Author Archives: Jeffrey Phillips
In a world of celebrity driven Twitter, “reality” shows and always on news, Andy Warhol was only partially right. We’ll all be famous for 15 minutes. Unfortunately some people seem to get their 15 minutes over and over again for all the wrong reasons. Luckily for us, however, most innovators toil away from the spotlight. In fact many people who are innovators don’t realize who and what they are. Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot about the current fad of innovation, where companies allow only very limited innovation exercises and quickly close the door again on innovation. The concept of closely monitoring innovation in this manner reminds me to some extent of the story of Pandora. Continue reading
This is one of those posts where the topic feels so large and so poorly defined as to be almost impossible to describe. Yet we get this question all the time – what can we do to be more innovative? Every firm is in a rush to become more innovative, yet few have the time, resource or attention required. I’m going to address in this post how to create an innovation discipline, since we believe that is the only way to sustain competitive advantage. Continue reading
Pity the IT manager. He (or she) is increasingly under pressure from product managers, business line leaders and others who want “innovation”. Whether that’s more data, or more insight from their data, or perhaps the product manager wants to deploy a new product – innovation is a constant demand. And while the IT folks would love to support innovation, they more often than not say “no”. Who, in this day and age, can possibly say “no” to innovation? Continue reading
There’s an interesting aphorism I’d like to explore today, highlighted in the article title. Ideas change your culture or culture changes your ideas. There is both an opportunity and a challenge embedded in that statement. First, let’s describe why the statement is true. Continue reading
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Doing innovation isn’t really all that hard, once you get the hang of it. Yes, there are dozens of methodologies and approaches. You can tap into your employees and/or your customer base for ideas. You can search for interesting technologies in research labs and universities. You can prototype, test and tweak ideas based on customer pilots. In fact, you can do just about anything in innovation. That is, if you can get it started. Continue reading
