Why does your firm exist? To maximize shareholder value? No – that’s the dumbest idea in the world. To reduce transaction costs? No – that’s another economic model that doesn’t have much grounding in reality. In fact, if you ask this of most firms, they don’t have a very good answer. There have been a […]
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. […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. This means that to innovate effectively you need to have great ideas, select the best ones and execute them, and then get those executed ideas to spread. All three steps are interdependent, and you need to be good at all three to innovate effectively. Today I’m interested in […]
Guest post by Ralph Ohr One of my main interests is looking at the intersection of organizational and human capabilities. Business is accomplished through people, thus individual mindset, behavior and capabilities determine organizational performance. When it comes to innovation, a recently published research paper, titled ‘The Bias Against Creativity’ serves as a good example. The findings […]
The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so. If you think of the last 10% of that time, a fair bit has happened. There have periods of major global warming, and a few ice ages. There have been asteroid strikes, and other natural disasters too numerous to count. Continents that were one […]
Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors, and in reading a couple of his books recently, I ran across several quotes made me think about innovation. In large part, this is because nearly everything I encounter makes me think about innovation one or another. Nevertheless, here are four thoughts triggered by Murakami. The first […]
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 […]
I don’t like focus groups. I’ve found the information that you get from them to be too shallow to be useful. However, this doesn’t mean that when we’re innovating we should just pursue whatever ideas drift across our minds. Steve Jobs was quoted last year about how Apple doesn’t use focus groups. A number of […]
Are you creating something new or replacing something that’s already there? If you’re replacing, you need to do much different things than if you’re creating something new. Every time you try to get your ideas to spread, you have to break connections. This is a lot harder if you’re trying to replace a deeply embedded […]
It’s time to vote for the top innovation bloggers of 2011 over at Innovation Excellence. The list of nominees is fantastic – and a great indicator of the growing community of people that are passionate about innovation. You can vote by leaving a comment on the voting page, or by sending a tweet to @ixchat […]
