Category Archives: innovation
implementation
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I just saw this on Merlin Mann’s twitter feed: The guy who worries people will “steal” his idea might better ponder why nobody “steals” his implementation. As I keep saying – ideas are cheap, and implementations are valuable. We need to find better ways to cycle through ideas rapidly. This reminds me of a post […]
priorities
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Here’s a great quote from Peter Drucker: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. We often get asked about how innovation relates to efficiency programs like lean and six sigma. Obviously, ideas that you implement within these programs that improve efficiency are often innovative. And we […]
forms of innovation
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One of the points that I consistently stress in my innovation classes is that there are many forms of innovation, and that people and firms need to think about more than simply product innovation. This idea goes back at least to Schumpeter and his five forms of innovation: New product or service New method of […]
Do strategy and innovation converge under uncertainty?
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Last week I was a panelist on an event hosted by CEDA on the topic of strategy after the global financial crisis. One particular theme that came out of the discussions was a reduced reliance upon prediction and planning. This is significant becuase traditionally, this is what strategy is all about. There was some recognition […]
Lo!
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I love the story of the first message to cross the internet: Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just […]
synthesis & connecting
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Jeffrey Phillips writes a really nice innovation blog called Innovate on Purpose. One of his recent posts concerns the importance of synthesis, where he says: What should be obvious is that one of the most important skills from an innovation perspective is the act and insight of synthesis. This is a real challenge, because most […]
the gap between invention and innovation
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If you want more insight into the differences between invention and innovation, check out the Museum of Unworkable Devices! It includes many perpetual motion machines, along with other ideas that will never work. Best of all, it has very good explanations of why the designs are futile. Great stuff! (that’s a picture from the site […]
herding the butterflies of innovation
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Tom Peters on innovation
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Here’s a nice talk by Tom Peters on innovation. Some of the points that jumped out at me: He again emphasises the importance of process/business model innovation – we simply can’t get stuck on only thinking of new products as innovation. The idea that you should only buy from vendors that are in the top […]
the geography of innovation
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Where you are is still important. Location has a huge impact on the resources available to you, the education of the people that you work with, the money available to try out radical ideas, and the cultural attitudes towards new things. Check out this from a Time Magazine article on California: Ignore the California whinery. […]
splitting and lumping
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It’s hard for birders to see albatrosses. You have to a book a boat trip, they take all day (or longer!), and there are long periods of boredom punctuated by frenzied excitement when you run across birds – which you really hope you don’t miss seeing! And even if you’re not prone to seasickness, inevitably […]
