Category Archives: innovation strategy
Managing an Innovation Portfolio
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Yesterday I talked about how inertia is the biggest obstacle to innovation. One way to get around this problem is to explicitly incorporate innovation into your strategy. One key aspect to doing this is to manage innovation as a portfolio. To do this, you need to invest in innovation across multiple time horizons. We tend […]
The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation
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There are many candidates for the biggest obstacle to innovation. You could try lack of management support, no employee initiative, not enough good ideas, too many good ideas but no follow-through just for starters. My nominee for The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation is: Inertia All of the other examples are really excuses – but we […]
The Importance of Business Model Innovation
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I frequently have people say something like this to me: “But my organisation can’t be innovative – we’re a service company” (or a government agency, or a university department, and so on). This is why the definition of innovation is so important. A lot of people think that their organisation isn’t innovative because they’re not […]
The First Follower is the One That Transforms a Lone Nut into a Leader
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Since this is the Innovation Leadership Network, it’s probably time to talk about leadership directly. My thoughts today are spurred by two things: first, this is our 300th post, second, this TED talk from Derek Sivers that was posted yesterday – it’s only 3 minutes, and you must watch it! It’s a great talk, and […]
How to Experiment to Support Innovation
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Earlier this week I did a talk on innovation for a local firm that was the opening session of their strategy-making work for the year. During the questions, one person asked for suggestions about a specific initiative that they had been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years, but which just […]
Innovation Vision
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How do we decide what our innovation strategy should be? Jeffrey Phillips says that we don’t need an innovation strategy at all, we just need a strategy, and it should have innovation embedded within it. That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve said here before as well when I talked about four different ways to integrate […]
Innovation Riffs
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Today, just for fun, I’ll let you assemble the story yourself from the collected parts. First up – Tom Fishburne says: I blogged a few months ago that companies can be classified either as Rule Makers, Rule Followers, or Rule Breakers. Most companies duke it out amongst themselves as Followers, trying to gain share against […]
Experiments – the Key to Innovation
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There is a big problem that organisations often face: they want to be innovative, but they also want to minimise risk. This creates a certain amount of tension. If I had to pick the number one thing that I would recommend to organisations that are trying to become more innovative, it would be this: experiment. […]
The Innovation Fight
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Playing to Save the World
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In this week’s class we talked about Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on using games to save the world. It’s one of my favourite recent talks, and it’s worth a watch: Her key idea is that we can harness the efforts put into online games can to solve real-world problems. Her latest game is called Evoke, […]
Quick Thoughts on Innovation
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Here are two quick connections that I made today relating to innovation. First – watch this: It’s called “All Creative Work is Derivative” by Nina Paley, and here’s her description of how she made it. Brian Arthur argues in his book The Nature of Technology that all new economic ideas build on the combination of […]
