Innovation is more than just generating ideas. Most organisations have more than enough ideas. They might need better ones, but usually they need to get better at selecting ideas, executing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The irony of this situation is that there are a lot of techniques around (and consultants that use them!) designed to […]
I had a chance to catch up with a friend last week who recently changed jobs. He is passionate about innovation, and his previous job title had been “Innovation Champion”, a position seemingly custom-designed for his skills and interests. So why did he switch jobs? That was one of the topics that we discussed. It […]
Here’s an exercise in connecting up ideas based on a few innovation-related quotes that have caught my attention over the past few days: If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. That’s Umberto Eco, via Stowe Boyd. This reminded me of a point made […]
Tom Fishburne makes brilliant cartoons about marketing and innovation, and the one in today’s blog post really rang true for me: You should read Tom’s post, because he raises some important points about the problems with focus groups. I recently talked about some of my frustrating experiences with focus group research as well. The danger […]
I’m reading Douglas Rushkoff’s book on innovation called Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. It has some intriguing ideas. Here is how he outlines the basic premise of the book: Just last year, I got a phone call from the CEO of a home electronics chain, asking if I could devise […]
Grant McCracken’s latest book Chief Culture Officer is a really interesting one. The basic premise is that for businesses to succeed, they have to be in touch with culture. In defining culture, McCracken doesn’t make much of a distinction between high-brow and low-brow – he’s more interested in the things that real people are actually […]
Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is […]
I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. […]
Steven Johnson is a fantastic author, and his next book is about innovation. It is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and it comes out next month. It is the result of a few years of study, where he has investigated creative, innovative environments. He explains the key points from the book in this TED […]
If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]