Fir Interviews

Jeremiah Owyang founded CrowdCompanies as a council of large businesses that stood to be disrupted by the "sharing economy," a class of businesses established based on the innovation of technology serving as the intermediary between people who have something (cars, spare rooms or apartments, free time) and people who want it (to get somewhere cheaper and faster than a cab, to stay somewhere more homey and less costly than a hotel room, to clean out a garage or scan photos, for example). Each of the members of CrowdCompanies needs to innovate to stave off disruption. They asked Owyang "to look inside of companies, to find out how they are structured to respond to disruption trends." The result is a report, "The Corporate Innovation Imperative: How Large Corporations Avoid Disruption by Strengthening Their Ecosystem" (which is available below). In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz and Jeremiah talk about the obstacles to innovation, some of the 10 types of innovation programs the study uncovered, the metrics for m