What Motivates Knowledge Brokers?

I wrote a post last week about the importance of connecting different groups as a precursor for innovation and the special role that some people have as bridges between disparate knowledge communities where ‘structural holes’ exist within the network between the communities. After writing this post I went looking for more research on the psychological […]

The First Follower is the One That Transforms a Lone Nut into a Leader

Since this is the Innovation Leadership Network, it’s probably time to talk about leadership directly. My thoughts today are spurred by two things: first, this is our 300th post, second, this TED talk from Derek Sivers that was posted yesterday – it’s only 3 minutes, and you must watch it! It’s a great talk, and […]

How You Define a Problem Determines if You Can Solve It

How we define things is incredibly important. I’ve been reminded of this almost constantly this week. Here are some examples: I was talking with a friend of mine over the weekend about using social media to improve the flow of ideas within an organisation. She is a high-ranking manager in a very large organisation, and […]

Innovation Vision

How do we decide what our innovation strategy should be? Jeffrey Phillips says that we don’t need an innovation strategy at all, we just need a strategy, and it should have innovation embedded within it. That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve said here before as well when I talked about four different ways to integrate […]

Empathy-Driven Innovation

Three things came together to make me think of this post: I regularly get feedback from my research interviews that people really enjoy them. That’s interesting, because I’m a lousy interviewer. After the last round, we got some feedback from our contact at the firm who said that he had received thank-you emails for setting […]

Neil Gaiman on Connecting

I keep talking about how connecting ideas in novel ways is the central act in the innovation process. I’ve been on a bit of a Neil Gaiman kick recently ( he’s SO good!), and today I was reading the Introduction to Smoke and Mirrors and found more examples of this. In the intro he includes […]

Connecting Ideas is the Fundamental Creative Act in Innovation

In this week’s class we talked about Jeff Bezos’ TED talk. When I think about innovation, to me the central part of the process is connecting ideas. As I keep emphasising, once we’ve done this, we then have to work like crazy to execute them well, and to get them to spread. But we need […]

Quick Thoughts on Innovation

Here are two quick connections that I made today relating to innovation. First – watch this: It’s called “All Creative Work is Derivative” by Nina Paley, and here’s her description of how she made it. Brian Arthur argues in his book The Nature of Technology that all new economic ideas build on the combination of […]

The Economy is a Network

The word “network” causes a lot of the same problems that “innovation” does – it is used in so many different ways that it is often hard to tell exactly what the user means, it’s in fashion to the point of sounding like hype, and as a consequence a lot of people are ready to […]

Information Wants to Be Free?

We often hear that “information wants to be free” – but does it really? If it does, why did my research partners and I just pay $13,000 to get a copy of this database? Now that’s admittedly 13,000 Australian dollars, and once you take exchange rates into account it comes out to — a whole […]

Why Your Great Idea Will Fail

There are a few reasons why your great idea will fail. The main one is that it will fail because it isn’t executed, or it isn’t execute well. We’ve talked about the problems with focusing just on ideas many times before. Last week I read an outstanding post by Matt Perez and realised why this […]

Establish Authority by Creating Value

One of the best ways to build connections within the economic network is to be an authority – and since revenue often follows connections, this is a useful strategy to consider. How do you become an authority? I’ve run across a couple of suggestions recently. First up – this from the JournaMarketing Blog (I’m not […]