Why Don’t We Use What We Know?

Two Major Innovations, Two Different Outcomes In the 1850s, infection rates in maternity wards were very high, and this was a big problem. No one knew why, and no one knew how to fix it. Ignaz Semmelweis wondered “what if everyone washes their hands before the come in contact with patients?” It was an experiment. […]

Where’s Your 10X Performance Improvement?

1969 was a pretty interesting year for the Swiss watch industry. That was the year the Omega Speedmaster became the first watch on the moon. Meanwhile, back on earth, there was a serious race to make the first automatic match that included a chronograph. Jeffrey Stein retells this story in International Watch magazine, and it’s […]

What Can We Learn From Innovation in Mature Industries?

How much do we know about innovation in mining (and other mature industries)? Last week I gave a keynote speech at the CEEC Workshop aiming to facilitate a paradigm shift in comminution. CEEC is the Coalition for Eco-Efficient Comminution. Communition is the process of smashing rocks as part of the mining process. The workshop gathered […]

Innovation Requires a Change in Behaviour

What is the most important innovation ever? I’ve argued before that it is hand-washing in hospitals. This innovation was a major driver in the improved health outcomes that have increased our life expectancies from less than 60 years at birth to nearly 80 in most developed countries. It’s such a simple idea, and so easy […]

Atul Gawande on Failure and Rescue

First off, you should go and read all of Atul Gawande’s commencement address to Williams College last weekend. It will take a couple of minutes, but it’s well worth the time. I’ll wait. Here are some of the highlights for me: …the critical skills of the best surgeons I saw involved the ability to handle […]

What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Failure

I often tell people that failure is an essential part of innovation. What do I mean by that? I think that what I really mean is that to innovate, we have to learn. It’s not the failure that drives innovation, but rather the learning. There is really a hierarchy of failure: System failure (the collapse […]

You Are Not a Special Snowflake & Other Innovation Obstacles

I’m teaching exec ed this week, which is always a lot of fun. During one of the breaks today, one of the people in the class said to me “This has been really valuable to me because it reinforces that I’m not the only one with these problems.” A very important point, which made me […]

Three Posts That You Should Read

Here are three posts that caught my eye recently that I think you should read: Ten Rules for Maker Businesses What kind of business model do you need if you are building things? Chris Anderson from Wired addresses this question with some excellent advice on issues from pricing building good relationships with your shipper. Check […]

The Complete Innovation Matrix

This post collects all of my thinking on The Innovation Matrix. I will update it as I add more posts. There are a few things that you can do with this. The cool thing is that it can collect all of the posts into one file, that you can then read in order (though the […]