I love the story of the first message to cross the internet: Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just […]
Roland Harwood has an interesting post today on the always worthwhile NESTA Connect blog in which he discusses eight issues that firms run into when trying to manage open innovation. While you should definitely read the whole post, one idea that jumped out at me is this: Misunderstand the difference between hierarchies and informal networks […]
Yesterday we had evidence of the importance of connecting, and today we’ve got some for filtering. Dominic Basulto points to a great graphic commissioned by Wired magazine and made by Density Design on his terrific Endless Innovation blog. Here’s the small unreadable version: And you can see the full version here. The map is based […]
Jeffrey Phillips writes a really nice innovation blog called Innovate on Purpose. One of his recent posts concerns the importance of synthesis, where he says: What should be obvious is that one of the most important skills from an innovation perspective is the act and insight of synthesis. This is a real challenge, because most […]
Nancy and I were chatting with Phil Long over the weekend about some of the barriers to innovation that we run into at our university. We concluded that some of the biggest ones come from slavish adherence to the Handbook of University Policies & Procedures (the HUPP). I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t have rules. […]
If you want more insight into the differences between invention and innovation, check out the Museum of Unworkable Devices! It includes many perpetual motion machines, along with other ideas that will never work. Best of all, it has very good explanations of why the designs are futile. Great stuff! (that’s a picture from the site […]
Kassia Krozer writes a fantastic blog that primarily discusses the book publishing industry. Her post today has an excellent quote from author Mur Lafferty (here’s his original post): What really surprises me is when you hear publishing people say that they don’t know what to do, or that they refuse listen to Internet professionals. They […]
Lee Sigelman wants to know why smartphones don’t have keyboards that look like this? That’s the Dvorak keyboard, and by all (well, most) accounts you can touchtype significantly faster on one of those than you can on a qwerty keyboard. The persistence of the qwerty keyboard is the poster child for the idea of economic […]
Here’s a nice talk by Tom Peters on innovation. Some of the points that jumped out at me: He again emphasises the importance of process/business model innovation – we simply can’t get stuck on only thinking of new products as innovation. The idea that you should only buy from vendors that are in the top […]
Where you are is still important. Location has a huge impact on the resources available to you, the education of the people that you work with, the money available to try out radical ideas, and the cultural attitudes towards new things. Check out this from a Time Magazine article on California: Ignore the California whinery. […]
