“Innovation” is Dead

January 3, 2009

Bruce Nussbaum wrapped up 2008 with a post on his BusinessWeek blog titled "'Innovation' is Dead". Most of the follow-up commentary revolved around whether "Transformation" was better/worse than "Innovation" as a focal point for 2009, given the apparent overuse of the word "innovation" throughout 2007/2008.

Innovation That Matters

July 2, 2008

Last week I had the great fortune to meet up with Carl Honore, author of the inspiring books, In Praise of Slow and Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children From the Culture of Hyper-Parenting.  Carl was the very first member/anchor tenant at the fabulous coworking space in Battersea Park, London, called Le Bureau.  I spent the day [...]

Who Needs Innovation?

June 29, 2008

Every airline in the US except Southwest, that's who!!!
RIP Hub and Spoke
Take Continental, for example.  As I sit here at the gate in Austin (happily glowing in the aftermath of our first InnovationCamp) waiting for yet another delayed Continental flight (which might or might not be cancelled...Check back periodically for updates), I now realize that [...]

Excuses and Constraints

June 19, 2008

Holy bat-shit Batman, I hate the excuses! - Bandit, on the rant...
If you want to avoid doing something, invent an excuse. If you need an excuse, pick something outside of your control and call it an impediment. Extra points if you cite financial reasons. Double your score if you mention "regulations" or [...]

InnovationCamp Update

June 9, 2008

 
We will continue to post updates on our progress towards InnovationCamp, which will be on Saturday, June 28, at GSD&M Idea City, in Austin.  More details and info coming soon. 
As we get closer, I want to periodically remind folks what we are up to.  There are now several different places to dial in to iCamp.  [...]

Why Business Needs Anthropology

June 6, 2008

In most management schools the closest thing to a humanistic perspective that is ever talked about is social psychology.  Don't get me wrong, social psychology is cool stuff.  However, when it comes to trying to make business organizations more humanistic, more conscious of tangible consumer needs, and more sustainable, the discipline of psychology (whether social, [...]

The Design of Coworking

May 31, 2008

Over the past couple of days I've been writing about some of the financial-business constraints that coworking faces as it evolves.  I've expressed a clear set of opionions on this, and have significantly raised the blood pressure in a few folks out there.  As I see it, the process of devising a working coworking model [...]

Creative is as Creative Does

May 27, 2008

In the current issue of Inc. magazine, Leigh Buchanan writes about several interesting small firms focused on helping big companies innovate.  While each of the firms she discusses is different from the next- Ziba, InnovationLabs, Maddock Douglas, Brighthouse (not that Brighthouse)- they are similar in some important ways.  Each company has put into play practices [...]

Managing the Half-Day Sessions

May 22, 2008

[from the Google Group here]
Part of InnovationCamp is a track of half-day sessions that are meant to be hands-on collaboration, participation problem/solutions sessions. I shamelessly got the inspiration from a TransitCamp poster:

Bottom line... it's more and more clear to me that tackling big problems (or any interesting problem) through large scale up-front analysis and [...]

Success… and Failure

May 20, 2008

Natural selection, along with the associated biological machinery, is the most durable innovation engine that I can think of. It's been running for approximately 3.5 billion years. And it's produced the 1 to 2 million species in existence today. In spite of this success, only about one species in one thousand that [...]