"Never innovate to compete, innovate to change the rules of the game." - David O. Adeife

The state of innovation, Boris Pluskowski
This is a long one ... so you'll want to make sure you have some time when you read it.  It is a thought provoking article/entry about where innovation is today in the adoption curve (this is that curve with the innovators/earlier adopters/<chasm>/early majority/late majority/late adopters curve).  

In short, it sounds like Boris believes innovation has crossed the chasm and is now into the early majority.  He also provides some pretty good examples of how the who is adopting innovation has changed in the last eight years.  A good quote from the article:

All of this points to an enterprise landscape where innovation is seen as a critical element of business strategy. It is no longer treated as an experimental venture, but a strategic CEO-supervised initiative. It has senior process leadership and senior project sponsors for each individual project run. There are now explicit goals and metrics tied to the bottom line welfare of the company.

The Passion to Innovate, Mitch Ditkoff
This is a short entry about how innovation in a company depends on the people and their passion to be innovative.  A good quote from Mitch:

Unfortunately, most organizations squash passion. This is why start-ups have a much easier time innovating than Fortune 500 companies. And that's why savvy Fortune 500 companies recreate the feeling of start-uppiness whenever they can.

Accepting a High Failure Rate for Creativity, Ben Casnocha
Ben picked up on an interesting tidbit of information about The Onion:

to get the 18 quality headlines needed for each week's edition, the writers have to propose 600 headlines in total.

He then mentions another interesting statistic:

At IDEO's toy group only 3% of proposed product ideas survive.

Wow, both of those numbers are impressive.

Innovating, not innovation, Diego Rodriguez
Very cool example of a creative and innovative company's culture ... you'll have to check out the video to see what Diego is talking about: IDEO Labs

Measuring Innovation, Trevor Speirs
This is a short entry discussing some options to measuring innovation.  Trevor mentions a balanced scorecard approach that would include the following:

• Inputs - Are you putting sufficient resources and generating enough ideas to fuel your target growth? Track the number of ideas you generated, how much resources you had dedicated to innovation (not evolutionary product development), and what types of opportunities do you have in your pipe (is your pipeline evaluating enough ideas of a sufficient market opportunity).
• Processes - How quickly are you processing ideas through each stage of your pipeline from early evaluation through to launch?
• Execution - How many launches have you had this year? How many launches attack large market opportunities? How accurate have your forecast efforts been?
• Value Creation - What is the contribution margin of your recent years’ launches? What percent of revenue growth is contributed by innovation projects?