Yesterday my electric toothbrush finally decided to die on me. It had served me well, may it rest in peace, and was so old that when I originally purchased it, there were probably only four or five options to choose from. It was so old that I actually recall buying it at a physical store, as…

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COVID19 will change the way we behave, conduct business, and indeed how we innovate for years to come. Exactly how much change we’ll see and what those changes will actually be is still unfolding.  But big life changing events inevitably reshape our long-term thinking, values and behaviors.  And the social disruption caused by COVID19 has broken more habits…

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We will beat the COVID19 virus, and innovation will play a key role in that victory.  We will find new treatments, using either new drugs, or hopefully fast-tracking reapplication of existing ones.  We will reapply existing technology to mass produce respirators. Nothing spurs innovation like a crisis, or a war, and we are in the middle of…

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We are living in interesting times. There is probably nobody out there whose personal and business life has not been impacted at least to some degree by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, in the time between writing this and it publishing, I suspect a lot will have changed.   To that point, it remains to be seen…

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One question many innovators face at some point in their careers is whether to work in a large, corporate organization, or in a small start up or consultancy. Today I want to revisit and update a blog I wrote a few years ago for LinkedIn that discussed some pros and cons of consultancy versus corporate…

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As the holiday season in the US gets underway, I habitually look back on what I’ve learnt over the previous year.  An important part of that is always what I’ve read, and in the festive spirit of sharing, here are five books that greatly influenced me in 2019.  None are strictly ‘Innovation books’.  Instead they…

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This continues on from an Innovation Excellence blog I wrote last month about how personality types can influence innovation capability. https://www.disruptorleague.com/blog/2019/10/03/5-psychological-traits-of-highly-innovative-organizations/  While many of the ideas in that article could also be applied to personal development, the primary focus was on how we behave, develop and recruit innovation capability in a team context.  But personality…

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When creating an innovation team, we often put a lot of thought and effort into bringing the right functional expertise together. Making sure we have diverse marketing, design, engineering, product supply, finance, research and innovation working together early in the process is certainly smart. But for a team to deliver big, disruptive ideas that will have…

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I write and play music as a creative hobby. It doesn’t pay terribly well, but it is fun, and can also occasionally trigger insights into the creative process that translate into the broader innovation space. Most recently, it caused me to revisit integrative thinking, a concept I was first introduced to by Roger Martin in his…

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Estimates that attempt to quantify failure rates for innovative products and services typically sit in a range somewhere between 70-95%. As an innovator, I find this an uncomfortably large number, especially given how much time and money we invest in innovation processes, consumer research and market modeling.  But as disappointing as these numbers are, the reality…

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