Monthly Archives: September 2010

Posted on

The Best IP Strategy Depends on What Your Overall Strategy Is

by

One of the points that I try to stress when I’m teaching about innovation is that there is no single approach to managing innovation that is right for everyone. In all cases, you have a series of choices available to you, and which choice is right depends on what you are trying to achieve. In […]

Posted on

Expand the Market for Innovation Success

by

I’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Xerox a few times recently, and I thought it would be worthwhile to actually write it up. The key points from the rise are these: Chester Carlson took out a patent on the process of xerography in 1937. After failing to commercialise it successfully, he […]

Posted on

Don’t Use the Same Network for Every Stage of Innovation

by

Tim and I have recently edited a network focussed issue of a journal called Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice. The really pleasing outcome from the submssions was the wide variety of applications that network analysis was having in the study of innovation management. We received papers from Asia, Europe and Australia and the overall standard […]

Posted on

Dissatisfaction Drives Innovation

by

What makes us innovative? In many cases, it is an almost overwhelming level of dissatisfaction with current state of the world. I thought of that today when I was looking at some of the feedback from the people that were in my executive education course a couple of weeks ago. One of the comments was […]

Posted on

Go That Way, Really Fast

by

Today I ran across a thought provoking post by Jeff Atwood with the same title as this one via Fred Wilson’s blog. In it, he explains how his firm’s entire strategy is summed up by this clip from Better Off Dead: If for some reason you can’t see the video (or if your attention span […]

Posted on

Seek Conflicting Views to Improve Innovation

by

Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal […]

Posted on

What if We Don’t Know What Our Business Model Is?

by

Here’s an alarming stat from Charles Baden-Fuller: 2/3 of companies have not articulated their business model. Yikes! This video has an interview with him in which he discusses this statistic and some of other business models issues that arise from the articles in a special issue of Long Range Planning which has twenty articles on […]

Posted on

Our Job is to Invent the Future

by

If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]

Posted on

Pulling in Ideas to Improve Innovation

by

One of the key ideas in The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison is that changes in the business environment are leading to a situation where rather than creating great ideas and then pushing them out to the world, we need to take advantage of knowledge flows by pulling […]

Posted on

Write Your Own Map

by

Here’s a strange thing that I’ve noticed: even when we’re talking about innovation, people like to be told what to do. Doesn’t this strike you as odd? The people that are the most interested in doing something new seem to like being told what to do, just like everyone else. I just revisited a great […]

Posted on

Is Innovation Good or Bad? Yes!

by

An article by Pat Lencioni in Business Week called Why Companies Need Less Innovation has generated a bit of controversy, at least in the part of the internet that I live in. His basic premise is that it is a mistake to try to make an entire company innovative – instead, it is better to […]