Entrepreneurship is now a pretty big deal. Business schools all over the world have courses in this area and some even make it their major focus of teaching and research. Governments are also interested in entrepreneurs and routinely ask themselves how they can develop a more entrepreneurial national culture. Many years ago, an economist called […]
Tim and I are now writing a lot on the importance of focus. Being successful with innovation is about managing the paradox of ‘disciplined creation’ and it helps to have some clear ideas about what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to create value. Part of this discipline is taking time […]
I often have people ask me how to build an innovative culture. The simple answer that is hard to execute is this: you build an innovative culture by innovating. Executing ideas is a critical part of innovation. If you think that innovation is only about having ideas, you won’t actually make anything. As fake Mark […]
Note: this post has been updated in The Innovation Matrix Reloaded. Here’s a sketch that I came up with last week that helps explain how organisations get better at innovation: This is a bit of a distillation of observations over time. I thought of it because I think that a lot of people that are […]
There was a nice interview in the Weekend Australian with Virgin’s CEO, Stephen Murphy. Quite honestly, I hadn’t heard of him and like everyone else I had assumed that Richard Branson was in total control of Virgin. Murhpy is a fairly conventional management accountant, so what is he doing at the helm of an entrepreneurial […]
A while ago I wrote a post on how standard methods of valuing business opportunities hindered innovation. Somewhat foolishly I called it “How accountants kill innovation” and it received a lot of comment from our blog readers, which was mostly very positive. Deb Schofield pointed out the uses of alternative valuation methods in her work […]
Google Australia lost two key people over the past couple of weeks – Lars Rasmussen, one of the developers of Google Maps and Google Wave, and Kate Vale, their first employee in Australia. It seems like the main motivation in both cases was the possibly premature death of Wave, but Vale made some comments that […]
If you are even remotely interested in innovation (and how would you end up here if you aren’t?), then this talk by R.A. Mashelkar is worth 19 minutes of your time: Mashelkar talks about the importance of innovating for everyone – of getting more for more for less. To do this, he talks about the […]
I’ve written a series of posts over the past year about connecting innovation to strategy. Looking back a these there are two main points that keep jumping out. The first of these is to recognize which of the three horizons the business is in. Innovating in Horizon 3, with the development of speculative but potentially […]
