Volume 1, Issue 5
How To Design Innovation In Payments
Out With the Old, In With The New 
This is not a news flash: Payments is about the most complex platform industry there is and igniting innovation in payments is anything but a given these days, even if a company is doing it within the construct of a successfully operating platform. Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School Professor, sheds new light on this in his new book The Architecture of Innovation, specifically on how corporations should organize their innovation initiatives in order to produce the best results: getting innovation to market and ignited. The implications to the payments industry are real and they are relevant.

Lerner and Diane Offereins, President of the Discover Network, will engage four C-suite innovators - all pioneers in designing and deploying innovation in payments - on a wide-ranging discussion of incentives, partnership strategy, innovation design, ignition obstacles and more. They will be joined by Chris Gardner, co-Founder and CEO of Paydiant, Mike Kennedy, Chairman of ClearXchange, Mike Pasilla, CEO of Elavon, and Chitra Narasimhan, Managing Director at CitiVentures.

Click here for the entire panel brief, including the inside scoop on how Kennedy got three banking giants to support a new idea in mobile payments; why the early Internet bubble was rife with innovation roadkill; and where the future of innovation architecture is headed.
Want to get in on the conversation?

It's easy. First, you have to be a delegate. That's just about getting on the list. Then, tweet us @PYMNTS some of the burning questions that you have on the topic of "architecting innovation in payments." HBS Professor and author, Josh Lerner, and Discover Network's Diane Offereins - The Architecture of Innovation panel honchos - will select the three most inquisitive submissions and give the nominees an opportunity to ask their question live and in person at The Innovation Project.

To make things even better, the delegates who submitted the three chosen questions will be placed in a drawing for a free room, a 15-minute one-on-one with the panel person of their choice, and a signed book. How cool is that?! Click here to for details on how to get involved!
The Architecture Of Innovation In Online Shopping

Why did two former J.Crew buyers decide NOT to partner up with retailers to ignite their online startup - Hukkster - but instead look to seed investors with big consumer networks and checkbooks instead? Well, they got it pretty quickly that to ignite their business what they needed most was to prove their value on the consumer side - their existing retail know-how could get them thru in the early days. So, who better than the Winkelvoss Brothers to give them both the money and access they needed?