Three Things You Can Do With a Business Model

Yesterday I looked at Eight Models of Business Models and Why They’re Important. However, in writing about how different people conceive of business models, I didn’t have enough space to address the really critical issue with them: What can you actually do with a business model? Once you’ve defined your business model, here are three […]

Eight Models of Business Models, & Why They’re Important

The term Business Model is one that gets thrown around a lot these days. Even though it might sound like a buzzword to you, it’s important to understand what a business model is, and how they are useful. One of the confusing things about the business model concept is that there are a wide variety […]

There’s No Such Thing as Information Overload

The size of your inbox or your RSS feed or your twitter stream might all argue otherwise, but there’s no such thing as information overload. Or, at least, if there is, it’s not new. Check this out: As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can […]

Innovation Betterness

Why does your firm exist? To maximize shareholder value? No – that’s the dumbest idea in the world. To reduce transaction costs? No – that’s another economic model that doesn’t have much grounding in reality. In fact, if you ask this of most firms, they don’t have a very good answer. There have been a […]

Do Posts Asking if Something Kills Innovation Kill Innovation?

One really good way to get traffic to your blog is to take a shot at a broad class of people, and do it with a catchy title. The latest version comes from FastCoDesign, which published the post “Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation?” Gregg Fraley and Jeffrey Phillips wrote quick responses, both affirming the negative. […]

Four Ways You Can Be More Innovative

Innovation is the process of idea management. This means that to innovate effectively you need to have great ideas, select the best ones and execute them, and then get those executed ideas to spread. All three steps are interdependent, and you need to be good at all three to innovate effectively. Today I’m interested in […]

When is it OK to Ignore Innovation?

The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so. If you think of the last 10% of that time, a fair bit has happened. There have periods of major global warming, and a few ice ages. There have been asteroid strikes, and other natural disasters too numerous to count. Continents that were one […]

Four Ideas Triggered by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors, and in reading a couple of his books recently, I ran across several quotes made me think about innovation. In large part, this is because nearly everything I encounter makes me think about innovation one or another. Nevertheless, here are four thoughts triggered by Murakami. The first […]

Innovation is Impossible

James Altucher recently suggested that “Eat All You Want of the Foods You Love and Still Lose Weight” would be a great book title – that no matter what was inside, it would sell. It’s easy to see why. Many of us like to eat all we want of the foods we love, and we […]

Business Model Analysis & the Link to Strategy

What’s the best way to use business model analysis in larger organisations? Steve Blank has done some outstanding work looking at how Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas can be used in entrepreneurial startups (see also this post and the ones that follow it). But there are still some questions about how to best use the […]

Innovation Through Subtraction

I don’t like focus groups. I’ve found the information that you get from them to be too shallow to be useful. However, this doesn’t mean that when we’re innovating we should just pursue whatever ideas drift across our minds. Steve Jobs was quoted last year about how Apple doesn’t use focus groups. A number of […]

Innovation Obstacle: Gumption Traps

Imagine that you have a great idea for how to make things work better at your job – it shouldn’t take too much effort, I’m sure you have plenty. Now think about an idea like that you had, but never acted upon – what happened? You probably thought of all the obstacles to executing the […]