The economist Rudi Dornbusch succinctly describes the way that ideas spread: Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could. It’s the innovation S-Curve in words, this is what that looks like graphically: And the problem is that the value for X is larger […]
I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson. It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table […]
The Shift Index 2011 is out now, and as with the previous two editions, it is a must-read. I am always skeptical of “everything is different now” type arguments, but in this series of reports, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and a number of other contributors have done a fantastic job of documenting exactly what […]
There’s a big problem with innovation: ideas spread much more slowly than we expect them to. Ideas follow an S-Curve as they spread that looks like this: They pick up steam very slowly, until they either die off or hit a tipping point and take off. The slow build-up is the time I’ve indicated as […]
There are two popular quotes that often get used when discussing innovation that were never actually said or written by the people to whom they are attributed. Despite the fact that they are fake quotes, there are still things that we can learn from them. The first common quote is attributed to Henry Ford: If […]
How can you tell when there is an opportunity for business model innovation? Recent events in higher education might give us a good indication. There are a few issues in university education these days. The main one is that education is information based, and over the past 20 years we have seen nearly every single […]
I had lunch a while back with two executives from an organisation that the Business School does a fair bit work with. They wanted to improve innovation and that’s what triggered our meeting. We talked for a couple of hours about what was happening in their organisation. We talked about innovation as a process, the […]
What is the most common mistake that I see when people try to implement management tools or frameworks? By far the most common is mistaking using the tool for getting the outcome you are looking for. I have been doing some consulting work recently where we are using the Business Model Canvas to develop a […]
With Kodak in big trouble this week, a lot of people have been reflecting on what went wrong. While many are using this an opportunity to talk about bad management, or missing the digital photography trend, I think there’s more to the Kodak story than this. Kodak’s problems illustrate two very important innovation problems. The […]
By Greg Satell (mostly) and Tim Kastelle Who wouldn’t like to be Apple? They make great products, consumers love them, competitors fear them and they make a ton of money.Yet for all that’s been written about Apple, nobody’s been able to emulate them. What’s more, little more than a decade ago, they were on the […]