Efficiency or Exploration?
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Here is a brilliant post from Randall Munroe on XKCD: There’s a very simple point here – strategy is about making choices. What we choose to emphasise reveals what we think it important. Here’s a simple business example: do we choose efficiency or exploration? In most cases, we need to do both. We need to […]
Malcolm Gladwell on the Norden Bombsight
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I’m traveling right now, so I can’t write a lot today. Instead, I have this must-see video from the always-watchable Malcolm Gladwell: I’m traveling right now so I can’t write a long post. So today, just watch this: Some important points: We get hung up on our technologies: the Norden bombsight made bomb dropping more […]
There’s No Such Thing as a Good Idea…
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Experimenting is a key part of innovating. In his new book REAMDE, Neal Stephenson has a great description of learning through experimenting: Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit […]
Get the Fundamentals Right First
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Innovation When All You Have is a Noodle
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Most of the inspirational innovation stories that we hear are about technology firms like Google, Amazon and Apple. This sometimes makes it difficult to help people find the connections to their work if they are in less sexy industries, like mining, education or government. However, innovation is just as important in those industries as well. […]
Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Inspiration from Jane McGonigal
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I missed writing about someone on Ada Lovelace Day this year because I was actually teaching my MBA class about a great technology heroine – Jane McGonigal. I love the concept behind Ada Lovelace Day. In order to encourage more women to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the day is used to […]
The Fundamental Problem in Management
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The fundamental problem in management is that the world is uncertain, and people hate dealing with uncertainty. The result of this that they go to great lengths to provide themselves with the illusion of certainty. The Bed of Procrustres by Taleb, which I discussed previously, is primarily concerned with the problems caused by false certainty. […]
Innovation in Aussie Rules
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Collingwood fan and outstanding economist Nick Gruen wrote an interesting piece prior to last weekend’s AFL Grand Final explaining why he thought his team would lose to Geelong. The underlying premise in the piece is that he thought Geelong would win because they were more innovative. Here are some of the key points: If I […]
Innovation Aphorisms
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Over the weekend I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thought-provoking book The Bed of Procrustres. It’s a very slow read disguised as a quick read – it’s ~100 pages of aphorisms. You can go through it quickly, but most of them both require and reward deeper thought. I’ve picked out some which provide some insight into […]
Risk Averse, or…?
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Here is something I ran across yesterday that confuses me quite a bit. Take a look at this graph from the Economist: The thing that confuses me is that I often hear from managers and others here in Australia that the reason that their organisation isn’t very innovative is that they are risk averse. But […]
Make Your Own Map to Make Novel Connections
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Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation. If this is the case, how do we get better at it? I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. […]
