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We find ourselves near the end of another fruitful, eventful year, here at December 19, 2017.  All eyes turn toward the holidays (actually, the merchandising happened in October and the Christmas muzak started in early November it seems).  While there are a few working days left in the month, and year, I thought I'd offer up some ideas for those individuals who are hard to shop for on your lists.  Today, gifts for the frustrated corporate innovator. The Frustrated Corporate Innovator We all know one of these, and in some cases this may be you.  You've longed for the rights to create some really interesting new products and services.  You've noticed product gaps and market opportunities ripe for the plucking.  Yet the organization you or your friend works for is too conservative, too risk adverse or simply too focused on existing products and services to spend time innovating.  There are several gifts I can offer you: The gift of freedom.  If you h...

I was working out this morning before work and as usual, watching the breaking news.  At 7am there are a range of news choices, and strangely each network seems to have the exact same advertisements on during the breaks.  As I was working out I realized that I knew the side effects of several medications that I don't need and don't take.  These side effects include headaches, vomiting, and so on.  The reason I know these is because there seem to be five or six pharmaceutical commercials on heavy rotation.  Thankfully, based on both the conditions they promote and the side effects, I'm not using any of them.  But listening to the adverts and thinking about how much I'd heard about the various medications and their side effects got me thinking. What if we innovators could create a regular, recurring, looping set of adverts for people in business, so that we were comfortable with the language and approach of unfamiliar methodologies and tools without ever know...

Thanks to my blog, and hopefully the insights I share here, I'm often asked to review books about innovation and innovators.  Recently I was asked to review a book entitled Quirky .  The subtitle is:  The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World.  Their capitalization, not mine. The traits that innovators possess or share has been an interest of mine for quite a while.  I researched this topic for years, reading academic papers, books and doing our own research to identify traits or characteristics that innovators have in common, so you can imagine this book was of interest to me. Quirky is as quirky does Melissa Schilling, who is a professor at NYU, took an interesting approach when writing this book.  She focused on just a handful of breakthrough innovators, going deeply into their development and lives.  This deep dive presents some interesting data, but since the population of innovators i...

I was thinking today about one of my favorite books - The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham - and the quote from the book that forms the title.  I won't bore you with a rehash, except to say that the main character is told that "the path to salvation is as narrow and difficult to walk as a razor's edge".  This from a Buddhist monk the main character, Larry, meets during his journey to find himself and his purpose not long after the end of the first World War. One of the things we are constantly taught is to find the path of least resistance - the well-defined, well-trodden path that others have taken.  This is the safest, most secure path.  The one that is easiest to travel, has the least amount of risk.  The path is known, secure and goes to a specific destination.  This is the path most of us walk every day.  The only problem is that there isn't anything new on the path.  You don't explore anything new, discover anything new.  You aren't co...