Category Archives: innovation
My Theme for 2010
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Here is a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller that sums up my theme for 2010: You never change things by fighting the existing model. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I’m not big on resolutions, but I like Steve Shapiro’s ideas for building a New Year’s Theme. So […]
Innovation Lessons from A Better Pencil
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How do new ideas find their place in the economy? That is one of the issues that Dennis Baron addresses in his excellent book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution. There is an excellent interview with Baron on Salon in which he outlines the argument of the book: Historically, when the new […]
Innovating When Your Organisation Isn’t Innovative
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One problem that I consistently run into when I talk to people about innovation is that they often feel stifled. How can you be innovative when you’re operating in a culture that isn’t innovative? This is a consistent problem for people working in the public service, as well for those in industries that seem relatively […]
Lessons from Babbage’s Difference Engine
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What are Innovation Networks, and Why Should You Care?
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I did some media training last week, which was interesting. In the course of the morning, I had to think about the main messages I would like to communicate to people about my research. The key one is that the networks that people form within innovating groups have an enormous impact on how successfully the […]
Innovation strategy and the return of the conglomerate
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We have been writing a bit about innovation strategy lately. While innovation and strategy are often poorly connected in the literature and in organisations, a real connecting point between the two is taking an evolutionary approach to both. In other words, if we manage both strategy and evolution as evolutionary processes of variation, selection and […]
David Lazer on the State of Complex Network Analysis
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Here is David Lazer’s keynote talk at the Political Networks 2009 Conference that took place recently (James Fowler’s talk is also worth watching): David Lazer at Political Networks 2009 from David Lazer on Vimeo. Lazer shows examples from a lot of state-of-the-art network research, mostly centred around politics. It gives you a pretty good idea […]
Picking winning innovations
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Tim has written a bit on Charles Darwin so I thought I would follow along this them with another idea. As Tim says, the first big test of Darwin’s radical ideas on the formation of new species was a presentation to the Linnean society. Darwin’s supporters chose the Linnean society because of its preeminence in […]
innovative shadow art
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barriers to innovation?
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Here’s a question for today – what are your biggest barriers to innovation? The one that I run up against the most myself is institutional inertia. Risk aversion is probably the biggest barrier that I’ve run into in my consulting and research. But I’m interested in hearing about yours in the comments! (picture from flickr/reinvented […]
