Overview: Innovation Strategy

"While traditional strategy calls for rigorous analysis and critical thinking, design thinking espouses ‘thinking by doing’. The key is to find the sweet spot between the two approaches." Nice exploration of overthinking vs. underthinking: "... overthinking — aka ‘death by analysis’. An obsession with minimizing risk leads to the inability to ma…

"digital transformation... the application (or reapplication) of digital technologies and the restructuring of operations to better engage with customers, the company ecosystem, and the greater marketplace... We have rocketed into a new economy - a new era - where much of what we knew and relied upon ten years ago is being superseded by new ins…

"goal of MY-WAY is to strengthen the web entrepreneurship ecosystem ... by actively engaging student networks and student entrepreneurship centres”... MY-WAY will also support the Young European Disruptors’ Network (EDs) – a European community of entrepreneurs who will meet at summits, regional events, leadership development programmes and commun…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"I constantly get asked the question “how are we doing?” and “how can we measure the success of our startup community.”... ... a great first crack at this with a paper that I think will be viewed as the starting point for a real discussion about long-term growth and measurement of the health of startup communities..." - Startup Revolution | Meas…

"When you have a job, it’s amazing how many startup ideas you come up with... I’m sure my list of ideas contains a few that could be much bigger than ReadMe. However, the point isn’t to find the idea with the biggest market size. It’s to find the right idea for you... I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors.…

"Procter & Gamble, one of the pioneers of open innovation... since seen its revenue go from 43 to 83 billions in 5 years... open innovation has allowed them to develop new products by relying on the expectations and need of the customers and on the expertise of new partners... 50% of their products were developed through collaboration with extern…

"MIT Startup Exchange (STEX) is convening a workshop to discuss the latest advances in energy innovation from the perspective of the corporates, academics, VCs, government, and startups in the MIT ecosystem redefining the field today. We aim to cover innovation models, technologies, collaboration patterns, and partnerships. Speakers will touch on …

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…

"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium

An excellent tour of management structures from hierarchy to holacracy, with some criticisms of the latter: "Hierarchies do authority incredibly well... but have some big flaws. They become slow, with decisions taking an eternity to pass up and down the ranks. Innovation from the edges is stifled by top-down control and bureaucracy.... So in the…

"There is no shortage of stories about companies that create amazing innovations with digital technology ... the software, media and technology industries ... account for less than 10% of the U.S. economy. What about the other 90%? We studied more than 400 large companies ... in every industry, companies are doing exciting things with digital te…

"I’ve seen many successful startups emerge and flourish outside of Silicon Valley, like Hootsuite, Jive, Bazaarvoice, Omniture, Spredfast, Sprinklr, BuddyMedia, BlaBlaCar, Freelancer, and a plethora of Chinese tech companies ... let’s first break down the pros and cons of having your startup be in Silicon Valley" - Your Tech Startup Doesn’t Nee…

I freely admit: I've been a fanboy of the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) since studying their design principles. Those principles are still good. Everything else, it turns out, was not.

"Who says innovation is only for start-ups? In these interviews, the heads of three large, established companies—Intuit, Idealab, and Autodesk— argue there’s no reason big players can’t develop the next big thing... how it can remove roadblocks to experimentation, and the merits of creating its very own idea incubators. "one thing that’s made the…

"When you think about a company with no managers there’s a good chance your mind drifts to stories of chaotic “meritocracies”, bro-y cultures, and HR disasters. Whereas we value mentorship and coaching, continuous self-improvement, and strive to make sure everyone feels safe and supported. ... That said, we do think there are problems with tradit…

"David Duncan, coauthor of Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days, explains how to organize corporate creativity... serendipitous ideas that turn into major innovations do happen, but they’re relatively rare. And the key thing is you don’t want the future of your company to be dependent on strokes of luck or accidental breakthroughs. " - Innovati…

Sets out "... the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use... how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people's long-term adoption of an innovation." and, for good measure, sets out the implications for design teams of each characteristic, because "Design teams can address many components of thes…

"In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg... focus on hiring, developing and empowering "smart creatives"-professionals with the technical skills to solve problems as well as the imagination to dream up new ideas. ... while senior executives strategize and plan, those plans always fall short. "Since the plan is wrong, the peopl…

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

Over on Medium, a terrific piece taking apart how bad most hiring processes are, and exploring one experiment with fixing it: hiring hackathons. The actual results were mixed - it was a pilot, after all - but the idea definitely deserves traction for a company like Intrasoft."

Of them all, I particularly like the look of Write Or Die, Wridea & StayFocused, which possibly says more about me than my 5 latest blog posts combined: "These tools will not only provide you with a way to write down your ideas whenever they hit you, but will also enable you to organize your time better and start writing more content through a re…

"Taster is a place for the BBC to try new ways of telling stories, develop new talent, and put new technology through its paces. It also allows the BBC to showcase a range of editorial and technology projects that may have previously remained behind closed doors... Enables the BBC to ... innovating quickly, gaining valuable feedback and respond…

"the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.... in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks..." How our mobile-phone-driven flight away from idletime and interiority damages our psychology, physical…

Interesting ruminations on the limits of traditional knowledge mgt techniques. "the everyday experiences we have do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions or the Word-documents explaining what we did or what we should have done." - Wh…

"The Five Whys technique was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training... "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." ... dig into each problem that arose until they found the root cause. "Observe the production floor w…

A timely and interesting article... "Gossip is an effective way of achieving these goals in an unhealthy social system. People engage in gossip when they lack trust or efficacy. We become consumers of gossip when we don’t trust formal channels... We become purveyors of it when we feel we can’t raise sensitive issues more directly... The problem w…

"The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data... often focuses on images... our instincts about privacy must change now that machines can decipher images." - Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence from 2014 | MIT Technology Review

Fairly typical piece on integrating social media into organisations to improve customer service, employee productivity and sales. These points have been made before, but this article brings them together well and provides plenty of links to the underlying research, which makes it useful if you need to supporting arguments for change management. -…