3rd Wave Capitalism: Podcast
I was recently interviewed by Scott Henderson for the site New Empire Builders, which is a site dedicated to finding new startups, interesting non-profits,...
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...
5 Things That Create Ridiculous Customer Experiences: Can't we avoid Catch 22?
The other day I was on the phone with my insurance company because they had rejected, for a second time, a procedure for my son which was performed by a...
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 a Vendor or a Business Partner?
One of my colleagues just asked me: What's the difference between a vendor relationship and a true business partnership? This is a vital question when any...
Are You Swimming in Data? Three benefits of Data Visualization
"A good sketch is better than a long speech..." -- a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte The ability to visualize the implications of data is as...
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,...
Can Behavioral Economics Bend the Healthcare Cost Curve? Reports from the field!
In the great debate and political firestorm surrounding healthcare it is easy to forget that the majority of the medical problems people have are due to...
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...
Cognitive Continuity: Key to winning in the Marketspace
A dear friend of mine was asking me about my 1994 article on Managing in the Marketspace , and I wanted to share some of my email to him because I think the...
Cool Idea: A smart coffee cup named Smug
I love the story of Chris Halberg the founder of Smug Coffee . He was in class at Marquette University and invented the idea of adding an RFID chip to a...
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...
Creating Customer Communities: Two different innovations in conversation
Valaria Moltoni, scion of the site Conversation Agent, has advocated (as many other have too) that you can benefit from creating communities of customers....
Creative Work Unlocked by Crowdfunding: A disruptive innovation
The other day I received a downright inspirational email from my friends at IndieGoGo, a site dedicated to the collaborative funding of ideas. ( Here's a...
Customer Service 2.0: Transparency, Tribes, and Talent
I confess that I have a warm spot in my heart for customer service operations. It is probably because I met my wife of 29.5 years Eileen Marie when she and...
Diamond Study Finds Financial Services Firms Focused on Innovation
I recently learned something fascinating from business and technology executives in the financial services industry. Despite the increased regulation and...
Digital Innovation in Social Space: The Patriot's Jumbo, Jumbotron
The New England Patriots are installing a 164 x 41.5 foot high definition television for this upcoming season, which is puny compared to the Dallas Cowboy's...
Disruptive Innovation Mashup? The Copenhagen Wheel
Big Think reported yesterday that the Copenhagen Wheel, which was designed at MIT's media lab is going to win the $15,000 Dyson Prize for design. The video...
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 You Curate Your Audience?
Earlier this week, in a hot New York City, I was having some tea and lemonade with a dear friend who is a senior publishing executive. When our conversation...
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...
Economics of Cognitive Work Part II: Exploring the B2B Paradigm
In a recent blog post I began to explore some ideas concerning the nature and economics of cognitive work in the modern corporation. I made a distinction...
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...
Five Ways Augmented Reality Will Change your Business
My colleague Anand Rao and I think that augmented reality is going to be a big deal for businesses. What is it? It is the idea that locations, devices, even...
Google v. Facebook: The battle for the world's attention
If you are the type of person who likes to think about where things might be going I'd suggest you start watching the evolving competitive battle between...
Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Now Foursquare? The loosely coupled operating system for the web...
Not long ago, I was presenting along with some folks to the senior executive team at a large division of a massive insurance company. I had the great...
Google's App Inventor: More needed duct tape for our digital world
When something gets modular, the opportunity to create many more innovations skyrockets. Hundreds, or thousands or millions of inventors can give something...
How Barcodes and Smartphones Will Rearchitect Information
Check out my new post at Harvard Business Review which talks about the new physicality of information -- linking marketplace & marketspace:...
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...
Innovating at Scale in a Successful Company: What Microsoft Could Learn from Lo
Large successful organizations have a hard time creating large scale innovations. When a company's on the brink of death, they entertain many radical...
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 BP's Misery
The ongoing tragedy of BP's well disaster makes me both sad and mad at the same time, and I've been trying to think if there is anything useful to learn...
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 Attention: The need for filters and feedback.
Howard Greenstein has a nice article on Mashable which notes why content feedback and filters are necessary in social media. We've all experienced that...
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 Interface: Guitar Band and Dance Central
Harmonix, the people who brought you the ever popular game Rock Band, have now created two interesting innovations in technology interface using the...
Innovations in Listening to the Market: eBay could do better...
eBay recently guided Wall Street to lower numbers. I'm always amazed that eBay can't grow faster because they have lots of information on millions and...
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...
Inside the Huddle: Connecting Strategy with Execution
Co-authored with Chris Curran We've hit the point in the summer when football training camps are almost upon us–one of our favorite times of the year....
Is Your Industry in Danger of Being Disrupted?
There is much talk about innovation -- and there are many approaches to creating new things, from the famous "open innovation" ideas of Henry Chesbrough to...
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...
People or Machines & Transparency: Twin innovations in service
Esurance.com 's current advertising campaign emphasizes the fact that their customers can interact with technology when they don't want to talk with people...
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...
Sales Reinvention: Why the iPad is a person to person innovation
Nothing happens until somebody sells something. -- Anonymous I admit it. I love salespeople. There are few things more precious to an enterprise than...
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,...
Taming the Torrent of Data... For competitive advantage...
I recently had the good fortune of leading our Diamond Exchange, where we discussed how companies could create competitive advantage through better use of...
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 Best Companies Use the Best Ideas
As someone who has been around organizations for a long time and working with them to create and implement new ideas, I observe that many firms have a...
The Dual Nature of Knowledge Work Productivity
When we think about knowledge work productivity, it is a very tricky subject. The reason it is tricky is because at one extreme we can routinize knowledge...
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 Importance of The Sales Cycle in Getting an Innovation Off the Ground
Time hurts all deals. -- Anonymous A key reason innovations fail is that inventors neglect to correctly assess how long it takes to sell something truly...
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 Physicality of Information
Today's Boston Globe reports on some work at MIT's Media Lab. One of the projects is Proverbial Wallets -- which creates a wallet that vibrates when there...
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...
The Web is Dead? or Just in the Modularity Cycle?
Wired magazine recently announced on its cover that the Web is Dead . I confess I really like the magazine despite some of the hyperbolic rants that Chris...
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...
What's Your Mind-Diet? Clay Shirky versus Nick Carr
There has been a wonderful debate going on in the pages of the Wall Street Journal between Clay Shirky and Nick Carr . Carr became famous for his IT Doesn't...
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...