Guest post by Holly Green Does Your Culture Support Innovation? There’s a lot of people talking about innovation these days, myself included. The good news is that business leaders seem to be sitting up and taking notice of this important subject. The bad news is that once a topic becomes popular in the media, people […]
I’m always staggered by the figures on the the development of China and India. Sometimes numbers are almost too big to comprehend but a McKinsey report from 2008 gave a nice summary of the projected transformations that will occur in China before 2025. This urbanization is the biggest migration of people in world history. Approximately […]
Here is a quick test of your organisation’s innovation program. Step 1: Think of the person in your organisation that has the most responsibility for making innovation happen. Step 2: Imagine that that person is the guy walking across the street in this video – for the purpose of illustration, we’ll call him Tom: Step […]
Innovation is about more than just having great ideas – a point we’ve made here repeatedly. To innovate, you also have to execute ideas relentlessly. For many people, this is actually the hard part. I’m currently reading Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, and it has some of the most sensible advice on this topic […]
Three stories that caught my eye today: First up, Stowe Boyd found this quote about competing with internet research firms Gartner and Forrester: In our view, firms wishing to disrupt the Gartner and Forrester models must have two particular attributes. First, they need a significant differentiator. It can be in specialization, the business model, service […]
We keep hearing that the whole point of strategy is build a sustainable competitive advantage. This makes some sense, up to a point. The problem though is that the skills and routines that help us build one can also constrain us, and prevent us from responding to a changing environment. That change can be someone […]
Almost every single time you are offered a black or white choice, the real answer is grey. This is inconvenient, because we like things to either white or black, right or wrong, easy or hard, incremental or radical. But the simple fact is that all of these are false dichotomies. Nearly everything that is presented […]
One area of thinking around innovation that doesn’t get much attention is how ownership and governance affects the ability of an organization to be innovative. It’s an issue that’s been playing on my mind for a few years but a recent conversation has prompted me to write down some ideas. First. I’ll just outline the […]
Innovation is more than just generating ideas. Most organisations have more than enough ideas. They might need better ones, but usually they need to get better at selecting ideas, executing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The irony of this situation is that there are a lot of techniques around (and consultants that use them!) designed to […]
I had a chance to catch up with a friend last week who recently changed jobs. He is passionate about innovation, and his previous job title had been “Innovation Champion”, a position seemingly custom-designed for his skills and interests. So why did he switch jobs? That was one of the topics that we discussed. It […]
