How to Improve Your Innovation Metrics

We’ve written a few posts criticising some of the more common innovation metrics in use, so I thought it would be smart to outline some ways that we can actually develop more effective metrics. Here’s a story that might help: A while ago I was in charge of managing student recruitment for a tertiary education […]

Innovating in Horizon 1

After Ralph Ohr’s excellent post on innovation and human capabilites, I’ve been giving some more thought to the three horizons model and how innovation is different within the horizons. The big takeaway from Ralph’s post for me was that we need to manage innovation differently accross the horizons. In other words don’t manage an H1 […]

How to Innovate with an Utterly Derivative Product

I just finished the new novel by William Gibson, Zero History, which prompted me to go back to read his previous two books since the three are loosely connected. I know that these books have polarised his fans, with some hating them and other loving them. I’m in the latter camp – I think his […]

Where You Are Still Matters

Yesterday I got fed up with reading about music-sharing services like Pandora and Spotify, because neither is currently available in Australia – quite frustrating. After some hunting around, I finally found deezer.com, a French music-streaming site.* I listened to the Punk Rock radio channel on the site, and discovered a fair number of French bands […]

Innovation and Human Capabilities

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr John Steen wrote a series of  posts on why experts and crowds usually miss disruptive innovation and how to use networks to tap expertise and knowledge. I’d like to expand these thoughts a bit more towards the question: what’s the role of human capabilities in innovation? For elaboration, I’m going […]

Ideas Are Cheap

I’ve said it before. Andrew Hargadon has said it too – and in doing so he quotes Malcolm Gladwell saying it too. Now one of my favourite current authors Charlie Stross says it as well: ideas are cheap. Ideas are cheap. They’re so damn easy to come by that I have difficulty understanding why so […]

The Core Challenge in Managing Innovation

A consistent point of controversy is whether or not innovation can be managed. If you think of innovation only as generating new, novel ideas, then it is very difficult to see how this could be actively managed (although there are in fact things we can do to encourage and improve creative thinking, so even here […]

Chance Favours the Connected Mind

Steven Johnson is a fantastic author, and his next book is about innovation. It is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and it comes out next month. It is the result of a few years of study, where he has investigated creative, innovative environments. He explains the key points from the book in this TED […]

Why Making Mistakes is a Key Innovation Skill

One innovation topic that consistently gets people worked up concerns the value of failure. Some say that you have to embrace failure when you are trying to innovate. This makes some sense, since part of the innovation process is controlled experimentation. However, that whole ’embracing failure’ concept tends to rub people the wrong way – […]

Where You Start Determines Where You Finish

What’s the best way to win with our new ideas? One avenue to follow is to try to make sure that these ideas don’t just improve on what’s currently out there, but instead they carve out a new space for themselves. But how? The Design of Business by Roger Martin has some suggestions. It’s a […]

Vote for Three Good Innovation Bloggers

Braden Kelly is running a contest right now to identify the top 40 innovation bloggers at his site Blogging Innovation. The site itself is a great resource – it compiles the best posts from a long list of innovation bloggers, publishing 3-4 high quality posts per day. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. […]