Where You Are Still Matters

Yesterday I got fed up with reading about music-sharing services like Pandora and Spotify, because neither is currently available in Australia – quite frustrating. After some hunting around, I finally found deezer.com, a French music-streaming site.* I listened to the Punk Rock radio channel on the site, and discovered a fair number of French bands […]

Ideas Are Cheap

I’ve said it before. Andrew Hargadon has said it too – and in doing so he quotes Malcolm Gladwell saying it too. Now one of my favourite current authors Charlie Stross says it as well: ideas are cheap. Ideas are cheap. They’re so damn easy to come by that I have difficulty understanding why so […]

The Core Challenge in Managing Innovation

A consistent point of controversy is whether or not innovation can be managed. If you think of innovation only as generating new, novel ideas, then it is very difficult to see how this could be actively managed (although there are in fact things we can do to encourage and improve creative thinking, so even here […]

Chance Favours the Connected Mind

Steven Johnson is a fantastic author, and his next book is about innovation. It is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and it comes out next month. It is the result of a few years of study, where he has investigated creative, innovative environments. He explains the key points from the book in this TED […]

Why Making Mistakes is a Key Innovation Skill

One innovation topic that consistently gets people worked up concerns the value of failure. Some say that you have to embrace failure when you are trying to innovate. This makes some sense, since part of the innovation process is controlled experimentation. However, that whole ’embracing failure’ concept tends to rub people the wrong way – […]

Where You Start Determines Where You Finish

What’s the best way to win with our new ideas? One avenue to follow is to try to make sure that these ideas don’t just improve on what’s currently out there, but instead they carve out a new space for themselves. But how? The Design of Business by Roger Martin has some suggestions. It’s a […]

Vote for Three Good Innovation Bloggers

Braden Kelly is running a contest right now to identify the top 40 innovation bloggers at his site Blogging Innovation. The site itself is a great resource – it compiles the best posts from a long list of innovation bloggers, publishing 3-4 high quality posts per day. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. […]

The Best IP Strategy Depends on What Your Overall Strategy Is

One of the points that I try to stress when I’m teaching about innovation is that there is no single approach to managing innovation that is right for everyone. In all cases, you have a series of choices available to you, and which choice is right depends on what you are trying to achieve. In […]

Expand the Market for Innovation Success

I’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Xerox a few times recently, and I thought it would be worthwhile to actually write it up. The key points from the rise are these: Chester Carlson took out a patent on the process of xerography in 1937. After failing to commercialise it successfully, he […]

Dissatisfaction Drives Innovation

What makes us innovative? In many cases, it is an almost overwhelming level of dissatisfaction with current state of the world. I thought of that today when I was looking at some of the feedback from the people that were in my executive education course a couple of weeks ago. One of the comments was […]

Go That Way, Really Fast

Today I ran across a thought provoking post by Jeff Atwood with the same title as this one via Fred Wilson’s blog. In it, he explains how his firm’s entire strategy is summed up by this clip from Better Off Dead: If for some reason you can’t see the video (or if your attention span […]