Google Australia lost two key people over the past couple of weeks – Lars Rasmussen, one of the developers of Google Maps and Google Wave, and Kate Vale, their first employee in Australia. It seems like the main motivation in both cases was the possibly premature death of Wave, but Vale made some comments that […]
If you are even remotely interested in innovation (and how would you end up here if you aren’t?), then this talk by R.A. Mashelkar is worth 19 minutes of your time: Mashelkar talks about the importance of innovating for everyone – of getting more for more for less. To do this, he talks about the […]
A while ago John and I did in-depth individual interviews with almost all of the senior managers of a firm about their innovation process. We ran into a striking paradox while doing so. One person said to us “This company needs to get rid of innovation.” He said this after he had explained all of […]
Think for a minute about all of the innovations that had to take place for you to read this sentence. There are lots – computers, semi-conductors, the internet, and the world-wide web just for starters. Where did this innovation come from? Many firms have played important roles in these breakthrough innovations. But another important player […]
How do you build a business model for doing something that you love? It’s a difficult question. In most cases, it means that you need to build some sort of craft-based business model, which can be challenging. But if you do it right, you can create smarter conversations – a recent idea from Hugh MacLeod. […]
This is the latest page that we’ve added on the top menu: Engaging with people that are entrepreneurs, or involved in managing innovation is one of our top priorities. Trying to help people doing these things is one of the objectives with this blog. However, you may find that the material here isn’t specific enough […]
I’ve written a series of posts over the past year about connecting innovation to strategy. Looking back a these there are two main points that keep jumping out. The first of these is to recognize which of the three horizons the business is in. Innovating in Horizon 3, with the development of speculative but potentially […]
One of the critical parts of the innovation process is getting our great ideas to spread. Diffusion is often the stumbling block for innovative new ideas. There is a section towards the end of Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky that provides some interesting insights into how to attack this problem. Belsky describes a storytelling […]
Guest post by Holly Green Does Your Culture Support Innovation? There’s a lot of people talking about innovation these days, myself included. The good news is that business leaders seem to be sitting up and taking notice of this important subject. The bad news is that once a topic becomes popular in the media, people […]
I’m always staggered by the figures on the the development of China and India. Sometimes numbers are almost too big to comprehend but a McKinsey report from 2008 gave a nice summary of the projected transformations that will occur in China before 2025. This urbanization is the biggest migration of people in world history. Approximately […]
Here is a quick test of your organisation’s innovation program. Step 1: Think of the person in your organisation that has the most responsibility for making innovation happen. Step 2: Imagine that that person is the guy walking across the street in this video – for the purpose of illustration, we’ll call him Tom: Step […]