clair075

As many of you loyal readers know (thanks Mom!) I'm a big believer that success in life, as in innovation, is about understanding the future and bringing products and solutions to the market just as the market realizes its needs.  This builds on the famous quip that to win the future you should create the future.  The unspoken but obvious counterpoint is that you can wait to see what the future holds and then react to it.  Many is the company that has decided to take the more passive, reactive, wait and see model, rather than invest a few dollars into trend spotting and scenario planning. Why aren't we doing more work on understanding and predicting the future?  It's pretty obvious that most companies aren't good at understanding and predicting the future, and they are so bound up in efficiency and quantitative metrics about the next month or quarter that they don't believe they have the time or insights to get it right.  There's a famous quote attributed to Nie...

I saw a sign in my Twitter feed recently that spoke volumes about innovation culture.   Let's contemplate the audacity of suggesting an idea about a movie full of sharks in tornadoes for just a moment. Creativity and Combinations To suggest a movie about sharks in a tornado demonstrates creativity.  Good innovation often happens when you combine two unexpected attributes or components together to create something new.  In this case I think everyone understood that Sharknado was over the top. And why not?  If you look at the rest of the movies being made, something a little tongue in cheek makes sense.  The first thing to take away that someone in Hollywood did right from an innovation perspective is making unusual connections. The guts to go beyond the obvious But beyond the idea of combining unlike objects, imagine the guts it takes to suggest something so new and unusual.  In many organizations even reasonable ideas get shot down very quickly.  Parti...

As a sometimes writer of blogs, white papers and even a few books, I understand the challenge of facing a blank page, trying to form the words into meaningful and insightful sentences.  A lot of times the concepts and ideas that sound so good in my head get misplaced and mis-translated on the page or simply don't ring with the same clarity when written that they seemed to have when I thought about them.  Writing in any form is a challenge, and increasingly I think writing is very similar to innovation.  Writing, after all, is the act of dreaming up something new to say about something old, bringing new concepts or new stories to light in a new way.  Writing, like innovating, is creating. What's more, writing, especially stories, takes real creativity.  Tolstoy wrote that there are only two basic story lines:  a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.  When you think of the diversity of stories, the creativity it takes to make them compell...