There was a nice interview in the Weekend Australian with Virgin’s CEO, Stephen Murphy. Quite honestly, I hadn’t heard of him and like everyone else I had assumed that Richard Branson was in total control of Virgin. Murhpy is a fairly conventional management accountant, so what is he doing at the helm of an entrepreneurial […]
A while ago I wrote a post on how standard methods of valuing business opportunities hindered innovation. Somewhat foolishly I called it “How accountants kill innovation” and it received a lot of comment from our blog readers, which was mostly very positive. Deb Schofield pointed out the uses of alternative valuation methods in her work […]
I’ve written a series of posts over the past year about connecting innovation to strategy. Looking back a these there are two main points that keep jumping out. The first of these is to recognize which of the three horizons the business is in. Innovating in Horizon 3, with the development of speculative but potentially […]
I’m always staggered by the figures on the the development of China and India. Sometimes numbers are almost too big to comprehend but a McKinsey report from 2008 gave a nice summary of the projected transformations that will occur in China before 2025. This urbanization is the biggest migration of people in world history. Approximately […]
One area of thinking around innovation that doesn’t get much attention is how ownership and governance affects the ability of an organization to be innovative. It’s an issue that’s been playing on my mind for a few years but a recent conversation has prompted me to write down some ideas. First. I’ll just outline the […]
One of the long-term themes running through the blog is how to encourage people to be more innovative. This a really tough question because the foundation of innovation is what people believe, say and do. In other words, becoming innovative is about changing the culture of the organization and this is always a long haul. […]
I had an interesting experience the other week as an editor of an innovation journal. The specifics of the story are a tale of academic corruption but in the broader sense it highlights issues about how academics should communicate their work. Tim is probably freaking out as he reads the blog title but I promised […]
After Ralph Ohr’s excellent post on innovation and human capabilites, I’ve been giving some more thought to the three horizons model and how innovation is different within the horizons. The big takeaway from Ralph’s post for me was that we need to manage innovation differently accross the horizons. In other words don’t manage an H1 […]
Tim and I have recently edited a network focussed issue of a journal called Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice. The really pleasing outcome from the submssions was the wide variety of applications that network analysis was having in the study of innovation management. We received papers from Asia, Europe and Australia and the overall standard […]
Last week Ralph Ohr left me with a challenge to think about how to use experts to get the best outcomes on making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We constantly miss disruptive changes in the operating environment and I suppose if I really knew the answer, I wouldn’t be posting it on a blog. Sometimes […]
McKinsey have just released their 2010 innovation survey. It’s a very thought-provoking read and its based on a survey of over 2000 respondents from several industries. The survey can be found on McKinseyQuarterly.com and its free to get a subscription. Many of the survey results regarding the management of innovation as a process are consistent […]
