The single most important management skill to develop is a tolerance for ambiguity. Why? Because we often must manage objectives that are contradictory. For example, Firms that are successful at innovation are able to simultaneously come up with ideas that allow them to take advantage of what they’re really good at (exploitation) while also being […]
What wins in innovation, great ideas or great process? Ideally, you’ll have both. But I suspect that if it’s either/or, process wins. There is an interesting example from the world of chess in Michael Nielsen’s fantastic new book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. The book discusses how our improved ability to network […]
I did a workshop last week with a group working on improving innovation within the Australian school system. I played my normal role of grenade-thrower, errr, thought-provoker on the topic of innovation, while working with eight other people that all have backgrounds in education. As the day went on, I noticed something interesting. In sessions […]
I’m still in Italy, where one of the topics of conversation is the recent special issue of The Economist, which discussed some of the problems that the economy here has experienced during the Berlusconi years (the special articles are summarised and linked here). Paul Kedrosky points to a response to this issue, where a reader […]
Three things that caught my eye yesterday: An excellent post by Helen Walters, which included this section: “The innovation shortcut is yours for the taking.” — This quote, from Gabor George Burt’s piece Why the Best Innovations Are About Relevance, Not Invention is the kind of statement to make blood run cold. Promising the earth […]
Thanks to everyone that has made comments and suggestions on The Innovation Matrix Reloaded. I’ll continue to incorporate your thoughts and ideas as the concept evolves. With that in mind, today I’d like to ask for some help. First, let’s take a look at the Innovation Matrix again – I’ve highlighted the two categories I […]
Since I put the Innovation Matrix together last year, we’ve been experimenting with it to see if it makes sense. I’ve used it in a couple of classes, and John and I have discussed it with a number of people that are actually responsible for innovation within their organisations. We’ve learned that the basic principle […]
Steve Blank wrote an interesting post today on the Startup Genome Project. The report is based on a survey of 663 startups. All of them are web-based businesses, and they are all early in their lifecycle. The objective of the study is to determine what factors drive startup success, and the report draws some interesting […]
The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and it doesn’t look like we expect it to When scientists first started talking about Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the discussion centred around how to best create AI that would think like people do. This view of AI has dominated […]
If you want to get better at innovation, you have start innovating more. That probably sounds obvious, but in practice, not all that many people do it. I was reminded of this by an interesting post by John Gruber discussing Apple’s transition to cloud computing. It includes this section: Jason Fried had a good cover […]
