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Last week I gave a talk in a class called Organizing for Innovation and Design, taught by Siobhan O'Mahony at Boston University.  At the start of the class, I asked the students if there were any topics they wanted to cover specifically.  They had read...

A couple of weeks ago I was reading Gillian Tett's column in the Financial Times. She typically writes about the financial industry, and I enjoy the way she is able to make complicated ideas clear and understandable. As I started reading this particular...

I teach a multidisciplinary product development course at Boston University. For their semester project, the students have to develop a new product that incorporates what they are learning in Marketing, Operations Management, Finance, and Information Systems. At...

There is an interesting post on the Innovation Policy Blog.  In this post they echo and comment on many of the statements from the President's State of the Union address about the need to invest in innovation.  I agree with most of these...

Last year I wrote a post about abductive and adductive reasoning, and how they are important skills for innovation.  A couple of months after I wrote it, I was in a discussion about the topic with someone who insisted that abductive reasoning is the only valid form of...

A couple of weeks ago I was given an advance copy of a new book called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, two faculty members from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  The publishing date...

I was recently asked to contribute a short piece to the blog section of a new website - OnInnovation.  It's sponsored by the Henry Ford Foundation, and is intended to collect insights from innovators and thought leaders, and enable people to connect with...

This fall I'll be teaching a class at the business school at BU.  It should be an interesting experience, as the class emphasizes multidisciplinary product development.  This class has been offered for a while, so the materials are pretty well...

I was recently reminded of the "hit rate" for investment in innovation (I'm also including entrepreneurial ventures here).  Most companies, VC's and others use estimates as rules of thumb.  An optimistic one is something like 1/3 of...

There's no question that truly innovative people are creative.  But creativity alone is not enough.  True innovators, those people who can deliver new ideas and offerings that are relevant to the market, possess something in addition to...