Our Blog

I've been talking to some people in the software industry about innovation, and we were comparing my innovation and development processes to agile and waterfall development processes used in the software industry.  At first glance, I thought it was a...

Last year I wrote a post about getting multidisciplinary teams right.  I've recently been asked to speak about building teams for innovation and put together this slide that elaborates on the ideas I wrote about.  Later I'll get into more detail about...

I talk a lot about how innovation work is different if you are developing an incremental innovation vs a truly breakthrough product.  As you can expect, the question then comes up about how a breakthrough product should be defined.  This is a great question,...

In my last post I discussed four dimensions of innovation. Innovation is a very broad term, and impasses in understanding often result when people are using similar terms to describe very different things. In summary: Innovation for Optimization -...

A couple of months ago I was discussing models that help to think about focusing innovation efforts with Hutch Carpenter.  I said I would post one that I use, and Ooops!  I forgot to do that.  So here's a model that I often use when discussing the...

We hear a lot about the need to break down silos, to look outside of the usual venues for innovative ideas, and to embrace new points of view. In this day and age, we have access to more information from more sources than ever before. At first glance, it would seem...

Last night I attended a panel discussion on Smart Medical Devices, put on by the Biomedical Engineering Society.  There was a lot of discussion about the definition of Smart Devices, new technologies (which were very impressive), and ultimately the...

I received an email from a regular reader of this blog asking the following question: I need to think about an interesting topic to do a 10 min presentation to my Global Consumer Insights Vicepresident. If you were him, what would you like to hear about from a CI...

This weekend I read a fascinating article by Columbia professor Dr. Robert Jervis in the Boston Globe.  He wrote about the way our brains make connections, how these connections inform our decisions, and how this process could have contributed to the incorrect...

Of course your company isn't running a casino on purpose. But is it running one accidentally? You can tell based on its approach to innovation investment. Does your company solicit new ideas for products and technologies in a more random fashion, investing in...