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Innovating by Going Backwards

By on 5 December 2012 in design, evolving economic entities

We often picture innovation as a relentless forward march of progress. But sometimes, we can make a significant forward leap by first taking a step backwards. Here’s a small case study that shows how.

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Here’s Why Many Innovation Initiatives Fail

By on 25 November 2012 in business models, design

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do customer service like Zappos?  Or design like Apple? Or innovation like 3M? Who wouldn’t want to be like those firms? Well, it’s not so simple. Barry Dalton wrote an excellent post called You Can’t Be Zappos (and why would you want to be?) addressing exactly this issue. [...]

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Different is Interesting

By on 3 October 2012 in design

Are we really that resistant to change? An experiment with soap shows that maybe we’re more open to new ideas than we think.

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Evolutionary and Revolutionary Innovation

By on 23 August 2012 in design, innovation strategy

Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr Triggered by a couple of recent discussions, I’ve been pondering for a while now over the question how evolution relates to revolution when it comes to innovation. In the following, I’ll try to develop my view on this. Let’s define  evolution as continuous and incremental innovations of a firm’s existing [...]

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Are You Entering a Market or Building One?

By on 1 July 2012 in design, experiments

There is a huge difference between entering an existing market and building a completely new one. To see an example, check this out – it is the very first Apple product, which Andrew Chen writes about in a terrific post: You can see why IBM didn’t view personal computers as any kind of threat to [...]

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Why Innovation is Less Risky Than You Think

By on 19 February 2012 in book riffs, design, experiments, innovation strategy

One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say. But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Here is how Peter Drucker puts it [...]

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Montessori Lessons for Innovators

By on 10 February 2012 in design, innovation

Since the revelations that many stars of silicon valley are alumni of Montessori schools there has been a lot of interest in what managers can learn from the Montessori approach to education. I hadn’t realized this until Tim told me but the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and [...]

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Replace Fear of the Unknown With Curiousity

By on 31 January 2012 in book riffs, design, innovation strategy

The Shift Index 2011 is out now, and as with the previous two editions, it is a must-read. I am always skeptical of “everything is different now” type arguments, but in this series of reports, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and a number of other contributors have done a fantastic job of documenting exactly what [...]

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Two Great Innovation Misquotes

By on 27 January 2012 in book riffs, design, evolving economic entities

There are two popular quotes that often get used when discussing innovation that were never actually said or written by the people to whom they are attributed. Despite the fact that they are fake quotes, there are still things that we can learn from them. The first common quote is attributed to Henry Ford: If [...]

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Tools Should Be Invisible

By on 23 January 2012 in business models, design

What is the most common mistake that I see when people try to implement management tools or frameworks? By far the most common is mistaking using the tool for getting the outcome you are looking for. I have been doing some consulting work recently where we are using the Business Model Canvas to develop a [...]

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Business Model Analysis & the Link to Strategy

By on 3 January 2012 in business models, design, innovation strategy

What’s the best way to use business model analysis in larger organisations? Steve Blank has done some outstanding work looking at how Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas can be used in entrepreneurial startups (see also this post and the ones that follow it). But there are still some questions about how to best use the [...]

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Innovation Through Subtraction

By on 1 January 2012 in book riffs, design, evolving economic entities, selection

I don’t like focus groups. I’ve found the information that you get from them to be too shallow to be useful. However, this doesn’t mean that when we’re innovating we should just pursue whatever ideas drift across our minds. Steve Jobs was quoted last year about how Apple doesn’t use focus groups. A number of [...]

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