Monthly Archives: February 2011
Are You Too Scared to Ask a Good Question?
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One of our long term research projects is the problem of innovating in large complicated businesses such as engineering and mining companies. We have been using social network analysis to understand innovation because one of the biggest innovation challenges involves finding good ideas and existing expertise to do something in a better way or to […]
“Create the Niche You Will Occupy”
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In a nice post inspired from the classic TED talk from Malcolm Gladwell, Harry Connolly’s talks about the importance of experimenting in a guest post on Charlie Stross’ blog: Another important point from the video is that consumers do not always know what they want. This isn’t exactly a revelation to readers, who are always […]
Without People You’re Nothing – Joe Strummer
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I watched The Future is Unwritten again this weekend, the documentary about Joe Strummer by Julien Temple. The Clash were my absolute favourite band for a long time, and I’ve always thought highly of Strummer. The movie gives a pretty balanced view of his life, exploring his faults as well as his strengths. But the […]
Use Data to Defeat “the Focus Group of One” Problem
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The most successful ad campaign that I ever designed only ran two weeks before the owner of my company killed it. I was working for a software company at the time, but our parent company also had a consumer hardware division. I was asked to help with their advertising. The budget was extremely limited – […]
All Life is an Experiment
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Uncertainty is one thing that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Unfortunately, in most business situations, uncertainty is a fact of life. Graham Hill made an interesting response to my post yesterday about simplistic, complex and simple models. He said: The real world is complex . Most businesses simplify the complexity to ‘manage’ it. Complex […]
Three Types of Models: Simplistic, Complex and Simple
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I was watching some MBA presentations this week, and they reminded me of a section of “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges. In this short story, Borges describes a map the size of the world (From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999): . . . In that […]
Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do
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What do you do if the tools you use to improve your innovation process actually make it worse? I had a meeting yesterday with one of our research partners to go over some of the results of our recent survey. The research has two parts – we are mapping the innovation and knowledge-sharing networks within […]
Forget Products – Think Ecosystems
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A colleague has just forwarded the brilliant ‘burning platform’ memo from Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop. If you haven’t read the entire memo to Nokia employees, you can link to a report here. It’s a brutal self-assessment that could be a turning point for Nokia. Learning often starts with a statement of “I don’t know” and […]
For Inspiration, Look Everywhere Else
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The Innovation Mantra
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Finding Disruptive Ideas
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We often talk about how innovation occurs along a spectrum. At one end there are relatively small, incremental innovations – taking things that we currently do and figuring out how to do them better. At the other end we have disruptive innovations – those ideas that attack existing market segments in a completely new way. […]
