Yesterday I talked about how inertia is the biggest obstacle to innovation. One way to get around this problem is to explicitly incorporate innovation into your strategy. One key aspect to doing this is to manage innovation as a portfolio. To do this, you need to invest in innovation across multiple time horizons. We tend […]
There are many candidates for the biggest obstacle to innovation. You could try lack of management support, no employee initiative, not enough good ideas, too many good ideas but no follow-through just for starters. My nominee for The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation is: Inertia All of the other examples are really excuses – but we […]
We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting. The three steps interact and reinforce each other – and successful information-based business models have all three. We can undertake business model innovation by changing our methods in these three areas, or by changing where […]
I wrote a post last week about the importance of connecting different groups as a precursor for innovation and the special role that some people have as bridges between disparate knowledge communities where ‘structural holes’ exist within the network between the communities. After writing this post I went looking for more research on the psychological […]
I frequently have people say something like this to me: “But my organisation can’t be innovative – we’re a service company” (or a government agency, or a university department, and so on). This is why the definition of innovation is so important. A lot of people think that their organisation isn’t innovative because they’re not […]
Stefan Lindegaard wrote two interesting posts this morning. The first talked about how a number of people in his open innovation workshop last week were very frustrated with the innovation process within their company. The second followed up a comment that I made on the first one – where he said that he sometimes advises […]
In a blog post last week, Umair Haque put forward the idea that we’re currently experiencing a social media bubble, and he also explained why he thinks this is a bad thing: Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as […]
Since this is the Innovation Leadership Network, it’s probably time to talk about leadership directly. My thoughts today are spurred by two things: first, this is our 300th post, second, this TED talk from Derek Sivers that was posted yesterday – it’s only 3 minutes, and you must watch it! It’s a great talk, and […]
Earlier this week I did a talk on innovation for a local firm that was the opening session of their strategy-making work for the year. During the questions, one person asked for suggestions about a specific initiative that they had been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years, but which just […]
How we define things is incredibly important. I’ve been reminded of this almost constantly this week. Here are some examples: I was talking with a friend of mine over the weekend about using social media to improve the flow of ideas within an organisation. She is a high-ranking manager in a very large organisation, and […]
A while ago Tim wrote an excellent post on the difference between networking and network structure. It’s one of my favorite posts and it’s among the most popular on the blog. Just to recap the main idea from that post – some network structures are better at supporting innovation and we need to understand how […]
How do we decide what our innovation strategy should be? Jeffrey Phillips says that we don’t need an innovation strategy at all, we just need a strategy, and it should have innovation embedded within it. That’s pretty consistent with what I’ve said here before as well when I talked about four different ways to integrate […]
