Guest post by Holly Green Does Your Culture Support Innovation? There’s a lot of people talking about innovation these days, myself included. The good news is that business leaders seem to be sitting up and taking notice of this important subject. The bad news is that once a topic becomes popular in the media, people […]
I’m always staggered by the figures on the the development of China and India. Sometimes numbers are almost too big to comprehend but a McKinsey report from 2008 gave a nice summary of the projected transformations that will occur in China before 2025. This urbanization is the biggest migration of people in world history. Approximately […]
Almost every single time you are offered a black or white choice, the real answer is grey. This is inconvenient, because we like things to either white or black, right or wrong, easy or hard, incremental or radical. But the simple fact is that all of these are false dichotomies. Nearly everything that is presented […]
One area of thinking around innovation that doesn’t get much attention is how ownership and governance affects the ability of an organization to be innovative. It’s an issue that’s been playing on my mind for a few years but a recent conversation has prompted me to write down some ideas. First. I’ll just outline the […]
I had a chance to catch up with a friend last week who recently changed jobs. He is passionate about innovation, and his previous job title had been “Innovation Champion”, a position seemingly custom-designed for his skills and interests. So why did he switch jobs? That was one of the topics that we discussed. It […]
Here’s an exercise in connecting up ideas based on a few innovation-related quotes that have caught my attention over the past few days: If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. That’s Umberto Eco, via Stowe Boyd. This reminded me of a point made […]
One of the long-term themes running through the blog is how to encourage people to be more innovative. This a really tough question because the foundation of innovation is what people believe, say and do. In other words, becoming innovative is about changing the culture of the organization and this is always a long haul. […]
Grant McCracken’s latest book Chief Culture Officer is a really interesting one. The basic premise is that for businesses to succeed, they have to be in touch with culture. In defining culture, McCracken doesn’t make much of a distinction between high-brow and low-brow – he’s more interested in the things that real people are actually […]
I had an interesting experience the other week as an editor of an innovation journal. The specifics of the story are a tale of academic corruption but in the broader sense it highlights issues about how academics should communicate their work. Tim is probably freaking out as he reads the blog title but I promised […]
Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is […]
