A few years ago I heard a talk by the group R&D exectutive of a global construction company. I’ve known him for a while and I know that he is one of the most enthusiatic advocates for innovation that you are likely to come accross, but when he was asked about innovation in some of […]

We know that the innovation process is risky. Nothing can guarantee the success of something new and failure is probably a good sign of a healthy innovation system. Without failures, no innovations. Of course, failure for its own sake is a ‘career-limiting move’ but successful innovation managers take the view that trials and rapid prototyping […]

Ryan Freitas recently wrote a post called 35 Lessons in 35 Years – there are some good tips here. One that particularly caught my eye is this one: Debates over terminology and semantics are for archivists and academics. If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than […]

Three blog posts that caught my eye this week demonstrate three different ways that you can fail at innovation: Ignore the small innovations: James Todhunter wrote an excellent post yesterday defending thinking about improvements as innovation. You should read the whole post, but here is a highlight: Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all […]

There’s a good post today by Michael Schrage concerning the recent article making the rounds claiming that America is suffering a creativity crisis. In short, he’s not buying that proposition. Here is one of the key quotes: This point is vital: genuine creativity isn’t about ideas. It’s about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and […]

I had an interesting conversation with someone from the government sector whose job is to support innovation and increase the number of innovating firms in the economy. While I can see why governments want to foster innovation, I think that his job is extremely difficult because he is actually trying to affect the strategy of […]

Hutch Carpenter just wrote a nice post outlining 25 different definitions of innovation. This is an interesting exercise. He breaks the definitions down into five sub-categories, which all reflect slightly different takes on the nature of innovation. I find this interesting because I frequently hear people discount the importance of innovation by saying that it […]

I wrote a post last week about why experts will often overlook disruptive innovations. Today I’m going to extend this argument by saying that crowds and markets are just as good at missing these step changes, but first I’ll talk about the inspiration for the post. Last night was the Australian federal election and I […]