Don’t Wait for Permission to Innovate

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 […]

The Biggest Innovation Challenge of All

We all get caught up in the day-to-day activities of work and life but have you really stopped to think about how extraordinary your life is? Don’t worry, I’m not about to do one of those self-help/motivational rants but I do want to make the point that we may be in the middle of a […]

An Innovation Challenge: Learning From Failure

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 […]

There’s More to Innovation Than Novelty

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 […]

How to Test a Business Model Like a Scientist

How do we decide what actions to take in business? Or in life? In many cases, we base our actions on our models of the world. We think that things work in a particular way, and this determines the choices we make. We can make a strong case for trying to make these choices more […]

Markets are Innovations Too

Well…. I have finally discovered Ebay (please don’t snigger). A consequence of my children growing up is that that there is now a lot of stuff that we no-longer need in the house. Just to see if the Ebay thing would work, I put a baby bouncer on Ebay and to my amazement the bids […]

Good Innovation Managers are Simply Good Managers

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 […]

Three Steps for Inventing the Future

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 […]

Where’s My Flying Car?

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 […]

How Corporate Crime Starts with Failed Business Models

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 […]

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

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 […]

Will Rogers Explains Business Model Innovation

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 […]