Blog
Presentation: An Introduction to the Killer Innovation Approach
Below are the slides from a presentation I gave last week introducing IT executives to the Killer Innovation Approach. In addition to the slides, I ran the attendee’s through a “sample” workshop over dinner where they were provided a task/objective, they had to meet an idea quota, rank their ideas a
Unintended Uses of Innovations
Have you ever noticed that many innovations end up being used in ways never contemplated by the inventors? Unintended uses are the first step to finding a pivot that creates opportunities. Some interesting examples include: Invention Original Use Actual Primary Use Telephone Broadcast audio content
How To Segment Your Customer For Better Innovation
How do you look at your customers? Do you put a face to them? Do you make them real so that the team creating the innovations has a clear target? The one thing that gets me going is when teams start talking about customers in terms that are meaningless to innovators. The one that […]
Reverse Mentoring – The Summer Intern Experiment
Well, the summer is over and school has restarted for my summer interns. If you are a regular reader of the blog, you read about my summer intern experiment where I hosted my summer interns at my California house. It’s what I called “reverse mentoring”. My selfish objective was to immerse myself
The emerging creative economy …
I’m a big believer that we are on cusp of a change from the information economy to the creative economy. We’ve been through these kinds of changes before with the shift from agriculture to industrial to information and now to the emerging creative economy. Why do I believe that this change is coming
The launch of an innovation …
Many of you have probably noticed that I’ve been inconsistent on postings to the blog and the release of podcasts. There has been a good reason …. On 5 September, we released an innovation that we’ve been working on for 18 months .. 18 all consuming months since I was also doing my normal “day […]
The Stress Of Innovation
As an innovation program gets ready to launch an idea into the market, the stress level within the team rises. Stress is normal. We start questioning the execution, the love of the idea … Is still the best idea we could have executed? Will the market respond to our idea? Have we done our […]
Over dressed for the AlwaysOn event ……
I apeared on a panel during the AlwaysOn event last week in Stanford. For those who know me, I’m usually the one who is more “casually” dressed compared to my other panelists. In this case, I was clearly over dressed …. Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun) came in his usual jeans and shirt … Nick
Reverse Mentoring
Hanging out with staff and interns that are younger than your own children is a real eye-opener. You quickly realize that you are so far out of the loop – you can’t even see the loop. The challenge is how to you get yourself back into the loop without looking like a creepy old guy […]
20 Years In To The Future
During my recent trip to Shanghai, I gave a press conference where I presented a vision and timeline of major shifts occurring over the next 20 years. For those of you who are podcast listeners, you know that I’m not a big believer of random long range forcasting. In this case, we’ve been careful
