Innovation is not constrained to individuals, teams or organizations. In some cases, the best to way to innovate is when entire industries comes together to share the effort and the investment necessary. Industry innovation is one approach that is commonly overlook and undervalued. In today's show, we talk with John Osborne who is General Manager of R&D at The Kroger Company and is the Chairman of the Board of the ZigBee Alliance.
The ZigBee Alliance is a standards organization around the ZigBee wireless stack used in everything from light bulbs to industrial sensors and monitors. To innovate with an organization such as Zigbee, you need to bring together 400 members and get them to align their efforts to the benefit of everyone involved. Not an easy task.
In today's show on industry innovation. John and I discuss:
- Comparison of innovating inside a large company to that of driving industry innovation.
- The early history of Zigbee.
- The transformation of ZigBee to being the platform/stack for IoT (Internet of Things).
- The challenges of getting large industry organizations to align and execute.
- What does “participation” look like in organizations like ZigBee.
- How do members take advantage of the standards and technologies created in organizations like ZigBee.
- What does the future look like fot IoT and ZigBee.
- How ZigBee is being used that most consumers are not even aware of.
Today's Guest: John Osborne II
John is currently the Chairman of the Board of the zigbee alliance (a global SDO) and General Manager of Research & Development at The Kroger Co. John’s expertise is in computer science combined with business management, negotiation and purchasing disciplines. He has been responsible for enterprise wide operational and technical projects budgets worth millions of dollars. He has a number of patents and co-authored a global technical specification for zigbee. John graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Ohio University.
Show Notes/Links:
Subscribe: RSS
Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.