Author Archives: Rowan Gibson
An Innovation Excellence Classic: From an interview with Rowan Gibson
AS WE ENTER the twenty-first century, there is a pressing need for clear strategies. Because unless companies have a clear vision about how they are going to be distinctly different and unique, offering something different than their rivals to some different group of customers, they are going to get eaten alive by the intensity of competition.
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Where is Latin America on the world map of innovation excellence? According to INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index, the whole region is pretty much nowhere. The bleak news from the 2011 index, published about 6 months ago, is that only Chile made it into the top 40 (at number 38). Costa Rica and Brazil followed, at numbers 45 and 47 respectively… Continue reading
We have known for some time that game-changing business innovations tend to be born the same way. In my book Innovation to the Core, I use the phrase “combinational chemistry” to describe the process of recombining insights, ideas, half-baked notions, competencies, concepts, technologies and assets to produce radical new breakthroughs. Continue reading
I’ve always said that you can innovate around literally anything, whether it’s toasters, tires, or paint cans, or a conventional business model like, say, banking, or air travel, or automobiles. All you have to do is use the right methodology to start radically reinventing whatever has gone before. Continue reading
An Ode to the “Great Man” of Innovation All good things must come to an end. In 1986, after an incredible seven-year relationship with Apple, the brilliant advertising agency Chiat/Day – responsible for such masterpieces as the famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial, and by far the era’s best print ads for the computer industry – was unduly ousted (as Steve Jobs had been one year previously) by Apple’s hapless CEO John Sculley. Instead of complaining, condemning or criticizing his former client, Jay Chiat ran a $40,000 full-page ad in the New York Times with the headline “Thanks, Apple”. I absolutely loved the gesture. Among other things, the ad said: “Thanks for letting us make a little history. Thanks for demanding our best, and then more than our best.” The words, of course, were directed not at Apple in general but at one particular person – Steve Jobs. And they speak … Continue reading
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men and women are created as innovators. That they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the right to exercise their creativity, the right to challenge the status quo, the right to imagine radical new ways of doing things, and the right to be heard, however outlandish their ideas may seem. That to secure these rights, companies need to institute governing structures, processes and mechanisms that encourage and support innovation in all its forms. That whenever organizations are destructive of these ends, it is the duty of the leadership team to demand the alteration and abolishment of old management practices that frustrate – rather than facilitate – innovation and experimentation, and to institute new management practices founded on principles that enable creativity and rule-breaking and risk-taking; principles that set the spirit of innovation free. We believe that … Continue reading
