by Joyce Lee
CHICAGO, Jun 30 (Xinhua) -- It's a buzzword branded into new MBA graduates and a term bandied about high-rise boardrooms. Innovation has wormed its way into everyday business lexicon. Some of Chicago's largest companies have made the practice an internal discipline, and are crafting the city into a hub of innovation in the country.
"There is, in Chicago, something quite different than what you would find in Texas or Boston or Silicon Valley. People in different industries get together, they fraternize,"Dan Miller, publisher and executive vice president of The Heartland Institute, told Xinhua Wednesday. "It's part of the culture, part of the air in the Midwest in Chicago that results in innovation."
In 2002, Miller co-founded the Chicago Innovation Awards with Thomas Kuczmarski, senior partner and president of consulting firm Kuczmarski & Associates, in order to change the city's reputation as flyover country. Locally-headquartered corporations like Accenture and Orbitz are overcoming their size to lend a hand to Chicago's reimagining.
The challenges of being big
While a small business-owner can deliver an innovation to market within weeks, it may take years for a corporation to identify a valuable idea and siphon it through research, technology, testing, and communications departments. "Sometimes the more people, the more ideas," says Luke Tanen, current director of the Chicago Innovation Awards. "But it can also create obstacles and bureaucratic red tape."
