I wrote a post last week about the importance of connecting different groups as a precursor for innovation and the special role that some people have as bridges between disparate knowledge communities where ‘structural holes’ exist within the network between the communities. After writing this post I went looking for more research on the psychological […]
A while ago Tim wrote an excellent post on the difference between networking and network structure. It’s one of my favorite posts and it’s among the most popular on the blog. Just to recap the main idea from that post – some network structures are better at supporting innovation and we need to understand how […]
Our post and press release on how accounting kills innovation has generated some really nice debate. Although I had a lot of criticism from my academic colleagues in accounting and finance, most of that was from people who hadn’t actually read the research paper. One of the biggest objections was that innovation academics like me […]
We have been following a bit of a theme lately on valuation methods and selecting innovation projects. This was started with my post on some research that we have been doing on valuing innovation projects. Using surveys and quantitative analysis the study showed that traditional valuation methods such as net present value inhibited innovation. However, […]
In a recent post Tim mentioned a comment by a representative of an Australian university tech transfer office at an investor’s conference the other week. As Tim says, he was declaring the death of open innovation and a return to ‘sensible’ IP strategy, where we patent everything and then try to sell it or license […]
I have a confession to make. Although I have been teaching business strategy and innovation management for over ten years there is always a doubt in my mind over the value of what I bring into the classroom. If you looked at my collection of PowerPoint slides and readings, you would see a bag of […]
This isn’t going to be one of those rants against ‘beancounters’. We have actually collected and analysed data which tells us that traditional accounting and valuation methods will damage innovation performance. To be fair to my accounting collegues (some of my best friends are accountants) the main conclusion from our study is that we need […]
There were some good (all reactions are good!) reactions to the blog post on the problems of using patent counts to measure innovation so I thought I would follow up with some evidence on patents and intellectual property (IP) strategy. Conventional thinking is that any IP generated within an organization should be carefully guarded by […]
One of the major themes running through the blog is that innovation is a complex process made from different activities. Tim and I have pushed this pretty hard because innovation is often confused with invention (the generation of an idea resulting in a new physical process or thing). There is a lot to be gained […]
I was in a business presentation session with a large engineering firm last week, which got me thinking about what I like to see in new product strategies. In this instance, the firm was considering a move into the renewable energy industry, based upon how big this industry might be in the years ahead. Now […]
You have probably heard of the dark matter puzzle in astronomy. I don’t remember that much from the astronomy unit that I took as part of my science degree but dark matter is one of those big questions that just gets undergrad students thinking. Put simply, the universe is really heavy (!) but if we […]
There was a bit of interest in the blog piece that I did on responding to change so I thought I would follow this up with a quick discussion of a really good model for understanding inertia and how resistance to innovation develops. One of my favorite research studies on excellence and inertia is by […]
