We are facing the best innovation opportunity in the history of business right now, and everyone is missing it. The sector that provides the best opportunity for innovation right now is older adults. And you can tap into this market with one fairly simple change to your business model. My wife Nancy is a geropsychologist. […]
I have talked a couple of times recently about some results from the assignments in my MBA class this year. In assessing the Innovation Value Chains within their firms, 3 out of 60 identified their organisation as ideas-poor, while the other 57 had bigger problems with idea selection and idea execution. The paradox is that […]
How do we come up with substantially new products, services and ways of doing things? When we are able to do this well, innovation provides our organisations with difficult to replicate competitive advantages. Yesterday, I talked about some of Roberto Verganti’s ideas in this regard in his book Design-Driven Innovation. One of the key points […]
This morning I thought of yet another way to talk about the incremental-radical innovation spectrum. Incremental innovations help you do things better, while radical innovations help you do things differently. If you follow the prescriptions in most business books, even when talk about having a radical message, you will end up doing things better. Actually, […]
Here is a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller that sums up my theme for 2010: You never change things by fighting the existing model. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I’m not big on resolutions, but I like Steve Shapiro’s ideas for building a New Year’s Theme. So […]
A few years ago I had a consulting job where my task was to help a company figure out how to sell the waterless composting toilet that they invented. They had already had other consultants working on the problem, but they weren’t happy with what they got from them. The only constraint that I had […]
Scott Berkun let out the secret of innovation today in an outstanding blog post. It’s a secret that Rowan Gibson tried to let out of the bag recently, and so did Braden Kelley on Blogging Innovation. I’ve tried to tell you about it too, using both analogies and statistics. The secret idea of innovation is […]
Yesterday I talked about how the interconnectedness of our economic networks often makes it more difficult for new ideas to spread. Because our products and services are embedded within a value network, we not only have to get people excited about our innovation, we have to get others within the value network to unconnect from […]
It’s always hard to find good examples of innovative organisations to talk about in my classes. Not because there is a shortage of innovative organisations to discuss, but because people need examples from organisations that seem similar to theirs. One of the skills that I have to get better at is helping people see the […]
