I had lunch a while back with two executives from an organisation that the Business School does a fair bit work with. They wanted to improve innovation and that’s what triggered our meeting. We talked for a couple of hours about what was happening in their organisation. We talked about innovation as a process, the […]
Why does your firm exist? To maximize shareholder value? No – that’s the dumbest idea in the world. To reduce transaction costs? No – that’s another economic model that doesn’t have much grounding in reality. In fact, if you ask this of most firms, they don’t have a very good answer. There have been a […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. This means that to innovate effectively you need to have great ideas, select the best ones and execute them, and then get those executed ideas to spread. All three steps are interdependent, and you need to be good at all three to innovate effectively. Today I’m interested in […]
The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so. If you think of the last 10% of that time, a fair bit has happened. There have periods of major global warming, and a few ice ages. There have been asteroid strikes, and other natural disasters too numerous to count. Continents that were one […]
Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors, and in reading a couple of his books recently, I ran across several quotes made me think about innovation. In large part, this is because nearly everything I encounter makes me think about innovation one or another. Nevertheless, here are four thoughts triggered by Murakami. The first […]
I don’t like focus groups. I’ve found the information that you get from them to be too shallow to be useful. However, this doesn’t mean that when we’re innovating we should just pursue whatever ideas drift across our minds. Steve Jobs was quoted last year about how Apple doesn’t use focus groups. A number of […]
Are you creating something new or replacing something that’s already there? If you’re replacing, you need to do much different things than if you’re creating something new. Every time you try to get your ideas to spread, you have to break connections. This is a lot harder if you’re trying to replace a deeply embedded […]
Hugh MacLeod’s great daily newsletter (which you should subscribe to here) had this cartoon today: Don’t try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether. In the commentary, he acknowledges that this might not align with the fantastic work that Mark Earls has been doing over the past few years. The basic point that […]
