An Innovation Manifesto

There have been a few before, but here’s another Innovation Manifesto: Innovation doesn’t need a manifesto – it needs action. We won’t wait for someone to give us permission to innovate- we’ll just try things out. Innovations have a life-span – we will try to execute ideas that last, and that make things better. Not-Invented-Here […]

How to Fail at Innovation

The way to fail at innovation is to try to avoid failing. The idea of failure has popped up quite a bit this week for some reason. Innovation is filled with tensions that we have to become comfortable with if we’re going to succeed. One of the big tensions is between success and failure – […]

The Universe, Dark Matter and New Venture Success

You have probably heard of the dark matter puzzle in astronomy. I don’t remember that much from the astronomy unit that I took as part of my science degree but dark matter is one of those big questions that just gets undergrad students thinking. Put simply, the universe is really heavy (!) but if we […]

New Ideas in Old Systems

The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think […]

Changing the Game for News

A lot of people have been talking recently about a Harris Poll that shows that 77% of people in the US say that they won’t pay for online news. Specifically, this is the question they were asked: How much, if anything, would you be willing to pay per month to read a daily newspaper’s online […]

The Pace of Economic Evolution

The pace of economic evolution is slow. Shockingly slow. Here are some examples: The Difference Engine: Invented: 1823 by Charles Babbage First Built: 1998 by the London Science Museum First Sold: Never Photocopier Invented & Prototype Built: 1938 by Chester Carlson First commercial prototype: 1948 by Haloid (who licensed the patent from Carlson) First Sold: […]

Craft or Scale? An Innovation Dilemma

In December of 1992, there were 50 websites on the internet. A year later, when they started building Yahoo, we had jumped to 623. So if you were going to build a search engine, what would be the best way to index things? Actually, at the time there weren’t any search ‘engines’ – we’d go […]

Networks for Design Driven Innovation

How do we come up with substantially new products, services and ways of doing things? When we are able to do this well, innovation provides our organisations with difficult to replicate competitive advantages. Yesterday, I talked about some of Roberto Verganti’s ideas in this regard in his book Design-Driven Innovation. One of the key points […]

Ten Great Free e-Books for Innovators

I hope that everyone is having a great holiday season. Whenever I make a new friend, one of the first things I usually do is buy them a book. I’m not exactly sure why – probably because I really value ideas & books, and I want to share them with people that I like. So […]

Tradition is Not a Business Model

I’m currently reading The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur. It’s a fantastic book. This morning I ran across this quote discussing the spread of innovations: There is another reason the old pricniple persists beyond its time, an economic one. Even if a novel principle is developed and does perform better than the old, […]

Linking Innovation to Strategy, part 3

One of the more alarming aspects of the global financial crisis has been the corresponding downturn in innovation-related spending by firms. Obviously, if you lost your job or your house or your retirement savings this issue doesn’t seem so critical, but I think it is important even so. The reason is that future jobs and […]

Lessons from Babbage’s Difference Engine

Here’s a nice video on Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine: It’s an example that I use in my classes to illustrate two big points. The first is that invention is not innovation. You don’t have an innovation until you have an idea that is ready to spread, and you can’t have that if you […]