A fundamental business problem right now is caused by the rapidly decreasing costs of storing and sharing data. The combination of these price drops with the increasing ease of sharing digital information has disrupted several industries – music, journalism, and book publishing among them. So everyone with a business model based on information being scarce […]
I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently talking about how ideas are cheap. I’ve been doing this for two reasons: the first is that ideas really are cheap; the second is that organisations often overinvest in idea generation when they’d be better served by getting better at executing ideas. I ran across two […]
We are facing the best innovation opportunity in the history of business right now, and everyone is missing it. The sector that provides the best opportunity for innovation right now is older adults. And you can tap into this market with one fairly simple change to your business model. My wife Nancy is a geropsychologist. […]
How do we come up with substantially new products, services and ways of doing things? When we are able to do this well, innovation provides our organisations with difficult to replicate competitive advantages. Yesterday, I talked about some of Roberto Verganti’s ideas in this regard in his book Design-Driven Innovation. One of the key points […]
This morning I thought of yet another way to talk about the incremental-radical innovation spectrum. Incremental innovations help you do things better, while radical innovations help you do things differently. If you follow the prescriptions in most business books, even when talk about having a radical message, you will end up doing things better. Actually, […]
A few years ago I had a consulting job where my task was to help a company figure out how to sell the waterless composting toilet that they invented. They had already had other consultants working on the problem, but they weren’t happy with what they got from them. The only constraint that I had […]
Yesterday I talked about how the interconnectedness of our economic networks often makes it more difficult for new ideas to spread. Because our products and services are embedded within a value network, we not only have to get people excited about our innovation, we have to get others within the value network to unconnect from […]
One of the critical elements of managing innovation is linking your innovation efforts to your overall strategy. Over the weekend, I talked about how you can use the Strategy Diamond by Hambrick & Fredrickson to help achieve this coordination. Another tool that you can use is the Business Models idea, something that we’ve discussed here […]
Intellectual Property rights encourage innovation, right? Right? Well, not necessarily. Actually, people that study this empirically consistently find that the evidence suggests that they don’t. Here’s a fantastic talk by James Boyle discussing his book The Public Domain, which addresses this exact issue: (Thanks to Gerd Leonhard for the tip on this talk) Boyle’s book […]
