Tom Fishburne makes brilliant cartoons about marketing and innovation, and the one in today’s blog post really rang true for me: You should read Tom’s post, because he raises some important points about the problems with focus groups. I recently talked about some of my frustrating experiences with focus group research as well. The danger […]
Adam Thierer wrote a terrific post today exploring his ongoing major theme comparing internet optimists and pessimists. He has written a series of very interesting posts assessing the arguments of the pessimists that think that the impact of the internet on society is generally bad (e.g. Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier), and the optimists […]
I’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Xerox a few times recently, and I thought it would be worthwhile to actually write it up. The key points from the rise are these: Chester Carlson took out a patent on the process of xerography in 1937. After failing to commercialise it successfully, he […]
Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal […]
If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]
McKinsey have just released their 2010 innovation survey. It’s a very thought-provoking read and its based on a survey of over 2000 respondents from several industries. The survey can be found on McKinseyQuarterly.com and its free to get a subscription. Many of the survey results regarding the management of innovation as a process are consistent […]
One of the important ideas that follows from managing innovation as a process is that to be successful at it, you need to manage a portfolio of different innovation initiatives. This means that you need to have a mix of incremental and radical innovation ideas. One good way of building an innovation portfolio is to […]
