I Have No Idea How the iPad Will Do!

With all the feverish discussion and prognostication about Apple’s preview of the iPad, I want to be the first person online to make this prediction: I have absolutely no idea how the iPad will perform. I’ll go one step further – neither does anyone else. The benefit of making predictions right now is that if […]

Destroyed by excellence

There was a bit of interest in the blog piece that I did on responding to change so I thought I would follow this up with a quick discussion of a really good model for understanding inertia and how resistance to innovation develops. One of my favorite research studies on excellence and inertia is by […]

Low Tech Networks

Everything is different now that we’re all knowledge workers, right? The digital world has changed everything… hive mind… singularity… chaos! change! panic! PANIC! Maybe. Maybe not. Yesterday I talked about the risks and rewards of low-tech innovation – if we re-think the most basic parts of our value networks, the parts that we take for […]

Low Tech Innovation

At start of my innovation courses, students often think that if their organisation isn’t inventing iPads, then they clearly aren’t (and can’t be) innovative. I end up spending a lot of time trying to help them see the many opportunities available for innovation, even within industries that appear to be pretty tightly constrained. In many […]

Filtering With Your Network

In yesterday’s post on Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies, I didn’t have room for one key point: one of the key filters to use is your network. When he was in Brisbane last month, George Siemans gave a talk with an example that illustrated this perfectly. For the past couple of years, he has […]

Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies

A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised […]

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

The question of how to best adapt to the changes brought about by the internet is of key importance to all organisations that are in information-based industries. According to Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google Do?, the answer is fairly simple: do what Google would. Here is a video in which he outlines the argument […]

Behavioural Innovation

I’ve been reading a lot of things from Umair Haque recently, and there he has some ideas that are definitely worth exploring. This is a talk that he gave last year which outlines several of his major themes. It is 20 minutes long, and well worth the time: Umair Haque at BRITE ’09 conference from […]

Changing the Game for News

A lot of people have been talking recently about a Harris Poll that shows that 77% of people in the US say that they won’t pay for online news. Specifically, this is the question they were asked: How much, if anything, would you be willing to pay per month to read a daily newspaper’s online […]

Yet Another Example of Why Inventions and Innovations are Different

One of my secret pleasures is Ken Burns documentaries. Ever since I saw his breakthrough work on the American Civil War about 20 years ago I have been mesmerized by his careful and beautiful use of images, narrative, music and cinematography (another innovation). It doesn’t really matter what the topic is… the Lewis and Clark […]

Innovation Lessons from My Cats

Nancy and I have a lot of cats, at least according to most people. Sometimes, they end up helping us out with work-related things – like the time Denali helped me with exam marking: Since they like to be in the middle of things, I thought it might be time to let them be in […]

Everybody Should Read Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod

Do you want to know how to easily find success? If so, then you probably shouldn’t read Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod. One of the themes of the book is that success is not easy. Creativity and Innovation are inherently threatening acts to many people, which makes new ides […]