Over the weekend I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thought-provoking book The Bed of Procrustres. It’s a very slow read disguised as a quick read – it’s ~100 pages of aphorisms. You can go through it quickly, but most of them both require and reward deeper thought. I’ve picked out some which provide some insight into […]
Here is something I ran across yesterday that confuses me quite a bit. Take a look at this graph from the Economist: The thing that confuses me is that I often hear from managers and others here in Australia that the reason that their organisation isn’t very innovative is that they are risk averse. But […]
Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation. If this is the case, how do we get better at it? I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. […]
What is the innovation that led to civilization? There are some interesting answers to this question in Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris. As part of his research, Morris has developed a Social Development Index, which he uses to track the progress of civilizations from 14000 BC to present. The index tracks […]
I’m currently attending the XIIth European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. It’s much less academic than most of the conferences I go to, which is a refreshing change. I ran into a problem yesterday, though, which got me thinking. I gave my workshop on the first day. About 20 people came to it, and they […]
One of the major obstacles to innovation is switching costs. Here’s a story that shows why: after 120 years, the main library at Princeton University is finally converting all of it’s books to the Library of Congress book classification system. This is remarkable for several reasons. The main one is that the Library of Congress […]
First up, from John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money: The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. As I’ve said before, when you’re innovating, you have to break connections before you can make new ones. This is a big part of […]
I did a workshop last week with a group working on improving innovation within the Australian school system. I played my normal role of grenade-thrower, errr, thought-provoker on the topic of innovation, while working with eight other people that all have backgrounds in education. As the day went on, I noticed something interesting. In sessions […]
One of my friends reminded me today about Louis CK’s great discussion of the benefits of innovation: That might not seem like an innovation discussion, but it sure is. One of the difficulties with innovating is that it takes so long to get an idea into circulation, but once it’s there, it gets taken for […]
In an excellent article on the impact of twitter on the Arab Spring revolutions, Blake Hounshell makes an important point about twitter itself: But five years since its founding, Twitter has hit a critical mass of activists and casual observers on the ground, journalists in the office and in the field, and analysts behind their […]
I recently read an article on BNet by Geoffrey James called “Top 5 Totally Useless Business Experts“. James usually writes an interesting column, and even in this one he makes some good points. But he also uses a form of argument that is deeply flawed. Here is part of the post: Useless Expert #1: Management […]
The first clocks using mechanical movements kept time by regulating a flow of water. For seven hundred years or so, everyone knew that these clocks were invented in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. No one is quite sure where exactly, as several cities at roughly the same time erected central clock towers. However, […]