In a series of journal articles, Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman have talked about the importance of being an ambidextrous organisation in order to succeed at innovation. To be ambidextrous, organisations have to be good at both exploration and exploitation. All this sounds a bit academic, so here it is in clearer terms (I hope!): […]
Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention: The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that […]
There was a nice interview in the Weekend Australian with Virgin’s CEO, Stephen Murphy. Quite honestly, I hadn’t heard of him and like everyone else I had assumed that Richard Branson was in total control of Virgin. Murhpy is a fairly conventional management accountant, so what is he doing at the helm of an entrepreneurial […]
A while ago I wrote a post on how standard methods of valuing business opportunities hindered innovation. Somewhat foolishly I called it “How accountants kill innovation” and it received a lot of comment from our blog readers, which was mostly very positive. Deb Schofield pointed out the uses of alternative valuation methods in her work […]
Google Australia lost two key people over the past couple of weeks – Lars Rasmussen, one of the developers of Google Maps and Google Wave, and Kate Vale, their first employee in Australia. It seems like the main motivation in both cases was the possibly premature death of Wave, but Vale made some comments that […]
If you are even remotely interested in innovation (and how would you end up here if you aren’t?), then this talk by R.A. Mashelkar is worth 19 minutes of your time: Mashelkar talks about the importance of innovating for everyone – of getting more for more for less. To do this, he talks about the […]
A while ago John and I did in-depth individual interviews with almost all of the senior managers of a firm about their innovation process. We ran into a striking paradox while doing so. One person said to us “This company needs to get rid of innovation.” He said this after he had explained all of […]
Think for a minute about all of the innovations that had to take place for you to read this sentence. There are lots – computers, semi-conductors, the internet, and the world-wide web just for starters. Where did this innovation come from? Many firms have played important roles in these breakthrough innovations. But another important player […]
