I am always skeptical of ‘everything is different now’ style arguments. If we think about the history of business, we have been trying to manage in a state of turmoil going back at least to the start of the industrial revolution, possibly longer. The introduction of railways, the telegraph, electricity and the automobile were all […]
I love the story of the development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). It was developed by Xerox in their Palo Alto Research Center. They used it on their first commercial home PC, the Xerox Star, but that didn’t sell very well. While the history is a bit muddled, Apple definitely knew of the work, […]
What’s the best way to measure innovation? Many organisations use only a single measure, like patents, or R&D investment, or revenue from new products/services. The problem with this is that innovation is complex, multi-dimensional, and difficult to capture – especially with only one metric. Take a look at this video from a post about the […]
Why do so many organisations focus on generating lots of ideas when the try to become more innovative? Innovation is a three-step process – generating great ideas, selecting and executing the best of these ideas, and getting your ideas to spread. Most organisations fail in the last two steps, not in generating ideas. One reason […]
One of my research partners invited me along to a show last night called Elvis Meets Buddy. It was a great evening, with a lot of interesting discussion of innovation, New Zealand wine and other interesting topics over dinner. Then we went to see the show, which was also pretty fun. It was a guy […]
For a couple of years I was the manager in charge of a self-managing marketing team (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that actually meant!). My first year with them, we ran the most successful campaign in the history of the organisation. There were many factors that came into play that led […]
I’ve run across a number of things that relate to recent posts, so I thought I’d put together a quick grab-bag selection today. Yesterday I talked about Naomi Simson and innovation at RedBalloon. One thing that I forgot to mention is that in addition to growing incredibly quickly and being very successful financially, RedBalloon is […]
I saw Naomi Simson, the founder and CEO of RedBalloon, give a talk at the Future Summit sponsored by the Australian Davos Connection. It was a fantastic talk, and she had a number of interesting insights on the innovation process. This talk gets at a lot of the same issues that she touched on last […]
Check out this talk by Jeremy Rifkin: I’ve talked before about how innovation needs to be empathy-driven, and Rifkin’s talk illustrates why. We are inherently empathic – and many ideas spread not through persuasion, but through copying. This point is made emphaticaly by Mark Earls in his terrific book Herd. Earls talks about what this […]
I’ve talked before about the importance of experiments in the innovation process. Experiments are essential for two reasons. First, they allow us to be more confident that our ideas will work. If we run a successful small experiment, that gives us some idea of how the innovation might work as we try to scale it […]