I’ve been working on a research project looking at innovativeness in project teams and it’s given me the opportunity to go back through the evidence of what makes innovative teams. Without giving you the long literature review I can tell you that this is a really well worked area over more than two decades. However, […]
Here is a great quote from Ioan Tenner in a post on the strategy of surprise: Significant surprise is a life event. Neglect this subject and your fate may be of the led and of the losers. The surprised lose initiative, stumble and take hasty decisions they will regret. They submit to choices crafted by […]
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, […]
How can we be better managers? I just finished reading Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. It is a must-read book, and they have one simple recommendation for managing more effectively: make better use of the evidence that shows us how to be better managers. […]
Since the revelations that many stars of silicon valley are alumni of Montessori schools there has been a lot of interest in what managers can learn from the Montessori approach to education. I hadn’t realized this until Tim told me but the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and […]
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 […]
Often when people have an idea for a great new product or service, they rush to be first to market with it. We keep hearing about first-mover advantage and how you need it. The only problem with first-move advantage is that it doesn’t seem to exist. The academic research on the topic shows that there […]
The economist Rudi Dornbusch succinctly describes the way that ideas spread: Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could. It’s the innovation S-Curve in words, this is what that looks like graphically: And the problem is that the value for X is larger […]
Most of you would know the Nietzsche quote “that which doesn’t kill is makes us stronger” (or it could be a Kelly Clarkson quote, depending on your age). My main point for today is that quote also applies to innovation and this has far reaching implications for anyone trying to make a firm or industry […]
I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson. It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table […]