Overview: Innovation Strategy

Thinking of pursuing your next idea? Read this definitive guide first... a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is all about verifying the fact that there is a market where your potential company can call home and bring in paying customers. It’s about finding your early adopters and seeing exactly they are willing to pay for.... [but] an entreprene…

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…

"what people really want is to be treated like individuals and given the tools to help themselves.... Rigour is the cold, hard fact of insight. Magic is the creative talent ... Without great insight, creative may be ill-informed or poorly targeted.... Meanwhile, a data-based body of evidence that isn’t supported by creativity fails to creat…

"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.... …

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

Another advocacy piece on holacracy, because "Getting rid of hierarchies might just save the human race" - You Don’t Need a Manager — Work: Reimagined — Medium

"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

the competitive significance of business models turbocharged by machine learning is poised to surge... companies must have two types of people to unleash the potential of machine learning. "Quants" are schooled in its language and methods. "Translators" can bridge the disciplines of data, machine learning, and decision making by reframing the …

A good tour of theories of creativity, concluding with results from two recent studies: "With these widely accepted theories of creativity in mind, it is rather jarring to see two brand studies, both of which suggest that creativity is closely linked with inherent neurological and personality traits rather than methodology or practice. The impl…

"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…

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

"in a world dominated by self-steering taxis, each ride becomes cheaper if the vehicles are autonomous rather than owned and run by major corporations... We can program it to ... make it the most moral, socially minded capitalist possible...it would not be self-aware... But they would be programmed to seek self-improvement in order to avoid bec…

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

"There are many kinds of intelligence, and many kinds of stupidity. But not all are created equal. The intelligence of a computer is not the stupidity of a human, and vice versa. Which one would you rather be? ... One can be smart in stupid ways... or stupid in smart ways... technology’s making us stupid stupid — not just stupider, but stupider…

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)

"Nice way of bringing creatives in to think (ugh) out of the box - run a science fiction contest: "The Art Of Future Warfare ...is based on the idea that writers, artists and game designers have a lot to offer policy wonks... “Unconventional,imaginative thinking and expression can contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduc…

"As Credit Karma has become a team of nearly 300 people, we've had to think about how to create a culture of uniform quality, where everybody is hungry and engaged with our mission. Successful companies are able to scale their culture of innovation with them. These cultures don't build themselves and require careful planning. Looking back, …

"Firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu have got into an AI arms race ... not so much making new sorts of minds as it is removing some of the need for the old sort... deep learning ... is a general-purpose pattern-recognition technique ... any activity which has access to large amounts of data—from running an insurance business to res…

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …

A good tour from Circa, not just re: Google: "Google ... will spend $150 million this year on a "far-reaching campaign" to improve the diversity of the technology industry... the technology industry "cannot be this homogeneous" if it intends to build products for a global marketplace."... Co-founders ... tasked the company in 2013 with doing…

"the whole point of digital transformation is realizing that technology fundamentally changes how you do business in just about every way. It therefore poses very difficult questions to business and technology leaders: Who best should do our work today? Where does the value come from? What do these new ways of working actually look like? How c…

While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…

"UBS ... are the latest of a string of banks to take a shot at incubating for the blockchain.... Despite the title this article's mainly about bitcoin, although it ends with "The possibilities and potential for blockchain technology are extraordinary at every level of business and society. If you’re not keeping up then you should" - It's not a…

"The excuse that tech companies make for their lack of gender diversity is that the pipeline of women studying engineering is shrinking. Sadly, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. Because there are few women in engineering, girls don’t perceive computing to be a friendly profession, so fewer are entering the field... This issue is important beca…

"the impact of IoT won’t be the Things, it will be the way the data can be analyzed to shape downstream innovation.... data from the highway department ,,, perfectly predicted the housing boom and bust, with an approximately six month lead time." - Trawling with Engines of Meaning — Work Futures — Medium

"many of us tend to sabotage creativity more than we cultivate it. Here are some of the self-sabotaging things you’re probably doing every day. "

"Stacy sits down with Google Ventures to share her perspectives on startup hiring, leadership, and more." Also a good example of video journalism, but a comparison between total Reads (as measured usign Medium's womderful metrics) vs number of views of the embedded videos - i.e., do people watch them, or just read the textual summaries? - Manage…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"in the cause of wider employee participation... there’s more to success than just investing heavily in the latest Enterprise 2.0 technology platforms. Large-scale engagement of the workforce requires, first and foremost, a firm grasp of organizational culture and its social dynamics, a psychological understanding of what triggers new behavior, …