What Open Innovation Is Not

In a recent post Tim mentioned a comment by a representative of an Australian university tech transfer office at an investor’s conference the other week. As Tim says, he was declaring the death of open innovation and a return to ‘sensible’ IP strategy, where we patent everything and then try to sell it or license […]

Innovation Heuristics

I have a confession to make. Although I have been teaching business strategy and innovation management for over ten years there is always a doubt in my mind over the value of what I bring into the classroom. If you looked at my collection of PowerPoint slides and readings, you would see a bag of […]

Innovation Lessons from Malcolm Gladwell

In all of my longer innovation courses, I use this video by Malcolm Gladwell in the first lecture. It’s his TED talk from a few years ago, and if you haven’t seen it yet, it is well worth your time: Gladwell recounts the story of Howard Moskowitz, who did the consulting work that led to […]

Analysis and Interpretation in Innovation

John’s post How Accountants Kill Innovation ended up causing a bit of a stir this week. The press release that went with it was pulled from the UQ Business School website complained about it, but the post here got a huge number of reads, and the press release got picked up by BioTechnologyNews.net, where it […]

How Accountants Kill Innovation

This isn’t going to be one of those rants against ‘beancounters’. We have actually collected and analysed data which tells us that traditional accounting and valuation methods will damage innovation performance. To be fair to my accounting collegues (some of my best friends are accountants) the main conclusion from our study is that we need […]

Why Your Great Idea Will Fail

There are a few reasons why your great idea will fail. The main one is that it will fail because it isn’t executed, or it isn’t execute well. We’ve talked about the problems with focusing just on ideas many times before. Last week I read an outstanding post by Matt Perez and realised why this […]

An Innovation Manifesto

There have been a few before, but here’s another Innovation Manifesto: Innovation doesn’t need a manifesto – it needs action. We won’t wait for someone to give us permission to innovate- we’ll just try things out. Innovations have a life-span – we will try to execute ideas that last, and that make things better. Not-Invented-Here […]

Three Blogs I Love

I’ve spent the past couple of days reading an astonishing number of excellent blog posts. I share nearly all of them on my twitter feed, so if you want a compilation of those, check that out. Today I thought I’d share three different blogs which always seem to have great content. First up is Innovate […]

Too Much IP Protection is Bad for Innovation

There were some good (all reactions are good!) reactions to the blog post on the problems of using patent counts to measure innovation so I thought I would follow up with some evidence on patents and intellectual property (IP) strategy. Conventional thinking is that any IP generated within an organization should be carefully guarded by […]

Olympic Innovation

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -F. Scott Fitzgerald That’s the quote with which Richard Lester and Michael Piore open their outstanding book Innovation: The Missing Dimension. The opposing ideas that they discuss throughout […]

Financing Innovation: Report from the AAAI Conference

We keep talking about how it’s not enough to just have good ideas, we have to execute them to turn them into innovations. A lot of good ideas can be tested on a small scale to see if they’ll work, but many ideas need a fair bit of cash to execute. If you work in […]

You’re too Scared to Innovate

One of the best live shows that I saw during my university days was Beat Happening and Girl Trouble. All of us were a long way from home in Washington when I saw them in New Jersey. While Beat Happening was playing what I thought was a pretty mesmerising show, my friend Tom leaned over […]