Innovation Zen

If the flattening of the world is largely (bur not entirely) unstoppable, and if it holds out the potential to be as beneficial to American society in general as past market evolutions have been, how does an individual get the best out of it? What do we tell our kids?
My simple answer is this: There […]

“As the world starts to move from a primarily vertical — command and control — system for creation value to a more horizontal — connect and collaborate — value creation model, and as we blow away more walls, ceilings and floors at the same time, societies are going to find themselves facing a lot of […]

I am a New Economy fanatic. Thence a Creativity fanatic. Thence an Intellectual-Capital fanatic. Thence … a … DIVERSITY fanatic.
Doest that mean I’m an Affirmative Action fanatic? Not necessarily. And in any case, that’s beside the point.
What is the point? It’s really quite simple: Creativity and Great Leaps Forward come from… mix/match/mess. That is, all […]

Marketing focuses on the needs of the customer, and therefore should begin with an analysis of customer requirements, and attempt to create value by providing products and services that satisfy those requirements.
The marketing mix is the set of variables that are to a large extent controllable by the company, normally referred to as the […]

Countries engage in international trade for two basic reasons, each of which contributes to their gain from trade. First, countries trade because they are different from each other. Nations, like individuals, can benefit from their differences by reaching an arrangement in which each does the things it does relatively well. Second, countries trade to achieve […]

Because of Apache’s proficiency at allowing a single-server machine to host thousands of different virtual Web sites - music, data, text, pornography - it began to have “a commanding share of the Internet Service Provider market.” IBM was trying to sell its own proprietary Web server, called GO, but it gained only a tiny sliver […]

We champion innovation. Then we genuflect when a giant customer “urges” us to cancel a risky new product that would upset the status quo. We beg for “more risk taking.” Then we videotape the “be daring” speech featuring the boss in a Brooks Brothers suit, sitting stiffly behind an old oaken desk. We exhort people […]

“Why don’t you invent something which will be used once and thrown away? Then the customer will come back for more.” This advice, from his boss William Painter, inventor of a disposable bottle-cap, haunted the 40-year-old salesman, King Camp Gillette, from Fond du Lac, Winconsin. In 1895 the vision splendid came as Gillette stood before […]

“Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings. This is true even for organizations that are focused on analysis and measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in a MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, […]

Invention is the creation of new products and processes throughout the development of new knowledge or from new combinations of existing knowledge. Most inventions are the result of novel applications of existing knowledge. Somuel Morse’s telegraph ,patented in 1840, was based on several decades of research into electromagnetism, from Ben Franklin to Orsted, Ampere and […]

The only thing that I’d rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.
Scott McNealy (Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems)

The flat-world platform is the product of a convergence of the personal computer (which allowed every individual suddenly to become the author of his or her own content in digital form) with fiber-optic cable (which suddenly allowed all those individuals to access more and more digital content around the world for next to nothing) with […]

In the field of innovation this theme is of central importance. It is clear from a wealth of psychological research that every human being comes with the capability to find and solve complex problems, and where such creative behavior can be harnessed amongst a group of people with different skills and perspectives extraordinary things can […]

Competing head-to-head can be cutthroat, especially when markets are flat or growing slowly. Managers caught in this kind of competition almost universally say they dislike it and wish they could find a better alternative. They often know instinctively that innovation is the only way they can break free from the pack. But they simply don’t […]

Whereas a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weights 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weight only 1,5 tons.
Popular Mechanics, March 1949

Innovation consists of the technological, managerial, and social processes through which a new idea or concept is first reduced to practice in a culture.

“After studying more than thirty successful attackers, I believe that the simple answer is that they broke the rules of the game in their industry. The common element in all the successful attacks is strategic innovation.”

“It is not that managers in big companies can’t see the disruptive changes coming. Usually they can. Nor do they lack the resources to confront them. Most big companies have talented managers and specialists, strong product portfolios, first-rate technological know-how, and deep pockets…

“Innovations, whether of product, process, or market, always move through two quite different stages. First, someone has to come up with the new idea. Then someone (often someone other than the idea imaginator) has to refine, focus, and implement that idea.”

“Management research confirms that innovative firms – those that are able to use innovation to improve their processes or to differentiate their products and services – outperform their competitors, measured in terms of market share, profitability, growth or market capitalization. However, the management of innovation is inherently difficult and risky: most new technologies fail to […]

It’s fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn’t make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, “Oh yeah, this stuff is good.”

“We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.”