When You Don’t Want Ideas to Spread

One of the themes that I talk about a lot here is the importance of getting our ideas to spread. It is a central part of innovation – if our new ideas are not adopted, then we’re in trouble. But what about when our business model is based on ideas not spreading? The idea seems […]

A Few Innovation Ideas

How do we get ideas to spread? It’s a critical question, and one of the ways that we distinguish between invention and innovation. For me, an invention is a clever new idea, an innovation is a clever new idea that is packaged up in way that enables it to spread. There’s a big difference between […]

Tradition is Not a Business Model

I’m currently reading The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur. It’s a fantastic book. This morning I ran across this quote discussing the spread of innovations: There is another reason the old pricniple persists beyond its time, an economic one. Even if a novel principle is developed and does perform better than the old, […]

How to Assess Your Innovation Capability

How do you know how good you are at innovation? One of the tools that we have found very useful for assessing innovation within organisations is the Innovation Value Chain. The tool was developed by Morten Hansen and Julien Birkinshaw and published in an article called The Innovation Value Chain in Harvard Business Review in […]

Using Networks to Spread Ideas

Yesterday I talked about some of the benefits and challenges of distributed innovation within organisations. One of the biggest challenges you face when you make everyone responsible for innovation is this – how do you get new ideas to spread throughout the broader group? This is part of what John and I are studying in […]

James Boyle’s Important Ideas on IP & Innovation

Intellectual Property rights encourage innovation, right? Right? Well, not necessarily. Actually, people that study this empirically consistently find that the evidence suggests that they don’t. Here’s a fantastic talk by James Boyle discussing his book The Public Domain, which addresses this exact issue: (Thanks to Gerd Leonhard for the tip on this talk) Boyle’s book […]

Seeing what’s coming

When Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone, he offered to sell the patent to Western Union. He knew that getting the idea to spread was the hardest part, and he figured that a big firm that was already in the communications industry would be better equipped to get the idea out there. This was part […]

the hardest part of innovation

I was thinking about my talk from yesterday, and one bit that I just spontaneously threw in is probably worth expanding on. I spent a lot of this week marking assignments from my MBA students (who were an exceptionally good bunch this year). For the major assignment this year, I had them analyse their own […]

What is an Innovation Culture?

Here are the slides + audio from the talk I gave this morning for the UQ Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology‘s planning day. One of the things that they were working on was thinking about what they want their innovation culture to be, so Phil asked me along to give some thoughts on that. […]

the best solution to Search Engine Optimisation

One of the ideas that I really liked in Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is that to be successful on the web, you need to ‘change the game’ (my full review of the book is here). The idea here is that you need to create an entirely new category for whatever it […]

focus on process, not tools

I’m reading Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante at the moment, which is very good. It includes a number of pieces on culture, many originally from Village Voice or the New York Review of Books. Sante is a fantastic writer and there are a number of great lines throughout the book, but one just […]

the importance of executing ideas

I’ve always been a fan of Charles Darwin. I think that he was a great scientist – a careful observer and deep thinker. But I still agree with many of Richard Lewontin’s points from his recent article about Darwin in the New York Review of Books. The main point that Lewontin makes in the first […]