The Best Way to Have a Great Idea…

Dual Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling famously said “The best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.” He was right. Well, really, he won two Nobel prizes, so my opinion here is relatively unimportant. But anyway, I think he was right. The quote from Pauling showed up again recently […]

Listening to customers…. really listening.

One of the consistent messages from innovation surveys is that customers are a major source of innovation. Sometimes customers with more extreme uses for products will adapt products to suit their purpose and then the manufacturers find out what is happening and take these adaptations on board. If you’ve seen the videos of big wave […]

Craft-Based Innovation – Dodocase

Check Kevin Rose‘s of the Dodocase for iPad, one of the more gorgeous things I’ve run across recently: Schumpeter defined innovation as the formation of new connections which drive economic growth. In The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur reinforces this idea by saying that all new economic ideas build on the combination of things that […]

Innovate What You Know? part 2

Here’s an actual conversation I had a few years ago with a programmer for whom I was doing some work: Tim: I did some usability testing on your website. Tim’s Friend: Great! Tim: There are some problems though – it renders poorly on Netscape and looks like garbage on a Mac. Tim’s Friend: I don’t […]

Critical Mass

In a brilliant post this week, Charlie Stross asks what’s the minimum world population needed to maintain the current level of the technology available to us today. Not long ago I talked about how isolation from the mainland made Tasmanian technology go backwards for a significant period of time – this is exactly the issue […]

Managing Different Creative Styles

Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation. Trying to harness this creativity within ourselves and our organisations is the first step in managing innovation as a process. Of course, this is a step that resists systematisation – as Simon Bostock points out, innovation is a cloud not a clock. In that post he […]

Old Spice Guy – Innovation Must Lead to Results

I love the Old Spice Guy as much as the next man (which means, of course, that I enjoy his commercials greatly in a shared spirit of manliness and a joint appreciation of expensive magnifying glasses). The original commercial is inventive and funny, and the social-media-based campaign that they ran last week is enormously innovative. […]

Can Innovation Management be a Profession?

The importance of managing innovation as a process is one of our key themes here. Because the success of any single great idea is pretty close to impossible to predict, the best way to successfully innovate is to try a lot of things, and to manage ideas through a process. If you do this, you […]

Innovating Meaning

Often when we someone asks us to describe a product or a service, we tell them about features. What does it do? How does it do it? This is a mistake. Products and services are not about features – they are about meaning, and they are about getting jobs done. Here’s an example – listen […]

The Negative Side of the Network Economy

The negative side of the networked nature of the economy is that it is not easy to get new ideas to spread through it, even if they are good ones. Part of the problem is that before you can people to connect with your great new idea (new product, new service, new way of doing […]

An Innovation Paradox

David Lazer included a really interesting demo in one of his talks at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. He was in a session talking about using the internet as a research resource, and there were about 100 people in the room. Lazer asked how many people there were under 30 years old – about 40% […]

Why You Need an Innovation System

I was originally going to title this post: Vampirenomics! This is because while we were in Italy, I went into several bookstores, just to check out what was there. A couple had superb business sections, but all of them had enormous vampire sections too. Some of them were translations of vampire books originally written in […]