clair075

OK, I don't have a self-driving car and already I'm sick of hearing about them and their potential.  Just like I don't have a virtual reality headset made out of cardboard and an iPhone, but I'm tired of hearing about virtual reality.  The reason I'm tired about hearing about VR and autonomous vehicles is that they are overhyped technologies that don't yet solve important problems.  And this is one of the biggest challenges that innovation faces:  creating shiny new technologies that are interesting but don't solve society's challenges or problems. We can ask ourselves a few questions about VR and self-driving cars, as examples of overhyped technologies.  The first one is an old one: quo bene?  Who benefits from the constant stream of hype that emerges around Virtual Reality (which isn't even all that new) or autonomous vehicles?  Why, surprise, the hype is being driven primarily by the manufacturers of these technologies.  VR, which as a technolo...

I love innovation.  I love all facets of it: the discovery of new needs, the creativity to discover new solutions, the realization of those new ideas as new products and services.  What concerns me sometimes is the way in which we attempt to implement innovation, because we are likely to constraint it at just the time we need the most innovation. You'll see a lot of talk about "innovation management".  This is not necessarily a wrong idea, but in the wrong hands will severely limit innovation activities and outcomes.  We managers and executives, trained in the school of efficiency and with our MBAs in tow believe we can "manage" anything.  In to some degree that is correct.  We can manage and improve things that are well defined and understood.  To some degree we can even put guardrails around things we cannot fully understand or define.  But the risk we run when we talk about managing innovation, is that we become entranced with the idea of "mana...

So, over my resistance, my teenage son encouraged, no demanded, that we go to see Suicide Squad, the latest in a series of "superhero" movies intended to entertain us and drive profits for Hollywood.  Much as I expected, the movie was poorly plotted, poorly acted, a virtual pastiche of every hero movie ever made.  You could basically predict every scene, what key actors would say or do.  The movie made no sense, had no suspense and key characters (what was that crocodile thing anyway, or why does a guy with a boomerang qualify as a superhero) had little or nothing to do. This is what you get when you scour the back catalogues of comic books, looking for ways to extend the franchise just a bit more.  This is what it looks like when you've run out of good ideas, out of plot lines and say to yourself - well, we have a number of not so hot ideas, let's throw them into a blender and see if they look better all mixed together.  A good movie, The Big Short, noted that ...

I stumbled upon a nice article that deals with a very important issue for any corporate innovator:  how to communicate what you are doing, why you are doing it and why it matters to executives.  The article was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review and is entitled When innovation meets the language of the corner office .   The article notes that innovators often use different terminology when describing their work or tools (eg customer experience journey) and have different deliverables, project expectations and time frames than other, more traditional projects.  Because of these differences innovators may never succeed in communicating to their executive team or corporate executives or may simply sound like they are using new, unfamiliar languages when they seek financial investments or approval on new ideas.  Is communication a big deal? I think so.  Paul Hobcraft and I built the Executive Workmat , which outlines 7 key factors for sustained innova...

In the spirit of the upcoming football season, I thought it would be interesting to look at the game of football and consider how innovation has dramatically changed the game over the last 20-30 years. In the old days, before the American Football League, many sportswriters and commentators felt that a lot of football could be described by the title of this post:  3 yards and a cloud of dust.  Most football, at the collegiate and professional level, relied on running the football.  It was only as the new American Football league was created that passing the football became more popular.  In the old National Football League, it was often said that only three things could happen when you threw the ball, and two were bad.  By this they meant that the quarterback could 1) throw to a receiver and miss or have the pass dropped 2) could throw the ball and have it intercepted or 3) could throw the ball and have it caught for a substantial gain.  The first two, need...