Last week I ran an executive education course called “Strategy In Action“. It’s an intensive full-week course and we try to equip managers with ideas and processes that will help them to develop and execute strategy. As part of the course, I also arrange guest speakers who have examples of good strategy in their business […]
Why do so many organisations focus on generating lots of ideas when the try to become more innovative? Innovation is a three-step process – generating great ideas, selecting and executing the best of these ideas, and getting your ideas to spread. Most organisations fail in the last two steps, not in generating ideas. One reason […]
I’ve run across a number of things that relate to recent posts, so I thought I’d put together a quick grab-bag selection today. Yesterday I talked about Naomi Simson and innovation at RedBalloon. One thing that I forgot to mention is that in addition to growing incredibly quickly and being very successful financially, RedBalloon is […]
Check out this talk by Jeremy Rifkin: I’ve talked before about how innovation needs to be empathy-driven, and Rifkin’s talk illustrates why. We are inherently empathic – and many ideas spread not through persuasion, but through copying. This point is made emphaticaly by Mark Earls in his terrific book Herd. Earls talks about what this […]
I’ve talked before about the importance of experiments in the innovation process. Experiments are essential for two reasons. First, they allow us to be more confident that our ideas will work. If we run a successful small experiment, that gives us some idea of how the innovation might work as we try to scale it […]
Tim and I had a conversation in my office the other day about the importance of fundamental innovation messages and how we really can’t repeat them enough in seminars, conversations and on this blog. I suppose that we don’t want to become repetitive but occasionally we still get reminders of how important it is to […]
“Fresh insightful connections.” That’s how Rishad Tobaccowala defines innovation in a terrific post today called Becoming Innovative. I think this is a great way to think about innovation. I’ve already said that connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation, so it was great to see Rishad say this: Connections is a about the […]
Here are a number of actual quotes from this week. On Monday, Mark and I had a research meeting with a colleague in the business school who does business process research. When Mark asked if she has ever looked at innovation, she said: I haven’t, because innovation isn’t a process, is it? After a bit […]
I’ve always assumed that the most creative and innovative phase of life is the period in decade or two after formal education. We have lots of energy, fresh ideas and we are just a little bit overconfident in our abilities so we try ambitious things. It’s true that there are good examples of this, including […]
A simple question: Is All Innovation Good? The simple answer to this is: No. Which poses a bit of a problem – we know that innovation is an essential part of long-term success – as Andrew Howlett says, “The ROI on innovation is survival.” And yet, because innovations create change, and the outcome of change […]
