Be Great at One Thing

I’m reading Douglas Rushkoff’s book on innovation called Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. It has some intriguing ideas. Here is how he outlines the basic premise of the book: Just last year, I got a phone call from the CEO of a home electronics chain, asking if I could devise […]

Modernizers, Preservationists and Innovation

Adam Thierer wrote a terrific post today exploring his ongoing major theme comparing internet optimists and pessimists. He has written a series of very interesting posts assessing the arguments of the pessimists that think that the impact of the internet on society is generally bad (e.g. Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier), and the optimists […]

Responding to Disruptive Innovation

This semester John and I used a simulation exercise in our MBA class. It gives you a chance to run a battery company that is facing a disruptive innovation (there’s a good description of it here). The company is in a market that is evolving – the majority of demand and revenue comes from the […]

Use Culture to Help Select Ideas

Grant McCracken’s latest book Chief Culture Officer is a really interesting one. The basic premise is that for businesses to succeed, they have to be in touch with culture. In defining culture, McCracken doesn’t make much of a distinction between high-brow and low-brow – he’s more interested in the things that real people are actually […]

Academics Behaving Badly

I had an interesting experience the other week as an editor of an innovation journal. The specifics of the story are a tale of academic corruption but in the broader sense it highlights issues about how academics should communicate their work. Tim is probably freaking out as he reads the blog title but I promised […]

Execution is Everything

Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is […]

Answer One Question to be a Better Manager

I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. […]

The Value of Clarity

One part of the language that always gets a bit of a bum rap is jargon. Everyone hates jargon. It’s easy to say we should just rid of it completely. The problem is that jargon actually serves a purpose. When a group of people share an interest in a topic, they develop a vocabulary to […]

How to Improve Your Innovation Metrics

We’ve written a few posts criticising some of the more common innovation metrics in use, so I thought it would be smart to outline some ways that we can actually develop more effective metrics. Here’s a story that might help: A while ago I was in charge of managing student recruitment for a tertiary education […]

Innovating in Horizon 1

After Ralph Ohr’s excellent post on innovation and human capabilites, I’ve been giving some more thought to the three horizons model and how innovation is different within the horizons. The big takeaway from Ralph’s post for me was that we need to manage innovation differently accross the horizons. In other words don’t manage an H1 […]

How to Innovate with an Utterly Derivative Product

I just finished the new novel by William Gibson, Zero History, which prompted me to go back to read his previous two books since the three are loosely connected. I know that these books have polarised his fans, with some hating them and other loving them. I’m in the latter camp – I think his […]