While emerging technologies create massive opportunity, especially for investors and companies that seek more adaptable forms of economic growth than currently available, value is held inert by traditional approaches, patents, and other closed systems. Yet, open data, content, and information may be the key to mass innovation for future technologies, although they bring difficult challenges to private-industry models that depend on the established ideas of intellectual property.
It is from this foundational observation that OpenXFORM (a blending of the words Open and the engineering abbreviation for Transformation) was developed and is explored and described in this book. The intent of the model design is to synthesize an approach to the process of innovation, inspired by natural systems and human-centric design processes. OpenXFORM describes how an open system of innovation can adapt to the unregulated world of information, data, and content; can decompose its own information to release to the open world; and can discover ways to find the points of synergy among the studied and tested methodologies that put human relationships first.
This book presents an explicit innovation process that shows how to move from a breakthrough idea through a process that encourages innovative thinkers to test their assumptions, validate hypotheses, and tune and tweak their ideas, not only to drive solutions for users but also to meet the strategic goals of their companies. The anatomy of innovation through OpenXFORM contains the process for moving ideas from a flight of fancy to an explicit concept that is ready to produce.
About the Author: Carol L. Stimmel is the founder and CEO of Manifest Mind, a New York corporation. Her responsibilities include managing key
industry and client relationships, driving research topics, and personal contributions to consulting engagements and research reports.
Carol has 25 years of experience in emerging technology markets including operating roles as well as extensive experience in market
intelligence and analysis.
Don Sherwood Olson's twentyeight years of progressive technical experience and leadership in software engineering, as architect,
designer, programmer, team leader, tester, and trainer marry with a second career as a writer and academic. He has worked as a lead
or principal software engineer in fields as diverse as rocket engine controls, flight avionics, and satellite-based communication
systems. He was the managing member of Catamount Consulting, LLC, for several years, consulting on software systems. Currently
he serves as a Web designer and developer with Northern Arizona University's Information Technology Services and also teaches as
an adjunct lecturer in the English and Honors programs at the university.
