Every economic bust launches criminal charges against executives of failed companies. It’s been a few years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Global Financial Crisis but the court cases in many instances are still ongoing. One of the most notorious cases in Australia was the child-care center empire of ABC […]
I’ve been invited to participate in a symposium on Deep Practice, organised around the theme “Deepening knowledge and innovation through design practice.” The program includes this free talk by Professor Mark Burry on March 24th in Melbourne. To prepare for the event, we’ve been asked to write a brief piece on the topic. This is […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction. There […]
Have you heard of Ruslan Kogan? I think he is one of the most exciting business entrepreneurs in recent years. I only got to hear about him when the major Australian electronics retailers started to complain about how unfair it was that a business could manufacture offshore and sell directly to consumers via the internet. […]
The first thing that I ever bought from the J. Peterman catalog was the Otavalo Mountain Shirt: I had discovered the Peterman catalog very early in its existence, and after getting a few in the mail, I finally bought the shirt. I quickly discovered that the quality of clothes from Peterman was very high, and […]
Guest post by Ralph Ohr There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea”. Their major claim is: “Great brands lead users, not the other way around.” As expected, this lead to controversial […]
Last week I was sent the Siemens report into productivity in Australia. Like the Grattan report that I wrote about a few weeks ago, it has a stern warning about the threat of declining productivity. Like the grasshoper in Aesop’s fable, Australians are at risk of squandering the wealth that is being generated from commodity […]
I’m in the middle of reading Evil Plans, the excellent new book by Hugh MacLeod, which reminded me of one of my favourites from him. I think this is a pretty good and concise explanation of business model innovation: One way or another, to innovate successfully you have to be distinctive. In other words, Hugh […]
