I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently talking about how ideas are cheap. I’ve been doing this for two reasons: the first is that ideas really are cheap; the second is that organisations often overinvest in idea generation when they’d be better served by getting better at executing ideas. I ran across two […]
The pace of economic evolution is slow. Shockingly slow. Here are some examples: The Difference Engine: Invented: 1823 by Charles Babbage First Built: 1998 by the London Science Museum First Sold: Never Photocopier Invented & Prototype Built: 1938 by Chester Carlson First commercial prototype: 1948 by Haloid (who licensed the patent from Carlson) First Sold: […]
We are facing the best innovation opportunity in the history of business right now, and everyone is missing it. The sector that provides the best opportunity for innovation right now is older adults. And you can tap into this market with one fairly simple change to your business model. My wife Nancy is a geropsychologist. […]
I have talked a couple of times recently about some results from the assignments in my MBA class this year. In assessing the Innovation Value Chains within their firms, 3 out of 60 identified their organisation as ideas-poor, while the other 57 had bigger problems with idea selection and idea execution. The paradox is that […]
This morning I thought of yet another way to talk about the incremental-radical innovation spectrum. Incremental innovations help you do things better, while radical innovations help you do things differently. If you follow the prescriptions in most business books, even when talk about having a radical message, you will end up doing things better. Actually, […]
A few years ago I had a consulting job where my task was to help a company figure out how to sell the waterless composting toilet that they invented. They had already had other consultants working on the problem, but they weren’t happy with what they got from them. The only constraint that I had […]
Scott Berkun let out the secret of innovation today in an outstanding blog post. It’s a secret that Rowan Gibson tried to let out of the bag recently, and so did Braden Kelley on Blogging Innovation. I’ve tried to tell you about it too, using both analogies and statistics. The secret idea of innovation is […]
It’s always hard to find good examples of innovative organisations to talk about in my classes. Not because there is a shortage of innovative organisations to discuss, but because people need examples from organisations that seem similar to theirs. One of the skills that I have to get better at is helping people see the […]
