Innovate What You Know?

Here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently – are we more innovative when we focus on solving our own problems? As Matt put it on the 37 Signals, there’s a strong argument for designing what you know: I know it’s not always possible, but, when it is, pick something to work […]

Critical Mass

In a brilliant post this week, Charlie Stross asks what’s the minimum world population needed to maintain the current level of the technology available to us today. Not long ago I talked about how isolation from the mainland made Tasmanian technology go backwards for a significant period of time – this is exactly the issue […]

Megatrends

When I run strategy seminars, I usually do a session on long-run trends in the macroenvironment. While firms can’t usually influence macro-trends such as interest rates, demographics and legislation, changes and trends can open up strategic opportunities and threats. While some of these can be predicted with a degree of certainty, such as an aging […]

David Gauntlett – Making is Connecting

Here’s a great talk by David Gauntlett outlining some of the ideas from his upcoming book – it’s 9 minutes long and well worth the time: It’s a bit of a jolt to run across something that resonates so strongly with some of the ideas that we’ve been developing here. Look at his three reasons […]

The Art of the Innovator

Superconnect, the new book by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, includes this great quote from Denis Diderot in his Encyclopédie: Everything is linked together… beings are connected with each other by a chain of which… some parts are continuous, though in the greater number of points continuity escapes us… the art of the philosopher consists […]

Managing Different Creative Styles

Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation. Trying to harness this creativity within ourselves and our organisations is the first step in managing innovation as a process. Of course, this is a step that resists systematisation – as Simon Bostock points out, innovation is a cloud not a clock. In that post he […]

Events and Processes

We had winter graduations today. I really enjoy graduations. The ceremony itself is a bit tedious, but the joy and celebration of the event always makes it worth going to (plus I get to wear the puffy hat!). Sitting on stage watching the graduates get their diplomas always makes me think of the how the […]

Old Spice Guy – Innovation Must Lead to Results

I love the Old Spice Guy as much as the next man (which means, of course, that I enjoy his commercials greatly in a shared spirit of manliness and a joint appreciation of expensive magnifying glasses). The original commercial is inventive and funny, and the social-media-based campaign that they ran last week is enormously innovative. […]

Breaking the Rules of Learning

Yesterday I went to a seminar from Bill Eggers, hosted by Deloitte. Bill is a specialist in thinking about governmental reform and the digital economy, but most of his messages about innovation apply to all organizations. It’s been a long time since I took three pages of notes in a seminar so I might do […]

Can Innovation Management be a Profession?

The importance of managing innovation as a process is one of our key themes here. Because the success of any single great idea is pretty close to impossible to predict, the best way to successfully innovate is to try a lot of things, and to manage ideas through a process. If you do this, you […]

Improve Innovations Through Iteration

Here’s a great quote from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky: Defending yourself in advance against all the possible ramifications of success has strong diminishing returns. As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something without […]

The Problem with a Solutions Business Model

You have probably heard of the phrase “jumping the shark”. This phrase goes back to an infamous episode of the 1970s sitcom called “Happy Days” when the producers, faced with declining popularity, tried to revive the show by getting the Fonz to jump over a shark on water skis. In the corporate world, there are […]