Social influence is important to innovation. One of the critical steps in innovating is getting our great new ideas to spread – and this is often an issue of social influence. Here is an excellent short talk from network researcher Sinan Aral about how to measure social influence: Sinan Aral: Social Contagion from PopTech on […]
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 […]
The best response to a bad idea is to make it better. When I work with people from government agencies, and also those from many large corporations, they often talk about their risk-averse culture. One of the problems with risk aversion is that if someone tries out a new idea and it doesn’t work, they […]
I’ve been working this week with two teams of MBA students that are working on a live consulting project as part of their studies. This is part of UQ’s partnership with Wharton in their Global Consulting Practicum program, which is a great initiative. This week, we were working on presentations to the clients in order […]
Most of the economy now is based on information. Even physical things are embodied information. Consequently, the scarce resource that is being competed for now is our time. Here is how Richard Lanham talks about it in an interview discussing his book The Economics of Attention: The basic argument is simple enough. We’re told that […]
One of the critical parts of the innovation process is getting our great ideas to spread. Diffusion is often the stumbling block for innovative new ideas. There is a section towards the end of Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky that provides some interesting insights into how to attack this problem. Belsky describes a storytelling […]
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 […]
If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]
One of the key ideas in The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison is that changes in the business environment are leading to a situation where rather than creating great ideas and then pushing them out to the world, we need to take advantage of knowledge flows by pulling […]
Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]
