Convergence Culture & Innovation

Mitch Joel points to this excellent video by Henry Jenkins, which outlines some of the key points from his book Convergence Culture: Mitch uses this to point out the importance of storytelling in marketing: The brands that win are the brands that tell a great story. When it comes to transmedia storytelling, the brands that […]

I Could Have Done That!

Nancy Duarte beautifully tells the story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and how he won the right to build the Dome for the magnificent Cathedral in Florence. It’s a terrific story, and you should go read it – it’s ok, I’ll wait. … So, the climax of the story is that Brunelleschi does something clever […]

Grab Bag: Constraints, Change & Networks

Three posts jumped out at me today, so I thought I’d share them with you and add some thoughts: First, John Borthwick wrote a fascinating and thoughtful review of the iPad. He says that the native applications that will make it a genuinely unique device haven’t emerged yet, but that when they do, they will […]

Innovate What You Know? part 2

Here’s an actual conversation I had a few years ago with a programmer for whom I was doing some work: Tim: I did some usability testing on your website. Tim’s Friend: Great! Tim: There are some problems though – it renders poorly on Netscape and looks like garbage on a Mac. Tim’s Friend: I don’t […]

Innovate What You Know?

Here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently – are we more innovative when we focus on solving our own problems? As Matt put it on the 37 Signals, there’s a strong argument for designing what you know: I know it’s not always possible, but, when it is, pick something to work […]

Critical Mass

In a brilliant post this week, Charlie Stross asks what’s the minimum world population needed to maintain the current level of the technology available to us today. Not long ago I talked about how isolation from the mainland made Tasmanian technology go backwards for a significant period of time – this is exactly the issue […]

David Gauntlett – Making is Connecting

Here’s a great talk by David Gauntlett outlining some of the ideas from his upcoming book – it’s 9 minutes long and well worth the time: It’s a bit of a jolt to run across something that resonates so strongly with some of the ideas that we’ve been developing here. Look at his three reasons […]

The Art of the Innovator

Superconnect, the new book by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, includes this great quote from Denis Diderot in his Encyclopédie: Everything is linked together… beings are connected with each other by a chain of which… some parts are continuous, though in the greater number of points continuity escapes us… the art of the philosopher consists […]

Managing Different Creative Styles

Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation. Trying to harness this creativity within ourselves and our organisations is the first step in managing innovation as a process. Of course, this is a step that resists systematisation – as Simon Bostock points out, innovation is a cloud not a clock. In that post he […]

Events and Processes

We had winter graduations today. I really enjoy graduations. The ceremony itself is a bit tedious, but the joy and celebration of the event always makes it worth going to (plus I get to wear the puffy hat!). Sitting on stage watching the graduates get their diplomas always makes me think of the how the […]

Old Spice Guy – Innovation Must Lead to Results

I love the Old Spice Guy as much as the next man (which means, of course, that I enjoy his commercials greatly in a shared spirit of manliness and a joint appreciation of expensive magnifying glasses). The original commercial is inventive and funny, and the social-media-based campaign that they ran last week is enormously innovative. […]

Can Innovation Management be a Profession?

The importance of managing innovation as a process is one of our key themes here. Because the success of any single great idea is pretty close to impossible to predict, the best way to successfully innovate is to try a lot of things, and to manage ideas through a process. If you do this, you […]