strategy.

Join us for a discussion with ideation expert and industry leader, Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO, of Innovation Games, Inc., on how Innovation Games can enhance the Product Portfolio and provide higher visibility and stakeholder alignment. Innovation Games helps companies improve business performance through collaborative and cooperative play. As the leading producer of online and in-person Serious Games, we invite you to explore our site to learn how we can help you solve complex problems in Sales, Corporate Strategy, Marketing Strategy and Product Development.

Our webinar on Wednesday October 6th at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET will offer a fascinating look at an innovative way to have serious fun doing serious business.

If there's one specific phase of the innovation lifecycle that will ensure failure if it's not done correctly, it is understanding market needs. Without that context, you might develop an innovative product yet not be commercially successful. And no one in this new innovation economy can afford a 'miss'.

As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face, I wanted to share the results from the third poll. Like our first two polls, this poll was also focused on the ideation phase and the challenges faced. There were again over 200 responses representing a solid cross-section of product management, sales, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

The question was: What is your biggest challenge in the capture and management of product ideas

As Director of Finance for Accept Corporation, I’m happy to work for a company that innovates beyond the solutions it provides to customers. My name is Stephanie Banister, a certified Independent Fiduciary for pension plans, and I usually write with a calculator. A fiduciary is the decision maker and the ultimate responsible party of every aspect of a pension plan, and they add value by providing more retirement income for employees, making sure the Plan is in compliance under ERISA at all times, and ensuring mediation between a plan and the financial services industry. Recently, I was featured in Kiplingers Personal Finance in an article about 401(k) plans, specifically about the innovative way we were handling the plan for Accept’s employees.