Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do

What do you do if the tools you use to improve your innovation process actually make it worse? I had a meeting yesterday with one of our research partners to go over some of the results of our recent survey. The research has two parts – we are mapping the innovation and knowledge-sharing networks within […]

Why Experimenting Beats Benchmarking

In his excellent new book Why the West Rules – For Now Ian Morris tells many great stories while trying to explain the trends in human history from around 14,000 BC to now. One of them jumped out at me – the story of the rise of Portuguese sea power on the back of guns […]

Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?

There’s been a lot of buzz about Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From. An article in Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt addresses the opposite question: Where Do Bad Ideas Come From? He is talking about bad ideas in foreign policy, such as the domino effect, which have been used to justify policy but […]

The Knowledge Economy is the Economy

When I started this blogging chapter in an attempt to find the answer to the question in the blog “What does a knowledge economy look like”, I had some half-formed ideas as to where I might go with all this, but nothing to really tie the threads together. I think I do now. It’s a […]

Don’t Keep Fighting the Last Battle

I ran across an interesting quote from Will Wilkinson in an article he wrote about wikileaks: The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether […]

The World is Changing Too Quickly! 1898 Version

Note: This is a guest post by Neil Kay. It is part of a chapter that he is writing for a book that I am editing with David Rooney and Greg Hearn called Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, volume 2. We’ll post Neil’s chapter as he writes it over the next few weeks. He explains […]

The World is Getting More Complex – Or Is It?

Note: This is a guest post by Neil Kay. It is part of a chapter that he is writing for a book that I am editing with David Rooney and Greg Hearn called Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, volume 2. We’ll post Neil’s chapter as he writes it over the next few weeks. He explains […]

Common Knowledge

Note: This is a guest post by Neil Kay. It is part of a chapter that he is writing for a book that I am editing with David Rooney and Greg Hearn called Handbook of the Knowledge Economy, volume 2. We’ll post Neil’s chapter as he writes it over the next few weeks. He explains […]

Shades of Grey

Almost every single time you are offered a black or white choice, the real answer is grey. This is inconvenient, because we like things to either white or black, right or wrong, easy or hard, incremental or radical. But the simple fact is that all of these are false dichotomies. Nearly everything that is presented […]

Responding to Disruptive Innovation

This semester John and I used a simulation exercise in our MBA class. It gives you a chance to run a battery company that is facing a disruptive innovation (there’s a good description of it here). The company is in a market that is evolving – the majority of demand and revenue comes from the […]

The Value of Clarity

One part of the language that always gets a bit of a bum rap is jargon. Everyone hates jargon. It’s easy to say we should just rid of it completely. The problem is that jargon actually serves a purpose. When a group of people share an interest in a topic, they develop a vocabulary to […]

Seek Conflicting Views to Improve Innovation

Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal […]