The Best Way to Have a Great Idea…

Dual Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling famously said “The best way to have a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.” He was right. Well, really, he won two Nobel prizes, so my opinion here is relatively unimportant. But anyway, I think he was right. The quote from Pauling showed up again recently […]

The Real Problem with the Media Business Model

Almost as soon as I finished yesterday’s post on media business models I knew that I had missed an important part of the story. A big part of the problem with the business model for many of the media segments is that they are actually two-sided markets, and the value proposition on one side has […]

Which Part of Your Business Model is Creating Value?

Andrew Keen posted a fascinating interview with Jeff Jarvis yesterday. All of the interview clips are worth watching – they touch on a number of interesting topics, including the relative benefits of publicness and privacy, the future of news and how to best develop new business models for journalism, why google struggles with social applications, […]

Do Something Now!

I have an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to do right now. It’s all really interesting work, and I’m happy doing it – there’s just a lot of it right now. When I find myself in situations like this, I often end up paralysed, which makes things even worse. That is the situation that I […]

Your Brand is How You Interact

One of the key parts of innovation is getting our idea to spread. One of the disadvantages that new organizations have when they innovate is that they do not have any name recognition – in this situation people often think that if only they had a strong brand to support them, then it would be […]

Listening to customers…. really listening.

One of the consistent messages from innovation surveys is that customers are a major source of innovation. Sometimes customers with more extreme uses for products will adapt products to suit their purpose and then the manufacturers find out what is happening and take these adaptations on board. If you’ve seen the videos of big wave […]

Don’t Hire Experience, Hire Learners

A few weeks ago, the Australian Financial Review published an article discussing how Australian employers value job candidates with an MBA. The short summary is: they don’t value MBAs at all. One headhunter was quoted saying something along the lines of “most employers say that if you have to choose between getting an MBA or […]

Strategy is What You Do

I spent a very enjoyable day today working with a group of people that basically act as innovation consultants. They each work with firms in order to help them develop and embed innovation processes. In the course of the day, several of them said something that went something like “we’re not sure how their innovation […]

Craft-Based Innovation – Dodocase

Check Kevin Rose‘s of the Dodocase for iPad, one of the more gorgeous things I’ve run across recently: Schumpeter defined innovation as the formation of new connections which drive economic growth. In The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur reinforces this idea by saying that all new economic ideas build on the combination of things that […]

Convergence Culture & Innovation

Mitch Joel points to this excellent video by Henry Jenkins, which outlines some of the key points from his book Convergence Culture: Mitch uses this to point out the importance of storytelling in marketing: The brands that win are the brands that tell a great story. When it comes to transmedia storytelling, the brands that […]

Sustainable Innovation

Last week Tim and I were at the launch of the inaugural “Brisbane Innovation Scorecard”. It was a really nice event with 200 people in the room for lunch with many high-profile speakers. I have been involved with the project since March and its amazing to see something go from a small concept to such […]

I Could Have Done That!

Nancy Duarte beautifully tells the story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and how he won the right to build the Dome for the magnificent Cathedral in Florence. It’s a terrific story, and you should go read it – it’s ok, I’ll wait. … So, the climax of the story is that Brunelleschi does something clever […]