Ignite Princeton – just days away

Picked up a great comment from Princeton Scoop here.
““Ignite” presenters share their personal and professional passions on life’s imponderables, improbables, and the decidedly offbeat, from orbiting garbage to the intersection between art and commerce. The whole thing sounds like it could be a tad overwhelming, but consider the event’s overarching theme: “Enlighten us, but make [...]

Resources for Innovation – The Power of Constraints

The wise stewardship of resources is the task of any organization. How those resources are deployed for maximum gain is the key responsibility of organizational leadership. The only problem with this concept is what happens when wise stewardship comes up hard against the necessary risking of resources for the material benefit of innovation? Unfortunately, in the present “economic unpleasantness” as a dear friend keeps calling the train wreck that is this great recession, stewardship of resources has digressed to hoarding of resources. Save for one notable exception – human resources.

Innovation Is Not Clockwork – The Challenges of Innovation Systems

A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without the aim, there is no system. – W. Edward Deming
Ignoring the interconnections between organizational subsystems causes havoc when innovation is demanded of all areas of the business, instead of one function, and the competition for resources becomes fierce.

Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
To create innovation there must be a structure that can support the exploration, the risk-taking, the resource expenditure without direct monetary return. A structure that supports innovation must capture and support an organization’s ability to reach beyond what it produces in the present to what it might produce for the future. It demands a structure that can seek and use unknown resources, to build the unknown for unknown customers (or at least meet current customers’ unknown needs!)

The Politics of Innovation – Dodging the Seagulls in “Finding Nemo”

…Business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else.
- James Surowiecki

Playing Games With Innovation
Let’s be blunt, innovation has become the latest political football in many organizations and the competition around owning it has become fierce, if not ugly. For those organizations who do not know how to address [...]

Innovation Economies & The Benefit Of Creative Destruction

Today innovation sits at the heart of economic value creation. If the 1980’s were all about productivity, the 1990’s were about quality, and the 2000’s about globalization, the current decade will most likely be about the capacity of organization to harness the controlled chaos inherent in innovation to create value. With the acceleration of globalization process, innovation is more and more seen as the appropriate tool to create business value.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? (A call to arms from Seth Godin)

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin

Genius Marketer Markets Book Ingeniously
If Seth Godin was doing anything with his past books it was perhaps leading a trail of breadcrumbs to this current book, Linchpin. Where Tribes (2008) was a call to finding a following [...]

Bill Gates’ 2010 Annual Letter focuses on Innovation

Gates: This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one.
2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda and my dad. It’s been an incredible year and [...]

Innovation Is Not A Strategy

Why Blue Sky Thinking Does Not A Blue Ocean Make
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The confused merging of strategy (specifically strategy formulation) and innovation in business circles is alarming. Both strategic thinking and thinking about [...]

Ignite Princeton – March 2nd – 7:00pm – Nassau Inn, Princeton NJ

What is Ignite?
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers. This is Princeton’s first Ignite Event.
Be there! It should be a fun night.
Attend Ignite [...]