A few years ago I had a consulting job where my task was to help a company figure out how to sell the waterless composting toilet that they invented. They had already had other consultants working on the problem, but they weren’t happy with what they got from them. The only constraint that I had […]
Scott Berkun let out the secret of innovation today in an outstanding blog post. It’s a secret that Rowan Gibson tried to let out of the bag recently, and so did Braden Kelley on Blogging Innovation. I’ve tried to tell you about it too, using both analogies and statistics. The secret idea of innovation is […]
Yesterday I talked about how the interconnectedness of our economic networks often makes it more difficult for new ideas to spread. Because our products and services are embedded within a value network, we not only have to get people excited about our innovation, we have to get others within the value network to unconnect from […]
It’s always hard to find good examples of innovative organisations to talk about in my classes. Not because there is a shortage of innovative organisations to discuss, but because people need examples from organisations that seem similar to theirs. One of the skills that I have to get better at is helping people see the […]
I’ve been talking recently about tools that you can use to link innovation to your organisation’s strategy. Jeffery Phillips explains the relationship between the two quite nicely in his post Do You Need An Innovation Strategy? So, the takeaway is this: innovation is an ENABLER to corporate strategy, and what innovation needs to succeed is […]
I’m currently reading The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur. It’s a fantastic book. This morning I ran across this quote discussing the spread of innovations: There is another reason the old pricniple persists beyond its time, an economic one. Even if a novel principle is developed and does perform better than the old, […]
How do new ideas find their place in the economy? That is one of the issues that Dennis Baron addresses in his excellent book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution. There is an excellent interview with Baron on Salon in which he outlines the argument of the book: Historically, when the new […]
I first started thinking about using twitter during a very loosely organised but wildly interesting talk from Phil Long (@RadHertz) nearly two years ago now. In the course of a one hour talk that wasn’t called ‘Cool Stuff I’m Excited About’ but should have been, Phil told us about TED talks – showing us the […]