The first thing that I ever bought from the J. Peterman catalog was the Otavalo Mountain Shirt: I had discovered the Peterman catalog very early in its existence, and after getting a few in the mail, I finally bought the shirt. I quickly discovered that the quality of clothes from Peterman was very high, and […]
I’m in the middle of reading Evil Plans, the excellent new book by Hugh MacLeod, which reminded me of one of my favourites from him. I think this is a pretty good and concise explanation of business model innovation: One way or another, to innovate successfully you have to be distinctive. In other words, Hugh […]
Here’s a persistent innovation management question: is it better to have a dedicated team responsible for innovation, or should this responsibility be distributed throughout your entire organisation? The best answer depends on your circumstances. But if you set up a dedicated team, it’s important to consider what role you want them to play. There are […]
People were using charcoal for art about 30,000 years ago. And we’ve been consciously manufacturing charcoal for at least 5000 years. Because charcoal burns hot and clean, it was the primary fuel source for making iron for quite a while, before it made its recent shift to cooking steaks on barbeques. Most of our charcoal […]
I ran across a shocking quote today. It’s from an article in the July issue of The Monthly by Malcolm Knox called The Next Chapter – which is about the current state of play with e-books. Here is the quote: Until this year, the argument over e-books centred on whether they would ever overtake print. […]
If you are even remotely interested in innovation (and how would you end up here if you aren’t?), then this talk by R.A. Mashelkar is worth 19 minutes of your time: Mashelkar talks about the importance of innovating for everyone – of getting more for more for less. To do this, he talks about the […]
How do you build a business model for doing something that you love? It’s a difficult question. In most cases, it means that you need to build some sort of craft-based business model, which can be challenging. But if you do it right, you can create smarter conversations – a recent idea from Hugh MacLeod. […]
Three stories that caught my eye today: First up, Stowe Boyd found this quote about competing with internet research firms Gartner and Forrester: In our view, firms wishing to disrupt the Gartner and Forrester models must have two particular attributes. First, they need a significant differentiator. It can be in specialization, the business model, service […]
We keep hearing that the whole point of strategy is build a sustainable competitive advantage. This makes some sense, up to a point. The problem though is that the skills and routines that help us build one can also constrain us, and prevent us from responding to a changing environment. That change can be someone […]
