When I was a boy I used to enjoy visiting my grandparents and one of my favorite objects in their living room was a globe where the countries would light up as different colours when I switched the globe on. After seeing all of these countries I would often go to the trusty Encyclopaedia Brittanica […]

How can we make businesses more innovative? That’s easy isn’t it? We just group them together into clusters (preferably in science park developments) and it will happen… won’t it? The trouble with this cluster theory of innovation is that it confuses cause and effect. When we see a successful cluster like Silicon Valley it’s tempting […]

One of the ‘quick facts’ that I like to mention in my strategy seminars is that only two of the top 100 US firms in 1900 are still around today. In Australia, the stat isn’t much improved and it points to the extreme difficulty of maintaining the performance of organizations over extended time frames. Of […]

One question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?” The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true. Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s […]

We all get caught up in the day-to-day activities of work and life but have you really stopped to think about how extraordinary your life is? Don’t worry, I’m not about to do one of those self-help/motivational rants but I do want to make the point that we may be in the middle of a […]

Well…. I have finally discovered Ebay (please don’t snigger). A consequence of my children growing up is that that there is now a lot of stuff that we no-longer need in the house. Just to see if the Ebay thing would work, I put a baby bouncer on Ebay and to my amazement the bids […]

Have you heard of Ruslan Kogan? I think he is one of the most exciting business entrepreneurs in recent years. I only got to hear about him when the major Australian electronics retailers started to complain about how unfair it was that a business could manufacture offshore and sell directly to consumers via the internet. […]

Guest post by Ralph Ohr There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea”. Their major claim is: “Great brands lead users, not the other way around.” As expected, this lead to controversial […]

Last week I was sent the Siemens report into productivity in Australia. Like the Grattan report that I wrote about a few weeks ago, it has a stern warning about the threat of declining productivity. Like the grasshoper in Aesop’s fable, Australians are at risk of squandering the wealth that is being generated from commodity […]

One of our long term research projects is the problem of innovating in large complicated businesses such as engineering and mining companies. We have been using social network analysis to understand innovation because one of the biggest innovation challenges involves finding good ideas and existing expertise to do something in a better way or to […]

In a nice post inspired from the classic TED talk from Malcolm Gladwell, Harry Connolly’s talks about the importance of experimenting in a guest post on Charlie Stross’ blog: Another important point from the video is that consumers do not always know what they want. This isn’t exactly a revelation to readers, who are always […]