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In my last two posts I examined the origin of explore and exploit, and where it has taken us so far in the innovation space. In this post I want to explore why everything we believe about explore and exploit from a strategic and business model perspective is increasingly wrong, and what innovators and strategists need to do now in ...

If you are following along, I’m writing a series of posts about the opportunities and challenges with the way we think about and implement the concepts behind explore and exploit. In my first post I wrote a short introduction to the topic. In that post I looked at the history of exploring and exploiting, which I’ll suggest comes from the ...

In so many ways it often feels like innovation is both wholly new, and ancient at the same time. Tools that we use to innovate aren’t new, in fact many are very old, but put to appropriate use they help us create miraculous new things. Too often we distrust old tools or methods, thinking that newer tools or methods are ...

It seems so funny, looking back on a meeting I attended about 20 years ago. At that meeting a good friend was presenting a new book, entitled Who Moved My Cheese? He was recommending this book to all of us in the leadership team of a mid-sized ERP consulting firm. Of course most of us read it and thought – ...

Oscar Wilde, perhaps one of the most acerbic and humorous writers of the 19th century, once commented that a second marriage after a failed first marriage was the “triumph of hope over experience”. His point was that people continued to pursue marriage, even in the face of bitter previous failure. Now Wilde was a bachelor, and also unable to marry ...

I’ve written and spoken about the importance of corporate culture and its impact on innovation over the last 15 years or so. Heck, one of the underlying issues I address in my book Relentless Innovation (shameless plug) is the overwhelming challenge that corporate culture presents to an innovation team. I’ve argued that corporate culture, more than any other issue, is the ...

In order to accelerate the pace of innovation and increase the amount of innovation that's done, we need to simplify it, or at least remove some of the uncertainty. To do that I'm going to argue in this relatively short post that innovation has three important deliverables:

We've positioned innovation incorrectly. Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers are ready to demand new products and services. We've positioned innovation as something to do to prepare for future business, future needs and future demands. Yet, innovation does answer these issues...

In strange and disappointing news, Lego announced that it was facing dire sales projections, with growth slowing from over 25% per year to low single digits. Strange, when just a few years ago Lego was on top of the world, with great new toys, Lego kits, Lego Robots and the Lego movies.

What if everyone in your company had to account for their time, and what if everyone had a specific time allocation for innovation? That might differ depending on the individual, their experience and interest in innovation of course, but what if at the end of each year you could look across your team and see how much time an individual spent building innovation skills and contributing to innovation projects. Wouldn't that be valuable as a manager?