One of my secret pleasures is Ken Burns documentaries. Ever since I saw his breakthrough work on the American Civil War about 20 years ago I have been mesmerized by his careful and beautiful use of images, narrative, music and cinematography (another innovation). It doesn’t really matter what the topic is… the Lewis and Clark […]
If anyone ever asks you why innovation is important, consider this: Year Technology Lighting Efficiency 1750 B.C. Oil Lamp 17.5 (lumen hours per BTU) A.D. 1800 Tallow Candle 22.2 1815 Whale-oil Lamp 39.4 1875 Kerosene Lamp 46.6 1883 Electric Light, Carbon Filament 762.0 1920 Electric Light, Tungsten Filament 3,463.7 1992 Compact Flourescent Bulb 20,111.1 The […]
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’m currently reading The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur. It’s a fantastic book. This morning I ran across this quote discussing the spread of innovations: There is another reason the old pricniple persists beyond its time, an economic one. Even if a novel principle is developed and does perform better than the old, […]
How do new ideas find their place in the economy? That is one of the issues that Dennis Baron addresses in his excellent book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution. There is an excellent interview with Baron on Salon in which he outlines the argument of the book: Historically, when the new […]
The more I study business in general, and innovation in particular, the more clear it is that we don’t do a very good job of taking time into account. This leads to a lot of problems – management focused on quarterly results at the expense of building a long-term success, innovations that spread quickly and […]
One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and […]
One of the more alarming aspects of the global financial crisis has been the corresponding downturn in innovation-related spending by firms. Obviously, if you lost your job or your house or your retirement savings this issue doesn’t seem so critical, but I think it is important even so. The reason is that future jobs and […]
Journalism is a fascinating business model innovation case study these days – at least if you’re on the outside looking in. Journalism must exist in some form or another for democracy to work, yet newspapers and other journalism outlets are struggling terribly right now. The availability of inexpensive digital content has made it much harder […]
How can you tell how well a project is going? Many types of projects have formal milestones that help you track your progress, and there are many tools available that enable project management. However, in our research group meeting yesterday, I realised that there are some informal project milestones that are just as important to […]
