Are Creativity, Entrepreneurship & Innovation the Same Thing?

There’s a difference between having a great idea, and creating value with that idea. Creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation are all words that are used to describe the value creation part of the equation. So do they mean the same thing?

Here’s Why Many Innovation Initiatives Fail

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. […]

What Will Make Nate Silver Blow Up? Political Innovation

The emergence of the poll aggregators, especially Nate Silver, was one of the stories of the election for me. While these methods are a huge advance, there are still ways that they can fail. The key cause might be political innovation.

The Attacker’s Dilemma

The Bing It One challenge would have been a great tool in 1998. Unfortunately, now that Google dominates search, an improved algorithm isn’t enough to get people to switch. This is the Attacker’s Dilemma: unless you bring a major performance improvement, there is no point in directly attacking a strong incumbent in their area of strength.

The Problem With Google

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.