3rd Wave Capitalism: Radical business innovation begins anew
Last week, on Thursday night September 16, 2010, I had the good fortune of speaking to the Society for Information Management's (SIM's) Boston chapter about...
7 Non-traditional Barriers to Innovation
A friend of mine recently asked me: What do you think are the biggest barriers to innovation? If you look at the literature on innovation many folks cite...
Are You Worldclass Online? Seven principles to think about...
The other day I was talking with my partner Jamie Yoder about a client who was asking him: What does it mean to be a world class online organization? Here...
Beethoven Had It Right: Let the audience invest
About two months ago I was having a discussion with a senior executive from a world class animation studio about Avatar , James Cameron's blockbuster movie...
Blue Water Thinking: Why deep innovation is so hard
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. -- Albert Einstein Deep innovation is really hard. If you have ever swum in the open ocean,...
Brain Brandy: A plea for information density, not information for the dense
The other day I was reading the New York Times online which was reporting on the financial crisis a year after the crash. They created the most fantastic...
Can the USA Regain its Love of Speed?
We used to love being the nation of the leading edge: the fastest and tallest of everything: fastest computers, tallest buildings, fastest cars, and so on....
Can You Draw Your Innovation Process?
A dear friend of mine Barbara Feinberg researched many new product development processes and she helped Kim Clark and Steve Wheelright of the Harvard...
Convenience is No Longer a Differentiator
Blame Robert Wodruff. In 1923 he became president of the Coca Cola company at the age of 33, four years after his father Ernest bought the company from Asa...
Create "Choosing" (Not "Shopping") Experiences
On a recent, gorgeous day in New York City I walked from Bergdorf Goodman at 59th Street & 5th Avenue past Cartier on 52nd street and continued down 5th...
Diamonds in the Rough: Driven by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
There are many books that I have read over the years that had a profound influence on me, and are almost unknown. I don't know exactly what that says about...
Disruptive Thinking: 5 attributes to consider
Every once in a while you see something which is such a fresh solution to a problem you just say ahhhh. Check out this skytrain/bus idea about how to float...
Do Your Knowledge Workers Have a "Bitsmith"?
Along with my colleagues Jeff Hesse and Terry Holliday, I have been trying to understand what makes some teams of knowledge workers more productive than...
Five Keys to Creating an Information Advantage
The value of having superior information has been true throughout human history, and the fact that my friend Tom Davenport's book on Competing on Analytics...
How Behavioral Economics Can Help Cure the Health Care Crisis
This post was co-authored with Bret Schroeder and Tom Weakland and is also posted at HBR at http://tinyurl.com/yel2j3y Noncompliance with medical advice is...
How the iPad is Like the Tesla Roadster
Courtesy of my dear friend Peer Munck (Founder of MunckMix , a music distributor), I just had my first ride in a Tesla Roadster , the $129,000 electric...
I Need a Miracle Every Day: Fishy Sensors...
My grandmother Catherine McCaig lived to be 105 years old, and worked until she was 99. She cried when she saw the beginning of James Cameron's Titanic...
Innovation and "Noble Failure": Lessons from Dave Pottruck
My dear friend Dave Pottruck was co-CEO at Charles Schwab (along with Chuck himself) when they reinvented themselves from being just a bricks and mortar...
Innovation Lessons from the Battle of Normandy
Shortly after the American's and Brits landed in Normandy they found themselves caught up in a region known as the Bocage. In the Bocage, there are many,...
Innovations in Control: Do you have the right cost of capital for today's environment?
This post is co-author Joseph Calandro, Jr., author of Applied Value Investing (NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009). One of the most important and overlooked innovations...
Innovations in Use: Is the iPad to computers as transistors were to radios?
A few days ago the iPad just passed 2,000,000 units in sales in under 60 days. Why is that? I think its because the device allows people to take their...
Intel & Vice: Innovation where hip meets bits, and the Digital Gift meets art
It always amazes me how the most creative folks often have one part of their radical plan which is very old style and conservative. In particular, Vice ,...
Jan 15Is This Innovation Too Disruptive for My Firm?
One of the trickiest decisions in business is to assess: is this innovation too innovative for my firm? You need to decide, will the core business embrace...
Policing Google and Other Fun Topics: Ben Edelman
I met a very bright young man today by the name of Ben Edelman , an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, who is involved in a number of...
Radical Continuity: What any retailer can learn from Nordstrom
I'm coming to believe every good is a convenience good. A recent New York Times article reported that Nordstrom has integrated their in-store inventory with...
Seeing Around the Corner: Can you know what innovations are coming?
I was talking with my friend Chris Curran today, our CTO, and he said, "you ought to write a post about 'seeing around the corner'". (Chris also mentioned...
Should Google Vertically Integrate?
Today, Google announced that it will move into the travel space with its $700 million acquisition of ITA, a flight information software company. If I were...
Social Killer Apps and the Humanization of the Marketspace
Today's New York Times article joins new stories about Zynga (formally Zynga Game Network ), the maker of FarmVille, MafiaWars and other popular games on...
Speed Selling & Innovation: Lessons from the master
I want to post some additional thoughts about Gordon Bell's comments on my previous post on speed selling and innovation. For those of use who know Gordon,...
The Battle for the World's Attention: Facebook's social graph versus Google's page link
Google's recently reported $100-200 million investment in the company Zynga , the very popular online game company, is their latest attempt to finally get...
The Economics of Cognitive Work: Some initial ideas
I have been long fascinated by the economics of cognitive work and I plan to explore this topic across a number of blog entries. I use the term cognitive...
The Integration of Marketplace & Marketspace: The killer app for healthcare?
In our recent Diamond Digital IQ study, we found that only 3% of healthcare companies were focused on innovation as their primary strategic emphasis. You...
The Power of Collective Risk Absorption
Every time there is an innovation in risk absorption the economy flourishes. The invention of the shared stock company by the Dutch and the English allowed...
Thought Experiment: What if Facebook, Skype and PayPal Merged?
Many people don't know that Bostonian William Crapo (Billy) Durant founded General Motors, and if you ever go to the old General Motors Building in Detroit,...
Used = Green: Environmentally friendly demand creation
One way to effectively market while being friendly to the environment is to facilitate the market in used goods. When I was a kid my father used to make me...
Vannevar Bush: I forgot he predicted Google and Wikipedia!
Did you ever have the experience of rereading something that you read a long time ago and say to yourself, "Wow -- this is so much better than I realized!"?...
Why Amazon Will Innovate Past Kindle and Microsoft's Bing Will Never Win
When I bought my iPad it was very easy to download my new Kindle application to read all my books I bought on Amazon, and I'm sure that Jeff Bezos knows...
Why Innovation Struggles: The triumph of explication over imagination
The ancient Oxford College All Souls, founded in 1438, has since 1932 been giving a one word exam as part of a two day battery of admissions tests. Imagine...
Why the Apple iPhone 4 May Change Communication
All true breakthroughs in an art form come when there is a change in perspective. Some say that Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428)...
You Robot: An innovation in conversations?
I have been a big believer in the idea that we need to reinvent the meeting. Seth Godin wrote an interesting post about how to use the iPad to improve...
YouTube & The 48th Anniversary of the Visual Global Village
On July 10, 1962, Telstar I was launched, the first communications satellite to transmit live television across the Atlantic. The term Global Village was...