Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Patrick Houston and published by InformationWeek. To read the complete article, please click here.

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Even innovators struggle with the pace of change. Here are some of the ways Silicon Valley companies like LinkedIn push the edge without falling off.

If you’re among those IT execs and managers grasping for ways to keep up with the curve — let alone get ahead of it — take comfort. Even those who reside in the so-called Cradle of Innovation are struggling as mightily as you.

In my meanderings around and about Silicon Valley, innovation itself has been consistently cropping up as a topic among the entrepreneurs who are supposed to embody the very word — as they too confront the same disruptive mobile, social and cloud technologies they’ve help wrought.

For example, CEO John Donahoe took a conference stage recently to discuss how he’s reinvigorating eBay, a company that played a large and early role in turning retailing upside down. He’s rekindled “that magic alchemy of innovation”– his words — with a treatment resonant of the alchemists’ heyday: He resorted to blood-letting — by replacing 80 of the top 100 people who were at eBay upon his arrival in 2008. Now, he said, “We have a nice blend of 150 people,” consisting of 50 from the old guard and 100 from a new one.

I suppose sometimes such drastic measures are what it takes to get a company or team cranking again. I’m not a fan of the approach. Instead, I’ll endorse an approach used by cloud-computing pioneer Salesforce.com. There, I met Matt Bennetti, a mergers and acquisitions exec, who acts less like any dealmaker I’ve known and more like a talent agent. When Salesforce.com buys a company, Bennetti personally sees to it that the newbies find acceptance, not so they adapt to Salesforce but so Salesforce adapts to them, their fresh eyes and cutting-edge ideas. He’ll even champion them for bigger roles. And in that way, he does his part to keep new blood coursing through the company’s veins.

[Get more innovation tips and share your best practices on how to survive “The Innovation Hamster Wheel.” Please click here.]

But my favorite strategy for rapid renewal came by way of an encounter I had with LinkedIn. If you’ve spent any time on the social media service favored by professionals, you’ve had to notice its recent rat-a-tat-tat of improvements — a new iPad app, LinkedIn for Windows phones, strikingly revamped profile and company pages, and a host of features around content, updates, endorsements and notifications. Get this: It claims it’s making new or incremental updates — beyond minor bug fixes, mind you — at a rate of 700 times a week.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Patrick Houston is a former SVP for a new media startup, a GM at Yahoo, and editor-in-chief at CNET.com. He is co-founder of MediaArchitechs, which offers strategic product, content and business development consulting to technology-driven media companies. He can be reached at patrick.houston@mediaarchitechs.com.