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.

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 [...]

Afterlife: An Essential Guide To Design For Disassembly, by Alex Diener – Core77

What if we take another run at the idea that everything has a life beyond its immediate life? What if we decided that things must be reparable, recoverable, recyclable, re-purpose-able? How different would then be our innovation and design approaches? Our disposable society must be disassembled.
Afterlife: An Essential Guide To Design For Disassembly, by Alex [...]

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 [...]

Stupid Wins In The Game Of Innovation – Phil McKinney

Phil McKinney’s latest blog post nails the way in which we are primed to think that creativity and innovation are domains reserved for the “gifted and talented”. So many times our ideas are beaten down by our own ruthless self-censorship, denial and embarrassment-induced conformity. McKinney notes that, “We are a race of innovators – born [...]

I Am Just Like You – Bob Sutton on impediments to self-awareness

Bob Sutton dips into, “David Dunning’s book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we [...]