The Value Proposition in Business Models

Anders Sundelin wrote a post earlier this week about the evolution of the business model concept. He does a great job of showing the various ways in which this idea has been operationalized – it’s still surprisingly fuzzy. For the state of the art thinking on business model innovation, a special issue of Long Range […]

Three Ways to Fail at Innovation

Three blog posts that caught my eye this week demonstrate three different ways that you can fail at innovation: Ignore the small innovations: James Todhunter wrote an excellent post yesterday defending thinking about improvements as innovation. You should read the whole post, but here is a highlight: Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all […]

Instead of Stockpiling Ideas, Make Them Flow

There’s a good post today by Michael Schrage concerning the recent article making the rounds claiming that America is suffering a creativity crisis. In short, he’s not buying that proposition. Here is one of the key quotes: This point is vital: genuine creativity isn’t about ideas. It’s about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and […]

How Can Governments Support Innovation?

I had an interesting conversation with someone from the government sector whose job is to support innovation and increase the number of innovating firms in the economy. While I can see why governments want to foster innovation, I think that his job is extremely difficult because he is actually trying to affect the strategy of […]

The Problem of Defining Innovation

Hutch Carpenter just wrote a nice post outlining 25 different definitions of innovation. This is an interesting exercise. He breaks the definitions down into five sub-categories, which all reflect slightly different takes on the nature of innovation. I find this interesting because I frequently hear people discount the importance of innovation by saying that it […]

Experts Miss Disruptive Innovations and Markets and Crowds Do Too.

I wrote a post last week about why experts will often overlook disruptive innovations. Today I’m going to extend this argument by saying that crowds and markets are just as good at missing these step changes, but first I’ll talk about the inspiration for the post. Last night was the Australian federal election and I […]

Ten More Great Free e-Books for Innovators

On Christmas Day last year, I posted a list of ten great free e-books for innovators. Today isn’t as festive, but I have another ten great free e-books that can help you become more innovative. Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation, and one of the ways to do this is to read […]

What’s the Best Use for IP?

Nina Paley has a great series of comics that look at Intellectual Property issues. Here is one of them: The strips make some good points about IP. This one in particular is interesting – it addresses an increasingly common problem. Patents were originally designed to help knowledge spread – by encouraging inventors to disclose their […]

Media Business Models

A guest post by Greg Satell – Digital Tonto There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the media business model needs to change. That’s undoubtedly true. Much like any other industry, the business context is changing rapidly and business practices need to reflect that. However, once you start to explore the issue, another […]

Why do we miss disruptive innovations?

Tim has written a bit on the blog about Charles Darwin so I thought I would follow along this theme with another idea. As Tim says, the first big test of Darwin’s radical ideas on the formation of new species was a presentation to the Linnean society. Darwin’s supporters chose the Linnean society because of […]

Innovation for Now and for the Future

One of the important ideas that follows from managing innovation as a process is that to be successful at it, you need to manage a portfolio of different innovation initiatives. This means that you need to have a mix of incremental and radical innovation ideas. One good way of building an innovation portfolio is to […]