Do strategy and innovation converge under uncertainty?

Last week I was a panelist on an event hosted by CEDA on the topic of strategy after the global financial crisis. One particular theme that came out of the discussions was a reduced reliance upon prediction and planning. This is significant becuase traditionally, this is what strategy is all about. There was some recognition […]

my boss won’t let me

Seth Godin wrote a piece for the Guardian a couple of years ago now, which included a list of ways to be remarkable. All of that is useful advice, and it’s a good piece that’s worth reading. The part that caught my eye though was the conclusion, because it reminded me of some of the […]

innovating with constraints

I’ve been giving further thought to the issue of public sector innovation which I discussed briefly last week. John and I do a lot of work with people in the public sector as that makes up a fairly big part of Brisbane’s economy, and I know that people often find it difficult to be innovative […]

but that was MY idea!

I’m not sure if this is just a normal evolutionary step, or if maybe it is just peculiar to a few of the firms that I’ve spoken to, but it seems like often when an organisation decides that it needs to be more innovative, the first step is to try to become more ‘creative’. Consequently, […]

iterations

Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried: Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo. There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would […]

creative spaces

I just want to pick up on a couple of ideas that I raised over the past week. The first was that of scheduling time so that you can pursue innovative activities, and the second talked about intersections between science fiction writing and economics. I thought of both of these things again when I ran […]

picking winners

Now that preseason pro gridiron games have started up again, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to play in the game-picking pool I’ve participated in over the past few seasons. I’ve had some interesting results in the pool – I’ve done extremely well in the regular season, but horribly during the playoffs. […]

more on academic blogging

I’ve written about Lilia Efimova’s excellent PhD research before, and now she’s written another really good post. It’s structured around this table: This is a really nice taxonomy, and there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added to it. I suppose I take a bit more of an evolutionary view of academic blogging. […]

googlenomics

First off, I apologise for the title of the post. I’m now declaring a moratorium on all titles of anything (especially books) that end in ‘nomics’ or ‘ology’. I just wanted to get one of my own in before I started enforcing the moratorium (still not sure how I’m going to get the publishers to […]

albatrosses v. salmon

I think that last Friday’s post on ideas being cheap ended up being less clear than I had hoped. Ironically, it’s because I tried to tackle too many ideas at once – which supports my main point, but which detracted from my ability to make it! So I’m going to have another go at just […]

ideas are cheap

I’ve had a strange week. I’ve spent a lot of it working around some network data so that I can analyse it. It’s for a consulting job, and the guy that collected it gave it to me in a state that was ….. not what I was looking for. So it’s been a bit of […]