The more I study business in general, and innovation in particular, the more clear it is that we don’t do a very good job of taking time into account. This leads to a lot of problems – management focused on quarterly results at the expense of building a long-term success, innovations that spread quickly and […]
One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and […]
One problem that I consistently run into when I talk to people about innovation is that they often feel stifled. How can you be innovative when you’re operating in a culture that isn’t innovative? This is a consistent problem for people working in the public service, as well for those in industries that seem relatively […]
How do you know how good you are at innovation? One of the tools that we have found very useful for assessing innovation within organisations is the Innovation Value Chain. The tool was developed by Morten Hansen and Julien Birkinshaw and published in an article called The Innovation Value Chain in Harvard Business Review in […]
Yesterday I talked about some of the benefits and challenges of distributed innovation within organisations. One of the biggest challenges you face when you make everyone responsible for innovation is this – how do you get new ideas to spread throughout the broader group? This is part of what John and I are studying in […]
One of the more alarming aspects of the global financial crisis has been the corresponding downturn in innovation-related spending by firms. Obviously, if you lost your job or your house or your retirement savings this issue doesn’t seem so critical, but I think it is important even so. The reason is that future jobs and […]
One of the critical elements of managing innovation is linking your innovation efforts to your overall strategy. Over the weekend, I talked about how you can use the Strategy Diamond by Hambrick & Fredrickson to help achieve this coordination. Another tool that you can use is the Business Models idea, something that we’ve discussed here […]
Intellectual Property rights encourage innovation, right? Right? Well, not necessarily. Actually, people that study this empirically consistently find that the evidence suggests that they don’t. Here’s a fantastic talk by James Boyle discussing his book The Public Domain, which addresses this exact issue: (Thanks to Gerd Leonhard for the tip on this talk) Boyle’s book […]
I just read a great post by John Borthwick which reviews the upcoming book about google by Ken Auletta. I encourage you to read the entire post, as I’m only going to focus on this part of it: What about a corporate statement of intent like Google’s “Don’t be evil”? “Don’t be evil” resonated with […]
Journalism is a fascinating business model innovation case study these days – at least if you’re on the outside looking in. Journalism must exist in some form or another for democracy to work, yet newspapers and other journalism outlets are struggling terribly right now. The availability of inexpensive digital content has made it much harder […]