I am always skeptical of ‘everything is different now’ style arguments. If we think about the history of business, we have been trying to manage in a state of turmoil going back at least to the start of the industrial revolution, possibly longer. The introduction of railways, the telegraph, electricity and the automobile were all […]
Check out this talk by Jeremy Rifkin: I’ve talked before about how innovation needs to be empathy-driven, and Rifkin’s talk illustrates why. We are inherently empathic – and many ideas spread not through persuasion, but through copying. This point is made emphaticaly by Mark Earls in his terrific book Herd. Earls talks about what this […]
Nothing could be less innovative than planting a garden at your house, right? Maybe – but maybe not. Take a look at this: It’s a Green Roof that’s been planted as part of an initiative put together by Sustainable South Bronx. This is initiative started by Majora Carter. The gardens do three main things. They […]
The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found in 1861, and it now resides in the Natural History Museum in London. It was an important find – two years after the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Archaeopteryx was the rarest of fossils, and one that was quite useful for Darwin’s theory – an […]
What do you think of this? [It] is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to… memory. … [It has] slanting translucent screens, on which material can be […]
Earlier this week I did a talk on innovation for a local firm that was the opening session of their strategy-making work for the year. During the questions, one person asked for suggestions about a specific initiative that they had been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years, but which just […]
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -F. Scott Fitzgerald That’s the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book Innovation: The Missing Dimension. The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout […]
One of the best ways to build connections within the economic network is to be an authority – and since revenue often follows connections, this is a useful strategy to consider. How do you become an authority? I’ve run across a couple of suggestions recently. First up – this from the JournaMarketing Blog (I’m not […]