Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids. This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers. While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them.

As the NFL celebrates another year of unsurpassed digital, mobile, and social success, they are facing a growing problem, and it's a big one. The in-home experience of today's NFL has become so good that live attendance, even during the playoffs, is suffering in substantial ways. Let's go inside the huddle and examine a few converged (physical + digital) innovations the NFL should employ to drive attendance and change the way we experience their sport live. Grab your Google Glass, strap on your Internet of Things ... and go long!

"Our CEO does not want to get involved in innovation. He just let us do it by ourselves.” There are both positives and negatives to this statement, which was shared by one of the participants at the Global Innovation Forum, when we had a brief talk.

A competition sponsored by Statoil and managed by The Economist Intelligence Unit has launched, designed to generate ideas and build awareness of innovative solutions to the world’s energy challenges. The competition looks to stimulate discussion and generate entries, focused on three core questions:

Anala Beevers, a four year old genius that has been invited to join MENSA, teaches us that we should abandon assumptions about the quality of ideas based on hierarchies and power structures and instead look at the knowledge and quality they bring.

I have the impression that Open Innovation still does not get the chance its potential deserves. There are many reasons for this. They range from overly generous definitions that enable companies to point to a small number of activities and then tick the Open Innovation box, to the success of Not Invented Here syndrome.

When we ‘cast around’ we are looking for something; to try it out, to think about it, to search for connecting a vague idea with something more tangible. So let’s go innovation fishing.

Sixteen year old Samantha Marquez and her invention Celloidosomes® demonstrates the importance of disposing of hierarchies in innovation.

In our next post on open innovation in the public sector, we discuss why employees can be a government's best resource for ideas.

In our series on open innovation in government we discuss first the need for fresh ideas within the public sector.