Seth Godin’s post today demonstrates one of the key benefits of being a lumper instead of a splitter – you can learn by analogy. Sure, the industries change, the goods/service ratio changes, regulation changes, names change. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. People are people, and basic needs and wants don’t vary so much. Put […]
In a nice piece in the latest newsletter from edge.org, Annalena McAfee talks about the impacts of digital technologies on modern life (check out the whole piece – it’s quite good). Her first interesting contention is that she feels that younger people are more polite, and more engaged with adults than kids were when she […]
I just saw this on Merlin Mann’s twitter feed: The guy who worries people will “steal” his idea might better ponder why nobody “steals” his implementation. As I keep saying – ideas are cheap, and implementations are valuable. We need to find better ways to cycle through ideas rapidly. This reminds me of a post […]
Here’s a really good talk by Mark Newman called Structure and Dynamics in Complex Networks: Structure and Dynamics in Complex Networks If you’re curious about network analysis and have never run across it before, this gives a pretty good explanation of what it is, and some of the things that we can analyse with network […]
Stefan Lindegaard has a post with links to a lot of good innovation related material, including an interview with Henry Chesbrough. The Chesbrough interview is terrific. He is best known for his research on open innovation, but a central part of that has been his work on business model innovation, which is the focus of […]
Here’s a great quote from Peter Drucker: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. We often get asked about how innovation relates to efficiency programs like lean and six sigma. Obviously, ideas that you implement within these programs that improve efficiency are often innovative. And we […]
One of the points that I consistently stress in my innovation classes is that there are many forms of innovation, and that people and firms need to think about more than simply product innovation. This idea goes back at least to Schumpeter and his five forms of innovation: New product or service New method of […]
Today I ran across this talk from Mark Buchanan: Prediction and its Limits in Socio-Economic Systems It’s from the International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems that took place in Zurich last May. It provides excellent support for the main point in John’s recent post – that the economy is a complex […]
I got a new mobile phone this week, and I’ve spent a fair bit of the time since then playing around with different programs and applications that are available for it. The killer app in smart phones for me is gps tracking. Using google maps, getting turn-by-turn directions and geotagging photos and notes are all […]
