The business environment is changing, and competitive advantages have much shorter lifespans now. To combat this, you need to build an innovation capability for yourself, and for your organisation. Here are some ideas on how.
Risk and uncertainty are two different things. Mixing them up causes problems. Here are some ideas for dealing with uncertainty in particular.
Frederick Douglass said “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground…” He was talking about political reform, but this is also true of innovation as well.
Do people love change or hate it? Are big firms better at innovation or are small ones? The answer to these questions is “both” – and we need to develop some skills for dealing with that.
How can you learn what you need to know to become an expert? It requires deep knowledge of a field, but it also requires broad knowledge of related fields. Our current technologies support deep, but not broad. We need to figure out a way to find t-shaped knowledge.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Nancy and I saw Ruby Sparks last night, and really enjoyed it. It’s written by Zoe Kazan, who also stars, and it absolutely skewers the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Nathan Rabin defined Manic Pixie Dreams Girls (MPDG) in his review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely […]
We see many systems these days where all of the intelligence in the system is embedded in the technology. Some examples: Driverless vehicles, in mines and on the streets. Highly sophisticated prosumer cameras. Most tablets – they can’t be programmed at all, really. High speed stock trading. When I talked about this recently, I made […]
As industries mature, they distribute intelligence differently. What do I mean by that? Here’s a diagram that I sketched out when I was at the CEEC Workshop last month: It shows that we can build intelligence about the system in two places – in people or in technology (which can be any kind of tool). […]
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. […]
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 […]
