What is the most important innovation ever? I’ve argued before that it is hand-washing in hospitals. This innovation was a major driver in the improved health outcomes that have increased our life expectancies from less than 60 years at birth to nearly 80 in most developed countries. It’s such a simple idea, and so easy […]
First off, you should go and read all of Atul Gawande’s commencement address to Williams College last weekend. It will take a couple of minutes, but it’s well worth the time. I’ll wait. Here are some of the highlights for me: …the critical skills of the best surgeons I saw involved the ability to handle […]
I often tell people that failure is an essential part of innovation. What do I mean by that? I think that what I really mean is that to innovate, we have to learn. It’s not the failure that drives innovation, but rather the learning. There is really a hierarchy of failure: System failure (the collapse […]
Here are three posts that caught my eye recently that I think you should read: Ten Rules for Maker Businesses What kind of business model do you need if you are building things? Chris Anderson from Wired addresses this question with some excellent advice on issues from pricing building good relationships with your shipper. Check […]
If you force me to choose, I pick the invention of quartz watch movements as one of the more astonishing examples of creative destruction in business. Once quartz arrived, the value propositions of most of the luxury Swiss watchmakers was instantly destroyed. Pre-quartz, they competed on accuracy. But quartz watches were 10 times more accurate […]
My wife Nancy gave a presentation at UQ’s research commercialisation workshop yesterday, recounting her experience with the Geriatric Anxiety Inventory. That’s what kicked off the thinking that led to yesterday’s post on creativity and commerce. Right after I finished that post, we went to the workshop dinner, where Ian Frazer gave the keynote address, discussing […]
How can established organizations innovate their business model? That is the question that I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently. Two ideas collided this week that gave me some insight into the question. First, in the comments on my post about different business models leading to different outcomes, Greg Satell said: A business […]
I’m starting up a couple of live consulting projects with some of our MBA students. Even though we are very early in the projects, they have already reminded me of just how critical it is to develop the ability to live with uncertainty. This is the fundamental point that Jonathan Fields makes in Uncertainty: Turning […]
Here is a great quote from Ioan Tenner in a post on the strategy of surprise: Significant surprise is a life event. Neglect this subject and your fate may be of the led and of the losers. The surprised lose initiative, stumble and take hasty decisions they will regret. They submit to choices crafted by […]
The economist Rudi Dornbusch succinctly describes the way that ideas spread: Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could. It’s the innovation S-Curve in words, this is what that looks like graphically: And the problem is that the value for X is larger […]