I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. […]
We’ve written a few posts criticising some of the more common innovation metrics in use, so I thought it would be smart to outline some ways that we can actually develop more effective metrics. Here’s a story that might help: A while ago I was in charge of managing student recruitment for a tertiary education […]
After Ralph Ohr’s excellent post on innovation and human capabilites, I’ve been giving some more thought to the three horizons model and how innovation is different within the horizons. The big takeaway from Ralph’s post for me was that we need to manage innovation differently accross the horizons. In other words don’t manage an H1 […]
Guest Post: by Ralph-Christian Ohr John Steen wrote a series of posts on why experts and crowds usually miss disruptive innovation and how to use networks to tap expertise and knowledge. I’d like to expand these thoughts a bit more towards the question: what’s the role of human capabilities in innovation? For elaboration, I’m going […]
A consistent point of controversy is whether or not innovation can be managed. If you think of innovation only as generating new, novel ideas, then it is very difficult to see how this could be actively managed (although there are in fact things we can do to encourage and improve creative thinking, so even here […]
Steven Johnson is a fantastic author, and his next book is about innovation. It is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and it comes out next month. It is the result of a few years of study, where he has investigated creative, innovative environments. He explains the key points from the book in this TED […]
One innovation topic that consistently gets people worked up concerns the value of failure. Some say that you have to embrace failure when you are trying to innovate. This makes some sense, since part of the innovation process is controlled experimentation. However, that whole ’embracing failure’ concept tends to rub people the wrong way – […]
Braden Kelly is running a contest right now to identify the top 40 innovation bloggers at his site Blogging Innovation. The site itself is a great resource – it compiles the best posts from a long list of innovation bloggers, publishing 3-4 high quality posts per day. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. […]
Tim and I have recently edited a network focussed issue of a journal called Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice. The really pleasing outcome from the submssions was the wide variety of applications that network analysis was having in the study of innovation management. We received papers from Asia, Europe and Australia and the overall standard […]
What makes us innovative? In many cases, it is an almost overwhelming level of dissatisfaction with current state of the world. I thought of that today when I was looking at some of the feedback from the people that were in my executive education course a couple of weeks ago. One of the comments was […]
