Little Innovations Matter!

Here’s a question for you. What’s better…. a lot of little innovations or one big innovation? If we had to choose, would it better to have an economy made up of a lot of firms trying to make small improvements to their business or do we want a game-changer like Apple or Google? The big […]

Bad Filtering Kills Businesses

If your business model is based on information, and whose isn’t these days, then you need to be able to aggregate, filter and connect. While reflecting on the death of Borders Books, I thought of three stories of filtering in retail. First Story: Tower Records In the mid-80s, I went in to the Tower Records […]

Ideas Are Something You Do

Here is today’s exercise in connecting up ideas. First off, there’s this summary of the TEDGlobal conference from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter: Then, there’s this quote from Seth Godin at the 99% Conference: What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship. Godin expands on that […]

Carmageddon – Change is Hard, Except When It’s Not

The world failed to end over the weekend. In Los Angeles, at least, this was a bit surprising, as there were many dire predictions made about the impact of closing down the 405 Freeway for a weekend of construction. Many of the key issues are summarised in this remix from Downfall (which is funny, but […]

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers – “Experiment. Go!”

Experimenting is the key to innovation success. The new book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is worth a read (there’s tons of information about the book, and some great videos here). The book tells lessons that Sivers learned while running his website CDBaby. My first thought in reading the experiences of one person is […]

Some ‘Deep Thought’ on The Global Innovation Index

There’s been a fair bit of chatter on the release of the global innovation index. It’s an impressive composite of many indicators of innovation and it thows out many interesting lists. According to the report, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore are the most innovative countries and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and China are the most efficient […]

Innovation Must Create Value, not Novelty

Is it possible to be too innovative? Helen Walters points to an interesting post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen called Over-Innovation Makes U.S. Firms Suck At Sustainability, which argues that it is. They argue that the high levels of US carbon emissions are due to too much innovation: The heart of the […]

Learning Innovation from Others

I was in a meeting with a CEO the other day who is confronting the possibility that what sustained the business for the last few decades is probably not going to deliver growth for the future. Tim and I have been working with him for over a year and we both rate him very highly […]

How Can We Break Out of Our Thinking Ruts?

Nancy and I just got back from an excellent trip to Italy. We each had presentations at different events there, and we also had a chance to take some time to see the sights. One of the things that we got to see in Rome was the Colosseum. Here’s a shot of us while we […]

Our Job is to Invent the Future, revisited

If we’re trying to innovate, our job is to invent the future. That’s why I was struck by this quote from Ray Kurzweil from a few years ago: I’m an inventor, and I started looking at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the […]

Look Past the Technology and See the Business Model

A few weeks back, Tim wrote a post about how a change to one dimension of a business model usually means a rethink of other parts of the business as well. One thing that I have always found interesting is how technology can change a business model. There are many examples of this such as […]

Innovation Lessons from Orson Welles

I’m still in Italy, where one of the topics of conversation is the recent special issue of The Economist, which discussed some of the problems that the economy here has experienced during the Berlusconi years (the special articles are summarised and linked here). Paul Kedrosky points to a response to this issue, where a reader […]