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 tools do you need to use to be successful in the social era? The fact is that the tools don’t matter. The two keys to success are: do awesome work, and connect with people.
How should respond to potentially disruptive innovations? If the first response is ridicule, followed by aggression and bargaining, then you could be in trouble.
If you are using a tool like the Business Model Canvas, where does innovation fit? The answer depends on your strategy. I use The Innovation Matrix to outline several different strategies, and how the business models for these will be different.
Business needs more art, as simple as that. Art teaches many critical skills, including risk taking, dealing with ambiguities, discovering patterns, and the use of analogy and metaphor. And we need all of those.
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.
What we can accomplish is enabled by how we view the world. It’s also constrained by how we view the world. Figuring out how to change our frame of view is a powerful innovation tool.
What are the implications of the new ways that technology allows people to connect and interact? Nilofer Merchant explores this in her book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra – it’s a good book with some important lessons.
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.
There is often a gap between what we do daily and our long-term objectives. This gap can kill strategy, and it can kill innovation. We apply some lessons from South Park to figure out how to successfully bridge this gap.
People often think it’s weird when they hear that I study innovation – even people in very innovative jobs. The biggest reason for this is mistaking invention for innovation. If you do this, then studying innovation makes no sense at all – what can you learn about the flash of insight, the stroke of genius, […]