If you want to get better at innovation, you have start innovating more. That probably sounds obvious, but in practice, not all that many people do it. I was reminded of this by an interesting post by John Gruber discussing Apple’s transition to cloud computing. It includes this section: Jason Fried had a good cover […]
How can we make businesses more innovative? That’s easy isn’t it? We just group them together into clusters (preferably in science park developments) and it will happen… won’t it? The trouble with this cluster theory of innovation is that it confuses cause and effect. When we see a successful cluster like Silicon Valley it’s tempting […]
One of the ‘quick facts’ that I like to mention in my strategy seminars is that only two of the top 100 US firms in 1900 are still around today. In Australia, the stat isn’t much improved and it points to the extreme difficulty of maintaining the performance of organizations over extended time frames. Of […]
One question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?” The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true. Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s […]
I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the […]
What happens when the people that are supposed to be creative and innovative in your organisation are neither? I ran across an interesting quote from one of the people interviewed in the new book Herding Cats: Being Advice to Aspiring Academic and Research Leaders by Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies: The biggest thing that I […]
The Future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson That’s the idea that framed yesterday’s post – Where’s My Flying Car? I argued that as innovators, our job is to invent the future – and that in doing so, instead of trying to come up with something that has never existed […]
When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?” Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies […]
