Why is it so difficult for established firms to deal with disruptive innovation? In general, I think that Clayton Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation is correct. His basic idea is that since disruptions generally start in niches, the economics of pursuing disruptive innovations look really bad for large incumbents: Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least […]
Hugh MacLeod absolutely nails it again with his business card for Joi Ito: New products, new services and new ways of doing things are all fundamentally about ideas. That is why innovation management is really idea management. Jeffrey Phillips addresses this same point in a terrific post called Ideas are a Commodity. He talks about […]
One of the problems that makes innovation necessary is this: no matter how strong your current position is, if you don’t innovate, your business will eventually decline. And it might not be eventually – it might happen sooner. Why? The Think Tank blog quotes Gary Hamel to explain: “Out there in some garage is an […]
Take a look at David Beckham’s goal against Greece that sent England to the 2002 World Cup Finals: If you ask famous athletes how they do things like that, they find it difficult to explain. How can you make a ball dip a meter while curving two? Who knows? Actually, there are some researchers that […]
I think that a lot of time when we talk about the importance of failure in innovation, people think about big, major failures like the Ford Edsel and the Apple Newton. But the whole point of driving innovation through experimenting is to figure out ideas that won’t work early. We want to find our failures […]
I’ve been thinking of the issue of process versus tools, and I thought of a good analogy. Innovation management for organisations is like fitness training for people. How many of you have ever bought a piece of exercise equipment because you thought that having the tool would make you more motivated to exercise? I have, […]
The economy is a network. I’m Reading Smart World by Richard Ogle and he talks about a couple of the important implications of this. The networked nature of the economy tells us a lot about how innovations diffuse – particularly some the difficulties new ideas face in getting adopted. It sheds light on some questions […]
I had a meeting today with Terry Cutler, and he told me about a couple of interesting examples of business model innovation. The striking one comes from Chile. As in many other countries, Chile’s old-growth rainforest has been severely depleted through logging and land-clearing. There have been major international protests against the logging practices of […]
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in an innovation jam organised by Kate Morrison from Vulture Street Innovation Services – it’s been a fascinating experience. I’ve talked about jams before, but it’s been great to get deeply involved with one. I’ve been thinking about this one through the aggregate, filter and connect […]
