Leadership: The Philosopher’s Stone of Innovation…? (Part 1)
I had the opportunity to speak before the Association for Strategic Planning this week on the topic of Innovation - an inherently rather broad and deep subject, so my approach was one of surveying the various paradigms of innovation (creativity/ideation, invention, implementation, value-creation, etc.), and that all of these conceptual frameworks for understanding [...]
Innovation Risk Management & Product Success Rates
In my earlier post on the potential traps of metrics-based innovation management, I noted that while a significant amount of innovation appears to be driven out of smaller firms, there is an underlying, Darwinian dynamic by which we only see the relatively small percentage of successful outcomes, as compared to the very large numbers of [...]
Forthcoming Talk @ ASP Orange County on Innovation
Just a heads up that I’ll be speaking before the Orange County Chapter of the Association for Strategic Planning this coming Tuesday (Feb 19th) at the Doubletreee Club Hotel in Santa Ana. Details and registration info are available here.
Here’s the promotional blurb on the event….
Most companies are aware of the need for innovation, and [...]
The Potential Trap of Innovation Metrics
“Be careful what you wish for measure … you just may get it.”
As my library of books on Innovation grows, I am seeing two somewhat conflicting themes emerging in regards to the role of metrics in Innovation. One sees up-front metrics as a key determinant of establishing efficient distribution of a firm’s resources across all [...]
Speed - Life In The Business Fast Lane
At this week’s staff meeting, we discussed an emergent theme from our conversations with clients and other constituencies - that of improving the velocity of organizations in executing across a number of dimensions.
In the area of new product development, the ability of a firm to accelerate new product introduction ahead of competition and within window [...]
Transparent Technology and The New World of Consumerism
There was an interesting posting over on FutureLab’s Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog on the impact of technology on consumerism, particularly within the youth culture.
The gist of the posting was on how young people in particular are aggressively using technology to seamlessly move back and forth between the worlds of bytes and atoms as they [...]
The Importance of Execution: IBM’s Innovation Man Commercial
Have you seen IBM’s “Innovation Man” commercial? I think it’s a real hoot and for those of you who haven’t seen it, I’ll try to capture it’s essence…
Scene: Outside an office building, female business professional walking away from building towards an inbound middle-aged, rather paunchy guy in a superhero outfit with a large “I” across [...]
Recommended Reading: The Myths of Innovation
Recently finished a wonderful book on the subject of innovation by Scott Berkun, entitled “The Myths of Innovation.”
Scott was a member of the Microsoft team which developed the Internet Explorer browser during the mid-to-late 90s, and his book is a blend of the history of innovation (with a strong emphasis on recent technological innovations), as [...]
Quantum Innovation - Some Foundational Thoughts
The term innovation is itself subject to multiple interpretations. My own use of the term is that innovation is applied creativity (a.k.a. “invention”) which provides value to a customer.
Quantum Leaders views the modern company in a manner akin to that of the quantum physicist, who considers light as having the properties of both a particle [...]
What is Innovation?
In the old days, we would normally begin to answer this question by consulting our dictionary - nowadays, we have all the resources of the net available to us, one of the more useful ones being wikipedias, a collaborative (“open source”) approach to encyclopedias.
The wikipedia on innovation lists a number of definitions (derived from various [...]