Innovation
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Louis Uchitelle asks that excellent question in the NY Times. My reaction is no: in a world of artful making, inventing without making would be difficult. “Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,†said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In…
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Leapfrogging
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2 min read
The fools at Fast Company lent me the keys to their blog last week. Here’s what I scrawled in lipstick on their bathroom mirror… Once in while I hear someone talk about innovation as leapfrogging the competition. I love this phrase because it’s so bold. It not only says we are going to innovate on…
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Michael Linton on Marketing Innovation
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1 min read
I attended an interview last night with Michael Linton, CMO of Best Buy, sponsored by Fortune magazine. He expressed the same healthy attitude toward trials that I’ve heard from other successful executives, e.g. “We have the programs we do regularly, the ready-aim-fire activities. Then we have the ready-fire-aim activities, the new programs we’re trying out.…
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Wladawsky-Berger on the Changing Nature of Strategy
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1 min read
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, on the need to move away from a purely hierarchical approach to strategy: “…for technologies and markets, the hierarchical approach is too rigid and must be complemented with more dynamic, bottoms-up approaches that constantly probe and react to what is going on within the business…
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Skirting the Edge of Disaster
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1 min read
I just noticed Kevin Kelley’s New Rules book is online. From Chapter 8 comes another reason innovation is hard to sell: “A real innovation is sufficiently different to be dangerous. It is change just this side of being ludicrous. It skirts the edge of the disaster, without going over. Real innovation is scary. It is…
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GE dares to dream of the future
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3 min read
In my tangible futures presentation last week, I repeated a statement I’ve written here, that sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. I’m happy to contradict that statement with a clear example: GE. In Growth as a Process, Jeffrey Immelt reveals the process that led to their…
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Female masters of innovation
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1 min read
Last year I went back to Jeanne Lietdke’s Strategy as Design article for a second, close reading. One thought I came away with was, “It’s not too surprising this has come from a woman. The creative embrace of conflict, the willingness to stay in the problem space, the lack of need to control a situation…
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It’s telling that this BusinessWeek/BCG survey only lists executive titles in this answer, even as executive-focused publications like HBR are publishing articles telling us, “Because so much of the learning about customers and so much of the experimentation with different segmentations, value propositions, and delivery mechanisms involve the people who regularly deal with customers, it…
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The client-centered innovation imperative
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2 min read
There’s an inherent problem in trying to market anything complex like innovation: we practioners are passionate and by necessity employ a rich set of ideas, while our clients who need it, by definition, have focused on another aspect of business and may not have the time nor the inclination to understand these rich ideas in…
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Concept car dreams
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2 min read
Since I’ve been thinking about tangible futures and why companies should envision the future (including car companies) I thought a visit to the Auto Show here in New York was worthwhile. The biggest surprise for me was the Toyota exhibit. While I love their process, I’m usually bored with their high quality but plain cars.…
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Principles for tangible futures
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1 min read
Tangible Futures, Part 3: Principles These are principles I’m using to develop tangible futures now… Tangible Futures are Inspirational, touching us both intellectually and emotionally. Pragmatic, optimistic in a realistic way. Innovative, they are a vision of something that is a mystery now because, by definition, we haven’t invented it yet. Strategic, describing something happening…
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Funding and the Innovator’s Dilemma
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2 min read
I’ve talked with several people who are heads of business units who have faced up to the what of the innovator’s dilemma but aren’t sure about the how. They have the determination to make difficult changes in how they serve their customers. They have P&L responsibility, but not necessarily a large scale budget that allows…
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Futures studies and the importance of ‘images’
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1 min read
Tangible Futures, Part 2: The historical context The Wilson Quarterly’s Winter 2006 issue focuses on future studies and includes this historical review, Has Futurism Failed? In it the authors cite several practitioners hailing the importance of our images of the future. To me this could include our science fiction, our movies, and our political rhetoric,…
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Tangible Futures example: Futurama
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1 min read
Sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. The social and political upheaval of the 1960’s and 1970’s may have squelched the raw optimism of previous decades, but this only made the need for inspiring visions even more important in the face of new, complex business environments. In…
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Tangible Futures example: Earth from space
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1 min read
Stewart Brand knew the power of this photograph before it was publicly released. In 1966, “…he sold buttons which read, ‘Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’ Legend has it that this accelerated NASA’s making good color photos of Earth from distant space during the Apollo program and that the ecology…