We’re All in the Knowledge Business Now

Many people think that their industry is immune from the disruption that we are seeing in music, news and books. However, we are not too far away from seeing every industry becoming knowledge-based. This has big implications.

Innovation for Growth

Why all this talk about innovation?  I get that question a lot. The reason that I think innovation is important is that it is the driver for growth.  Consequently, we’re changing the name of the blog to Innovation for Growth. Here are some of the reasons that I think it’s important to link innovation with […]

Are eBooks Really Books?

If I am fortunate enough to get promoted again, I’ll face a choice. My position can either be Associate Professor, or Reader. It will still be a while before I have to make that choice, but Reader is a pretty tempting title. Why would an academic be called a Reader? It comes from the days […]

The Right Idea at the Wrong Time is Still Wrong

You may remember Webvan, probably the most spectacular flame-out in during the tech boom in the late 90s. If you don’t, Nicole Perlroth describes their blowup for Forbes: Of Web 1.0’s most memorable implosions, Webvan still takes the cake. The online grocer raised $375 million in an IPO, descended upon eight major U.S. cities, peddled […]

Smart Tech Needs Smart People!

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 […]

Where is the Australian Facebook?

“Sell enough of this software so that we get bought by Microsoft.” That was the task I was given in the startup I joined in my last job before I entered academia. I guess the fact that I’m writing this now tells you how effective I was at meeting that goal… You can actually date […]

Procter & Gamble – Using Open Innovation to Become a World Class Innovator

Note: This is part of a series of posts discussing The Innovation Matrix. See this post for a description of the full model and what can be done with it. We can use The Innovation Matrix to help us understand how the innovation capability of firms evolves over time. A great case study in this […]

Innovation is the Source of the Variation that You Need to Adapt & Survive

Innovation is an evolutionary process. Here is John explaining what that means: <p. Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea […]

Innovation Problem: New Ideas Spread Slowly

There’s a big problem with innovation: ideas spread much more slowly than we expect them to. Ideas follow an S-Curve as they spread that looks like this: They pick up steam very slowly, until they either die off or hit a tipping point and take off. The slow build-up is the time I’ve indicated as […]

Two Great Innovation Misquotes

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 […]