Innovation
-
Tangible Futures example: Da Vinci’s flying machine
•
1 min read
Leonardo Da Vinci possessed one of the greatest abilities to imagine the future potential for humans and work out these ideas as an engineer or designer would. It’s telling that we remember his drawings more readily than his words. Here is his pen and ink drawing of A Flying Machine from 1490…
-
Imagine it is the year 1900 and you own a large corporation needing offices in a major city. You want to construct a building that makes a grand statement of your financial strength and contributes to the civic infrastructure. Currently the highest buildings are about 20 stories, but you are told new construction techniques are…
-
Understanding the future in a tangible way
•
3 min read
Tangible Futures, Part 1: Background I’m starting a series of posts to talk about something we’re calling Tangible Futures, which are tangible expressions of visions for the future. That might sound quite ordinary or quite esoteric depending on your point of view, but having worked on it for several months I’m finding it to be…
-
Business Innovation Factory
•
1 min read
BIF is one of the few organizations of its type on the US East Coast: “The Business Innovation Factory is a community of innovators collaborating to explore… business model innovation through a series of experiences designed to get ideas off of the white board and onto the ground as quickly and cost effectively as possible.…
-
Good Crazy and Bad Crazy
•
1 min read
My MIG colleague Scott Hirsch recorded a podcast with PodTech and discussed technology-focused startups that drive by the rear-view mirror, open vs. closed networks, and why it’s the crazy-brave people that drive innovation.
-
Open-source business sucks! No wait, it doesn’t!
•
1 min read
Sigh. The current issue of the Economist has a story called “Open, but not as usual: As “open-source†models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent” which I had to read to learn about these limitations. But the article — while mentioning the usual glitches — is generally bullish on open-source…
-
Apple’s R&D investment – too low or too high?
•
3 min read
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” — Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998…
-
Shiny, happy, innovative people
•
1 min read
…the business world is full of highly touted prescriptions for being more innovative… in my experience, few solutions actually address what I believe to be a fundamental enabler of innovative behavior in organizations… The key to unleashing innovative behavior is asking the question “how can I help each person in my organization achieve a state…
-
Positive solutions that are neither left nor right
•
2 min read
In this Bruce Mau talk on Global Creativity, he mostly discusses the Massive Change exhibit. But at the end he drops this, without making it clear how it’s tied in… (my paraphrasing) Why are we seeing things on the political right and left that are both interesting? They should be at odds. What we realized…
-
Books on European Innovation
•
2 min read
A day after my recent musings, the Wall Street Journal looked at three books on European growth… Cousins and Strangers is written by the last British governer to Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner. Most of the text seems to mirror the kind of Bush administration bashing that progressives in the US already do,…
-
The Innovative Europe
•
3 min read
Continuing on the Europe theme, I see a lot of potential for innovation there if the EU, governments, and companies are willing to address the current challenges with a view of the current situation as helpful constraints rather than roadblocks. State-based benefits are a competitive advantage that should be leveraged more. The obvious example is…
-
Who’s innovating?
•
1 min read
While pretty much everyone everywhere is freaking out about the future rich country status of China and India (can you say self-fulfilling prophesy?), the ability to innovate is what will keep the rich countries rich. So who’s innovating? According to this EU report, the innovation leaders are Sweden Switzerland Finland Japan Germany United States Denmark…
-
Walking home from work tonight I was thinking that most everything written about innovation is useless. It’s generic banter. Fixing companies must be done in the context of their problems by people passionate enough to constantly push against the dead weight of status quo. If we learn anything useful from the Tom Peters of this…
-
The Innovate-Dominate Imperative
•
1 min read
This essay by Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins offers some useful models of the software industry that could easily apply to similar industries in a state of major transition. This year, many software companies will be busy trying to convert their offerings from products into services. In fact, I would estimate that last year, software-as-a-service…
-
The Anti-Trend
•
1 min read
Springwise offers a handy heuristic for forecasting… Talk about conflicting trends: domestic outsourcing is more popular than ever, yet at the same time consumers are DIY-ing like there’s no tomorrow: as a hobby or to save money. For every trend, there’s an anti-trend!