Many people think that their industry is immune from the disruption that we are seeing in music, news and books. However, we are not too far away from seeing every industry becoming knowledge-based. This has big implications.
We often picture innovation as a relentless forward march of progress. But sometimes, we can make a significant forward leap by first taking a step backwards. Here’s a small case study that shows how.
Why all this talk about innovation? I get that question a lot. The reason that I think innovation is important is that it is the driver for growth. Consequently, we’re changing the name of the blog to Innovation for Growth. Here are some of the reasons that I think it’s important to link innovation with […]
How should respond to potentially disruptive innovations? If the first response is ridicule, followed by aggression and bargaining, then you could be in trouble.
You may remember Webvan, probably the most spectacular flame-out in during the tech boom in the late 90s. If you don’t, Nicole Perlroth describes their blowup for Forbes: Of Web 1.0’s most memorable implosions, Webvan still takes the cake. The online grocer raised $375 million in an IPO, descended upon eight major U.S. cities, peddled […]
We see many systems these days where all of the intelligence in the system is embedded in the technology. Some examples: Driverless vehicles, in mines and on the streets. Highly sophisticated prosumer cameras. Most tablets – they can’t be programmed at all, really. High speed stock trading. When I talked about this recently, I made […]
Note: This is part of a series of posts discussing The Innovation Matrix. See this post for a description of the full model and what can be done with it. We can use The Innovation Matrix to help us understand how the innovation capability of firms evolves over time. A great case study in this […]
Innovation is an evolutionary process. Here is John explaining what that means: <p. Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea […]
There’s a big problem with innovation: ideas spread much more slowly than we expect them to. Ideas follow an S-Curve as they spread that looks like this: They pick up steam very slowly, until they either die off or hit a tipping point and take off. The slow build-up is the time I’ve indicated as […]
There are two popular quotes that often get used when discussing innovation that were never actually said or written by the people to whom they are attributed. Despite the fact that they are fake quotes, there are still things that we can learn from them. The first common quote is attributed to Henry Ford: If […]
