The economy is a network. I’m Reading Smart World by Richard Ogle and he talks about a couple of the important implications of this. The networked nature of the economy tells us a lot about how innovations diffuse – particularly some the difficulties new ideas face in getting adopted. It sheds light on some questions […]
I had a meeting today with Terry Cutler, and he told me about a couple of interesting examples of business model innovation. The striking one comes from Chile. As in many other countries, Chile’s old-growth rainforest has been severely depleted through logging and land-clearing. There have been major international protests against the logging practices of […]
One topic that I’ve done quite a bit of academic research on is Innovation Systems (National, Regional and Sectoral), but strangely, I haven’t written much about it here. However, over the weekend I saw a recent report released here in Australia called Management Matters in Australia (the summary is here, and you can also download […]
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in an innovation jam organised by Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation Services – it’s been a fascinating experience. I’ve talked about jams before, but it’s been great to get deeply involved with one. I’ve been thinking about this one through the aggregate, filter and connect […]
What do you think of this? [It] is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to… memory. … [It has] slanting translucent screens, on which material can be […]
Nancy and I bought our house about three years ago. Since then, we have planted over 300 native trees and shrubs on the property. Most of those are meant to be bird-attracting, but quite a few are also supposed to attract butterflies. A couple of months ago Nancy noticed some huge caterpillars eating some of […]
Yesterday I talked about how inertia is the biggest obstacle to innovation. One way to get around this problem is to explicitly incorporate innovation into your strategy. One key aspect to doing this is to manage innovation as a portfolio. To do this, you need to invest in innovation across multiple time horizons. We tend […]
There are many candidates for the biggest obstacle to innovation. You could try lack of management support, no employee initiative, not enough good ideas, too many good ideas but no follow-through just for starters. My nominee for The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation is: Inertia All of the other examples are really excuses – but we […]
We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting. The three steps interact and reinforce each other – and successful information-based business models have all three. We can undertake business model innovation by changing our methods in these three areas, or by changing where […]
I frequently have people say something like this to me: “But my organisation can’t be innovative – we’re a service company” (or a government agency, or a university department, and so on). This is why the definition of innovation is so important. A lot of people think that their organisation isn’t innovative because they’re not […]