Monthly Archives: March 2011

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Don’t Wait for Permission to Innovate

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One question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?” The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true. Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s […]

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An Innovation Challenge: Learning From Failure

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I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the […]

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There’s More to Innovation Than Novelty

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When I went to visit Neil Kay last year, we talked a bit about novelty. He said that the way that we frame PhD research is all wrong – that it is a mistake when we tell people that they need to make a novel contribution to knowledge. Instead, we agreed that people should be […]

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Good Innovation Managers are Simply Good Managers

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What happens when the people that are supposed to be creative and innovative in your organisation are neither? I ran across an interesting quote from one of the people interviewed in the new book Herding Cats: Being Advice to Aspiring Academic and Research Leaders by Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies: The biggest thing that I […]

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Three Steps for Inventing the Future

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The Future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson That’s the idea that framed yesterday’s post – Where’s My Flying Car? I argued that as innovators, our job is to invent the future – and that in doing so, instead of trying to come up with something that has never existed […]

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Where’s My Flying Car?

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When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?” Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies […]

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How Corporate Crime Starts with Failed Business Models

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Every economic bust launches criminal charges against executives of failed companies. It’s been a few years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Global Financial Crisis but the court cases in many instances are still ongoing. One of the most notorious cases in Australia was the child-care center empire of ABC […]

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For Most Researchers, “Practice” is Harder than “Deep”

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I’ve been invited to participate in a symposium on Deep Practice, organised around the theme “Deepening knowledge and innovation through design practice.” The program includes this free talk by Professor Mark Burry on March 24th in Melbourne. To prepare for the event, we’ve been asked to write a brief piece on the topic. This is […]

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Will Rogers Explains Business Model Innovation

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One of the keys to successful business model innovation is to find the hidden assumptions in your industry and then change them. When you are doing this, it is useful to remember this quote from Will Rogers: It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so. It […]