I had a chance to catch up with a friend last week who recently changed jobs. He is passionate about innovation, and his previous job title had been “Innovation Champion”, a position seemingly custom-designed for his skills and interests. So why did he switch jobs? That was one of the topics that we discussed. It […]
Here’s an exercise in connecting up ideas based on a few innovation-related quotes that have caught my attention over the past few days: If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. That’s Umberto Eco, via Stowe Boyd. This reminded me of a point made […]
Tom Fishburne makes brilliant cartoons about marketing and innovation, and the one in today’s blog post really rang true for me: You should read Tom’s post, because he raises some important points about the problems with focus groups. I recently talked about some of my frustrating experiences with focus group research as well. The danger […]
I’m reading Douglas Rushkoff’s book on innovation called Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. It has some intriguing ideas. Here is how he outlines the basic premise of the book: Just last year, I got a phone call from the CEO of a home electronics chain, asking if I could devise […]
Adam Thierer wrote a terrific post today exploring his ongoing major theme comparing internet optimists and pessimists. He has written a series of very interesting posts assessing the arguments of the pessimists that think that the impact of the internet on society is generally bad (e.g. Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier), and the optimists […]
Grant McCracken’s latest book Chief Culture Officer is a really interesting one. The basic premise is that for businesses to succeed, they have to be in touch with culture. In defining culture, McCracken doesn’t make much of a distinction between high-brow and low-brow – he’s more interested in the things that real people are actually […]
Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is […]
I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. […]
We’ve written a few posts criticising some of the more common innovation metrics in use, so I thought it would be smart to outline some ways that we can actually develop more effective metrics. Here’s a story that might help: A while ago I was in charge of managing student recruitment for a tertiary education […]