Times’ Maker Week — a weeklong initiative for the paper’s developers, designers, product managers, and other newsroom staffers to take a break from their typical work and focus on other projects... the Times holds quarterly Maker Days where staffers can spend a day doing research or pursuing another type of learning opportunity that they may not …

Executive leaders are involved more than ever before in using online communities to solve important business issues ... But budgets are not keeping up with demand, and measuring value isn't getting much help from platform vendors... The majority of organizations have now deployed some form of community platform to help workers, typically in the f…

If your meetings are like most, there are two or three people who always speak up and a handful of others who hang on the sidelines. ... a drag on your meetings' productivity... It's not enough just to bring a more diverse workforce in through your doors. You need to get everybody talking—meaningfully, collaboratively, and regularly—in order to m…

We asked  respondents to share the different types of challenges they face... changing company culture lead with 63% of respondents stating that it is an extremely significant to successfully lead digital transformation efforts toward fruition... executive support is key to sanctioning change and investing in it

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

The heart of differentiation therefore is your company’s ability to develop and promote distinctive products, services, and branded experiences on a consistent basis.  It’s not the output that sets you apart, but the way that everything you do supports the product and gives it context... set apart your company as a whole, instead of staking your f…

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

companies made huge bets on branded content... to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers... invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. Digital crowds now serve as very effective an…

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

an edge is not just a term for advantage itself; it can also be the place where you can find that advantage... the outer rim that frames what you do and separates it, quite conveniently, from what you don’t... When you proceed beyond this border in business, the main thing that changes is risk. they are the places where the inside and the outside…

a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…

For the US daily newspaper sector over the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 17 percent and ad revenue more than 50 percent ... a key for the industry is changing the culture of newsrooms to foster innovation. This includes allowing interaction of different groups—journalists, technicians and others which the study referred to as "tribes…

What are Europe's most innovative news applications and initiatives?

We sift through the academic journals so you don’t have to. Here are 10 of the most interesting studies about social and digital media published in 2015.

The innovation we talk of in journalism isn’t the kind of innovation designed to radically change the way consumers behave, it’s really just short term reactionary attempts to try and deliver content to platforms the majority of consumers already use... Innovation in tech is rarely if ever short term... We’re being taken on this journey and it …

What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.

When EU tried to create its own platforms directly, “it was spectacularly bad. It tried to create its own version of Google, called Quaero... Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.”... there a…

Over 40 new resources ... some great longreads to enjoy as the nights grow long, the productivity tips you’ll need to find the time to read them, and a free set of steak knives. The Christmas season, after all, is almost upon us.

After studying innovation among 759 companies... found that corporate culture was a much more important driver of radical innovation than labor, capital, government or national culture... what is an innovative corporate culture? And ... is there any way you can build one? This article addresses both questions by offering a simple model of the k…

disruption theory is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Despite broad dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied... refinements over the past 20 years appear overshadowed by the popularity of the initial formulation... too many people who speak of “disrupt…

There's never been a better time to innovate in media, so it's good to be back to EurActiv. Eight years ago I helped launch BlogActiv, before leaving for the world of EU communications agencies. Give or take a month or two, my 6-month stint fell in the middle of EurActiv's 15 years of life so far. It's good to be back, albeit p…

we begin to see the complexity at the intersections, the amplification of disruptive power, and the broad implications for the future.

First, some useful definitions: "Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist... Creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge. Innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions. And entrepreneurship is applying innovations, scaling the ideas, by inspiring others’ imagination... the way to innovate is to look a…

Any decent Communication Strategy will integrate offline, online, internal and external communications. But what about your organisation's Innovation Strategy?

"A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed... coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible... Apps can now do what manag…

"the C-Suite have optimized the supply chain, digitized marketing and communications, socialized customer care and service. Where else can they get a competitive advantage? Fundamentally changing the way they work, implementing change -- especially culture change -- faster and better, will be the source of competitive advantage going forward.... …

"The true purpose of an accelerator is to teach the method of entrepreneurship, so that on graduation day the founders have the knowledge and tools to keep improving. Funding, launching, weekly growth, etc is all a bonus." - Improving Startup Accelerators — Startups & Venture Capital — Medium

"By evaluating 18 practices related to digital strategy, capabilities, and culture, we have developed a single, simple metric for the digital maturity of a company... its Digital Quotient. This survey reveals a wide range of digital performance in today’s big corporations... a strong and adaptive culture can help make up for a lack of technica…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

In Steph’s inaugural episode we explore the experience and perspectives of women in startups and lifestyle businesses. - The Female Perspective on Startups and Lifestyle Businesses (FS111)