Monthly Archives: November 2010

Posted on

The Social Construction of Business Models

by

One of the tricky parts of doing social science is that a lot of the things that we try to study are not actually real. Or, as Steve Horwitz puts it in an interesting post trying to define Austrian Economics: The “facts” of the social sciences are what people believe and think. This has some […]

Posted on

The Role of Strategy

by

There is a terrific quote in Creative Disruption by Simon Waldman about strategy. It is from Markus Reckling, the Managing Director of Corporate Development for Deutsche Post – here’s the quote plus Waldman’s interpretation: “I used to think that strategy was about avoiding unforeseen events; now I it’s about making sure you can deal with […]

Posted on

Be Prolific and Focused: Innovation Lessons from the Beatles

by

Tim and I are now writing a lot on the importance of focus. Being successful with innovation is about managing the paradox of ‘disciplined creation’ and it helps to have some clear ideas about what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to create value. Part of this discipline is taking time […]

Posted on

The Innovation Matrix: People or Tools?

by

I had lunch last week with some managers from a company that is trying to improve their innovation performance. They kept asking me what tools should they be using to do this? Is there software that will help, or a process, or some other tool? I had to explain that there are a lot of […]

Posted on

Innovation and Ambidexterity

by

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Tim wrote a post on “Staying Innovative While Growing”. I fully concur with his conclusion: “But it’s another innovation paradox – the small firms that might be most innovative often don’t have the market clout to get their ideas to diffuse. The firms that are big enough to get ideas […]

Posted on

Don’t Underestimate Business Models that Don’t Look Like Yours

by

I ran across a shocking quote today. It’s from an article in the July issue of The Monthly by Malcolm Knox called The Next Chapter – which is about the current state of play with e-books. Here is the quote: Until this year, the argument over e-books centred on whether they would ever overtake print. […]

Posted on

You Are What You Do

by

I often have people ask me how to build an innovative culture. The simple answer that is hard to execute is this: you build an innovative culture by innovating. Executing ideas is a critical part of innovation. If you think that innovation is only about having ideas, you won’t actually make anything. As fake Mark […]