McKinsey have just released their 2010 innovation survey. It’s a very thought-provoking read and its based on a survey of over 2000 respondents from several industries. The survey can be found on McKinseyQuarterly.com and its free to get a subscription. Many of the survey results regarding the management of innovation as a process are consistent […]
We know that the innovation process is risky. Nothing can guarantee the success of something new and failure is probably a good sign of a healthy innovation system. Without failures, no innovations. Of course, failure for its own sake is a ‘career-limiting move’ but successful innovation managers take the view that trials and rapid prototyping […]
Ryan Freitas recently wrote a post called 35 Lessons in 35 Years – there are some good tips here. One that particularly caught my eye is this one: Debates over terminology and semantics are for archivists and academics. If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than […]
Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]
Three blog posts that caught my eye this week demonstrate three different ways that you can fail at innovation: Ignore the small innovations: James Todhunter wrote an excellent post yesterday defending thinking about improvements as innovation. You should read the whole post, but here is a highlight: Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all […]
There’s a good post today by Michael Schrage concerning the recent article making the rounds claiming that America is suffering a creativity crisis. In short, he’s not buying that proposition. Here is one of the key quotes: This point is vital: genuine creativity isn’t about ideas. It’s about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and […]
I had an interesting conversation with someone from the government sector whose job is to support innovation and increase the number of innovating firms in the economy. While I can see why governments want to foster innovation, I think that his job is extremely difficult because he is actually trying to affect the strategy of […]
Hutch Carpenter just wrote a nice post outlining 25 different definitions of innovation. This is an interesting exercise. He breaks the definitions down into five sub-categories, which all reflect slightly different takes on the nature of innovation. I find this interesting because I frequently hear people discount the importance of innovation by saying that it […]
I wrote a post last week about why experts will often overlook disruptive innovations. Today I’m going to extend this argument by saying that crowds and markets are just as good at missing these step changes, but first I’ll talk about the inspiration for the post. Last night was the Australian federal election and I […]
On Christmas Day last year, I posted a list of ten great free e-books for innovators. Today isn’t as festive, but I have another ten great free e-books that can help you become more innovative. Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation, and one of the ways to do this is to read […]
Nina Paley has a great series of comics that look at Intellectual Property issues. Here is one of them: The strips make some good points about IP. This one in particular is interesting – it addresses an increasingly common problem. Patents were originally designed to help knowledge spread – by encouraging inventors to disclose their […]
