Why do so many organisations focus on generating lots of ideas when the try to become more innovative? Innovation is a three-step process – generating great ideas, selecting and executing the best of these ideas, and getting your ideas to spread. Most organisations fail in the last two steps, not in generating ideas. One reason […]
One of my research partners invited me along to a show last night called Elvis Meets Buddy. It was a great evening, with a lot of interesting discussion of innovation, New Zealand wine and other interesting topics over dinner. Then we went to see the show, which was also pretty fun. It was a guy […]
For a couple of years I was the manager in charge of a self-managing marketing team (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that actually meant!). My first year with them, we ran the most successful campaign in the history of the organisation. There were many factors that came into play that led […]
I’ve run across a number of things that relate to recent posts, so I thought I’d put together a quick grab-bag selection today. Yesterday I talked about Naomi Simson and innovation at RedBalloon. One thing that I forgot to mention is that in addition to growing incredibly quickly and being very successful financially, RedBalloon is […]
I saw Naomi Simson, the founder and CEO of RedBalloon, give a talk at the Future Summit sponsored by the Australian Davos Connection. It was a fantastic talk, and she had a number of interesting insights on the innovation process. This talk gets at a lot of the same issues that she touched on last […]
Check out this talk by Jeremy Rifkin: I’ve talked before about how innovation needs to be empathy-driven, and Rifkin’s talk illustrates why. We are inherently empathic – and many ideas spread not through persuasion, but through copying. This point is made emphaticaly by Mark Earls in his terrific book Herd. Earls talks about what this […]
I’ve talked before about the importance of experiments in the innovation process. Experiments are essential for two reasons. First, they allow us to be more confident that our ideas will work. If we run a successful small experiment, that gives us some idea of how the innovation might work as we try to scale it […]
Veronica Vera pointed me to a great talk by Anil Gupta from TEDIndia. He talks about grassroots innovation, and methods for getting ideas to spread in poorer regions. It’s a fascinating talk: Innovation in developing countries is a wildly unappreciated phenomenon – there are incredibly interesting things going on in places like India, China and […]
Why is it so difficult for established firms to deal with disruptive innovation? In general, I think that Clayton Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation is correct. His basic idea is that since disruptions generally start in niches, the economics of pursuing disruptive innovations look really bad for large incumbents: Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least […]
Hugh MacLeod absolutely nails it again with his business card for Joi Ito: New products, new services and new ways of doing things are all fundamentally about ideas. That is why innovation management is really idea management. Jeffrey Phillips addresses this same point in a terrific post called Ideas are a Commodity. He talks about […]
Tim and I had a conversation in my office the other day about the importance of fundamental innovation messages and how we really can’t repeat them enough in seminars, conversations and on this blog. I suppose that we don’t want to become repetitive but occasionally we still get reminders of how important it is to […]
