I think that a lot of time when we talk about the importance of failure in innovation, people think about big, major failures like the Ford Edsel and the Apple Newton. But the whole point of driving innovation through experimenting is to figure out ideas that won’t work early. We want to find our failures […]
Earlier this week I did a talk on innovation for a local firm that was the opening session of their strategy-making work for the year. During the questions, one person asked for suggestions about a specific initiative that they had been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years, but which just […]
There is a big problem that organisations often face: they want to be innovative, but they also want to minimise risk. This creates a certain amount of tension. If I had to pick the number one thing that I would recommend to organisations that are trying to become more innovative, it would be this: experiment. […]
We already know that giving stuff away can be an important part of building an effective revenue generation mechanism – and it seems to work quite well in publishing in particular (even academic publishing!). Two of the strongest proponents for giving away some version of work for free are Seth Godin and Cory Doctorow, and […]
Dealing with uncertainty is one of the most important skills for a manager. How can we teach this? By working on problems where we don’t know the answer in advance.
Ideas change the world. It’s up to us to make sure they change things for the better.
If we make thinking and acting two separate things, we are much more likely to fail. We have to figure out how to do both simultaneously. Here are some thoughts on how to do this.
If you feel disconnected from life, or too wrapped up in tech, or too busy to work on important things, you can solve your problem by walking.
All along I thought the magic in lean startup was customer development. I was wrong. The magic is hypothesis testing.
As reiterated by Tim Kastelle in the previous post, it’s imperative to distinguish discovery from execution when it comes to startup and innovation activities – bearing in mind that both purposes are complementary and equally important. This suggests following a dual approach for balanced corporate innovation management. The main objective of dual approaches is to sufficiently separate exploration-/discovery-oriented initiatives from exploitation-/execution-oriented ones […]
The first time I was advocating the idea of a dual innovation approach, here also referred to as organizational ambidexterity, is now more than 5 years ago. At this time it became pretty obvious to me that this concept – academically worn-out but deficiently or not at all put into practice in most organizations – would be of increasing importance […]
The second part of Ralph Ohr’s guest post on the current big issues in innovation management, with comments from Tim.
