There are obstacle to innovation everywhere. Risk aversion, lack of resources, lack of enthusiasm, not enough time, not enough ideas, too many ideas – the list is potentially endless. You can help your organisation be more innovative right now (today!) by answering these four questions: What is one idea that I can execute right now […]
I constantly run across blog posts, emails, and spam comments on the blog that promise to tell you the perfect strategy for getting a higher PageRank for your website, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score. And the problem with all of these strategies is that they are faulty. They might results in […]
One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say. But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Here is how Peter Drucker puts it […]
Yesterday I made the case for evidence-based management in general. Today I’d like to talk about what this means for managing innovation. The case in favour of evidence-based management is made in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. They talk about a few innovation examples, […]
We repeatedly see survey results that say that CEOs think that innovation is a top priority for their firm. And yet, these same surveys also say that most CEOs are unhappy with their innovation efforts. Why is this so? Here’s an example – a report from a couple years ago in McKinsey Quarterly. They surveyed […]
I remember that when Gillette came out with their double-bladed razor, I started joking about how it wouldn’t stop until razors had five blades. At the time, that seemed absurd, but sure enough, now we can buy razors with five blades. Now, while this may seem ridiculous, it’s actually a pretty smart response to a […]
The Shift Index 2011 is out now, and as with the previous two editions, it is a must-read. I am always skeptical of “everything is different now” type arguments, but in this series of reports, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and a number of other contributors have done a fantastic job of documenting exactly what […]
Yesterday I looked at Eight Models of Business Models and Why They’re Important. However, in writing about how different people conceive of business models, I didn’t have enough space to address the really critical issue with them: What can you actually do with a business model? Once you’ve defined your business model, here are three […]
One really good way to get traffic to your blog is to take a shot at a broad class of people, and do it with a catchy title. The latest version comes from FastCoDesign, which published the post “Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation?” Gregg Fraley and Jeffrey Phillips wrote quick responses, both affirming the negative. […]
What’s the best way to use business model analysis in larger organisations? Steve Blank has done some outstanding work looking at how Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas can be used in entrepreneurial startups (see also this post and the ones that follow it). But there are still some questions about how to best use the […]
We’ve written a few posts criticising some of the more common innovation metrics in use, so I thought it would be smart to outline some ways that we can actually develop more effective metrics. Here’s a story that might help: A while ago I was in charge of managing student recruitment for a tertiary education […]
