Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal […]
Here’s an alarming stat from Charles Baden-Fuller: 2/3 of companies have not articulated their business model. Yikes! This video has an interview with him in which he discusses this statistic and some of other business models issues that arise from the articles in a special issue of Long Range Planning which has twenty articles on […]
If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]
One of the key ideas in The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison is that changes in the business environment are leading to a situation where rather than creating great ideas and then pushing them out to the world, we need to take advantage of knowledge flows by pulling […]
Here’s a strange thing that I’ve noticed: even when we’re talking about innovation, people like to be told what to do. Doesn’t this strike you as odd? The people that are the most interested in doing something new seem to like being told what to do, just like everyone else. I just revisited a great […]
Ryan Freitas recently wrote a post called 35 Lessons in 35 Years – there are some good tips here. One that particularly caught my eye is this one: Debates over terminology and semantics are for archivists and academics. If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than […]
Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]
Three blog posts that caught my eye this week demonstrate three different ways that you can fail at innovation: Ignore the small innovations: James Todhunter wrote an excellent post yesterday defending thinking about improvements as innovation. You should read the whole post, but here is a highlight: Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all […]
There’s a good post today by Michael Schrage concerning the recent article making the rounds claiming that America is suffering a creativity crisis. In short, he’s not buying that proposition. Here is one of the key quotes: This point is vital: genuine creativity isn’t about ideas. It’s about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and […]
Hutch Carpenter just wrote a nice post outlining 25 different definitions of innovation. This is an interesting exercise. He breaks the definitions down into five sub-categories, which all reflect slightly different takes on the nature of innovation. I find this interesting because I frequently hear people discount the importance of innovation by saying that it […]
