Author Archives: Jeffrey Phillips
Unfortunately, when many executives and politicians say “let me be clear” they mean to emphasize what they want to communicate. It’s not necessarily clarity they seek, but emphasis of a certain point of view. Clarity in innovation, like sunshine in politics, is the best disinfectant. Continue reading
I was talking with a potential client who seemed cynical about innovation. In fact, most of our clients are both equally cynical and hopeful about innovation. They are cynical because innovation has often failed to deliver extravagant promises, and hopeful because innovation is one of the few tools that firms have to grow, to differentiate and to disrupt Continue reading
So I had lunch today with a friend who described another friend’s innovation approach. It boiled down to “lets go generate a lot of ideas”. The theory being that once they had a lot of ideas they’d find a valuable one that would be important and relevant. This approach always reminds me of the story of the little girl digging in the horse barn. Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Wizard of Oz reflects so much about innovation. Not the story per se, but the setting and the characters and how they represent attributes or characteristics innovators must possess. Take, for example, Dorothy’s three key companions – the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man Continue reading
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
