I read an interesting article about the role of the IT organization in enterprise innovation, written by a former colleague of mine, Charles Babcock. The story, "IT Must Play a Central Role in Enterprise Innovation," spoke to many of the key challenges that both CIOs and their IT teams face in their efforts to help drive (not just support) innovation within their companies.

The story, which was based on reactions to the issue from a panel of CIOs and other industry experts at Interop 2011 in Las Vegas this week, included a quote from Nationwide Financial Services CIO Emeritus Bruce Barnes which to me captured the essence of the biggest challenge facing the potential innovative-ness of CIOs themselves: time and bandwidth.

China is on pace to become the world's most important source for innovation by 2020, overtaking both the U.S. and Japan, according to a public opinion survey conducted by drugmaker AstraZeneca that will be released next week.

According to the survey results, which were pre-released earlier this week, the U.S. is currently viewed as the world's most innovative country, according to 30 percent of the 6,000 people who were polled, followed by Japan with 25 percent and China at 14 percent.

It's a question that's been the subject of intense debate within many companies - who is (or should be) responsible for an organization's social networking efforts? There are a few schools of thought on this.

When organizations first began launching Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts a couple of years ago, a widely-held belief at the time was that oversight of a company's social media efforts should be handled by one of the communications functions such as marketing or public relations.

I was reading an article the other day about how Procter & Gamble wants to triple the amount of revenue it generates from working with outside sources, including universities, entrepreneurs and even competitors, for developing ideas into new products.

It's all part of a more flexible approach to R&D known as "open innovation" where companies such as P&G and Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. draw upon internal and external ideas as seeds of inspiration - and revenue. Opening up to ideas from outside the organization makes a great deal of sense, particularly as companies struggle to find new sources for growth. Open innovation can also streamline the R&D process, reduce the time-to-market for new products and foster collaboration in an increasingly open-source business environment.