October 31, 2011 – 5:19 pm
We are pleased to announce the return of the Open Innovation Accelerator on February 1st 2012 in London. We have now run dozens of these for various organisations but it’s always really good fun to run a public session with a mix of participants from large and small companies, public and private sectors, and creative [...]
October 25, 2011 – 7:15 pm
Innovation isn’t just a ‘thing’ that can be manufactured, rather, to quote Verna Allee, it is an emergent property of networks. Therefore it makes perfect sense for any individual or organization that wants ‘more innovation’ to seek to engage or build a productive and profitable external network. Some people refer to this ‘open innovation’. The [...]
October 19, 2011 – 2:43 pm
I’m doing a research project for O’Reilly UK. O’Reilly are the publishers of Make magazine and the Makezine.com website; they’re the people behind Maker Faire and Maker Shed; and they publish great books on Arduino, circuit-bending, amateur robotics, creative hacking and related topics. They want to understand how they can better support the UK maker [...]
October 11, 2011 – 3:00 pm
When buying into in a company any investor worth their salt will undertake some investigation into the quality of the opportunity before them. They do their homework. But are they being as diligent as they could be? Stages in the due diligence process includes detailed investigation of the key areas of a business: its management [...]
October 8, 2011 – 11:33 pm
I’ve been drawn to the many tributes and obituaries of Steve Jobs in recent days, and particularly enjoyed this excellent piece from Stephen Fry, and also this interesting article which makes the case that his greatest contribution was changing Capitalism, through defying a customer-led approach: “Take the old adage that the consumer is king. In [...]
September 11, 2011 – 7:05 pm
What drives innovation? A personal vision? Of course. A new technology? Sometimes (though solutions don’t always need new technology). Recognition of a need can and should also drive it. Without a need for the innovation to address, success in the market place will be limited. In his book ‘Patent Nonsense’, Clive Anderson suggests a common [...]
September 5, 2011 – 7:25 pm
I was amazed and delighted to listen to the Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival last week, where he argued that we need to bring together the arts and sciences and reinvent the polymath, harking back to the Victorian era. You can see an edited video of [...]
August 24, 2011 – 6:32 pm
We were asked recently by a client how open innovation can support sales activities. Here are the headlines of our response. Front of mind – by engaging externally you become more visible and therefore more likely to be front of mind when people are making sales decisions. Enhancing brand image – being perceived as more [...]
“People working in innovation often refer to “the innovation process” as if producing an innovation was just one more business process that can be engineered for maximum efficiency. This traditional approach attempts to manage innovation as a linear “stage gate” process. This is often referred to as “over the wall” – meaning I did my [...]
I’ve been hearing a lot about Agile programming recently from a lot of different people which makes a lot of sense to me and chimes strongly with some of our thinking around open innovation and networked enterprises. And as it happened I was pleased to be invited to be part of a Management Today webinar [...]
