Bad Filtering Kills Businesses

If your business model is based on information, and whose isn’t these days, then you need to be able to aggregate, filter and connect. While reflecting on the death of Borders Books, I thought of three stories of filtering in retail. First Story: Tower Records In the mid-80s, I went in to the Tower Records […]

Ideas Are Something You Do

Here is today’s exercise in connecting up ideas. First off, there’s this summary of the TEDGlobal conference from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter: Then, there’s this quote from Seth Godin at the 99% Conference: What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship. Godin expands on that […]

Carmageddon – Change is Hard, Except When It’s Not

The world failed to end over the weekend. In Los Angeles, at least, this was a bit surprising, as there were many dire predictions made about the impact of closing down the 405 Freeway for a weekend of construction. Many of the key issues are summarised in this remix from Downfall (which is funny, but […]

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers – “Experiment. Go!”

Experimenting is the key to innovation success. The new book Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is worth a read (there’s tons of information about the book, and some great videos here). The book tells lessons that Sivers learned while running his website CDBaby. My first thought in reading the experiences of one person is […]

Innovation Must Create Value, not Novelty

Is it possible to be too innovative? Helen Walters points to an interesting post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen called Over-Innovation Makes U.S. Firms Suck At Sustainability, which argues that it is. They argue that the high levels of US carbon emissions are due to too much innovation: The heart of the […]

How Can We Break Out of Our Thinking Ruts?

Nancy and I just got back from an excellent trip to Italy. We each had presentations at different events there, and we also had a chance to take some time to see the sights. One of the things that we got to see in Rome was the Colosseum. Here’s a shot of us while we […]

Our Job is to Invent the Future, revisited

If we’re trying to innovate, our job is to invent the future. That’s why I was struck by this quote from Ray Kurzweil from a few years ago: I’m an inventor, and I started looking at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the […]

Innovation Lessons from Orson Welles

I’m still in Italy, where one of the topics of conversation is the recent special issue of The Economist, which discussed some of the problems that the economy here has experienced during the Berlusconi years (the special articles are summarised and linked here). Paul Kedrosky points to a response to this issue, where a reader […]

There Are No Innovation Shortcuts

Three things that caught my eye yesterday: An excellent post by Helen Walters, which included this section: “The innovation shortcut is yours for the taking.” — This quote, from Gabor George Burt’s piece Why the Best Innovations Are About Relevance, Not Invention is the kind of statement to make blood run cold. Promising the earth […]

What’s Your Skype?

In his latest book Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott (along with Anthony Williams) argues that there are two types of business models in existence today: those that have been disrupted by the internet, and those that are waiting to be disrupted by the internet (summarised in an article from the Wall Street Journal). I’m not 100% convinced […]

Scarcity as the “Mother of Invention”

Can we decouple growth from consumption of resources? Guest post by: James Bradfield Moody Co-Author, The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited World Over the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we have seen economic growth strongly coupled with the consumption of more and more resources.  The more we grew, the more […]

Searching for Unicorns: The Innovation Matrix

Thanks to everyone that has made comments and suggestions on The Innovation Matrix Reloaded. I’ll continue to incorporate your thoughts and ideas as the concept evolves. With that in mind, today I’d like to ask for some help. First, let’s take a look at the Innovation Matrix again – I’ve highlighted the two categories I […]