Seek Conflicting Views to Improve Innovation
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Innovation occurs when we creatively connect ideas in new and novel ways. If we are trying to differentiate ourselves, or our organisation, we need to be able to do this well. One way to approach this is to consciously seek out viewpoints and information that we normally wouldn’t encounter, or which conflict with our normal […]
What if We Don’t Know What Our Business Model Is?
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Here’s an alarming stat from Charles Baden-Fuller: 2/3 of companies have not articulated their business model. Yikes! This video has an interview with him in which he discusses this statistic and some of other business models issues that arise from the articles in a special issue of Long Range Planning which has twenty articles on […]
Why is Innovating in Projects Different?
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Our Job is to Invent the Future
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If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job? According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future. Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument: …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely […]
Pulling in Ideas to Improve Innovation
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One of the key ideas in The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison is that changes in the business environment are leading to a situation where rather than creating great ideas and then pushing them out to the world, we need to take advantage of knowledge flows by pulling […]
Write Your Own Map
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Here’s a strange thing that I’ve noticed: even when we’re talking about innovation, people like to be told what to do. Doesn’t this strike you as odd? The people that are the most interested in doing something new seem to like being told what to do, just like everyone else. I just revisited a great […]
Is Innovation Good or Bad? Yes!
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Using Networks to Find Knowledge
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Last week Ralph Ohr left me with a challenge to think about how to use experts to get the best outcomes on making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We constantly miss disruptive changes in the operating environment and I suppose if I really knew the answer, I wouldn’t be posting it on a blog. Sometimes […]
Some Thoughts on the McKinsey Global Innovation Survey
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McKinsey have just released their 2010 innovation survey. It’s a very thought-provoking read and its based on a survey of over 2000 respondents from several industries. The survey can be found on McKinseyQuarterly.com and its free to get a subscription. Many of the survey results regarding the management of innovation as a process are consistent […]
Owning the Right Risks
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We know that the innovation process is risky. Nothing can guarantee the success of something new and failure is probably a good sign of a healthy innovation system. Without failures, no innovations. Of course, failure for its own sake is a ‘career-limiting move’ but successful innovation managers take the view that trials and rapid prototyping […]
Focus on Building Things
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Ryan Freitas recently wrote a post called 35 Lessons in 35 Years – there are some good tips here. One that particularly caught my eye is this one: Debates over terminology and semantics are for archivists and academics. If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than […]
