Lessons Learned: STARTUP IS VISION - Eric Reis

The following is a rather unusual guest post. One of the more surreal parts of speaking publicly and putting ideas out into the ether is to watch other people run with them. I can't seem to help tuning into comment threads on blogs, news aggregators, etc. Internet people being what they are, a lot of these comments are nasty, brutish, and short. However, every once in a while, I come across someone who consistently corrects other people's mistakes. Someone who seems to get it. And who am I to complain if that someone happens to be a giant robot dinosaur named FAKEGRIMLOCK?

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Watch as a young Steve Jobs brainstorms with the NeXT team in 1985....

What is quite extraoridnary about these videos is that Jobs saw the Apple computer as a way of revolutionising higher education. The sad reflection as you will see here is that Apple the company revolutionised the computer, music and telecommunications but failed to move the most important contemporary civilising industry - education!!

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The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key - Booz and Company Annual Study

Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

Download and read the whole report here.

Stanford's Fresh Entrepreneurship Factory - Forbes

If you could get people who love the values of design thinking — such as the push to turn ideas into prototypes that customers can use — to apply its principles to new business building, you’d produce more winning entrepreneurs. That’s the premise of the Stanford Design School’s Launchpad program — a 10 week course consisting of 20 assignments to which students from all over Stanford can apply. On May 25, I interviewed Launchpad’s co-founders Michael Dearing — a former eBay (EBAY) executive who earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School — and Perry Klebahn, formerly chief operating officer at Patagonia with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford who invented a market-leading snowshoe.

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Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity - the IBM Institute of Business Value Report 2011

"Why are some organizations consistently good at innovating and adapting while others seem to be blindsided by change? Is it because of their disciplined innovation process or the knowledge and skills of their people? Or is it their determination to build a culture where challenging assumptions is not only encouraged, but expected? Our IBM Creative Leadership Study found that leaders who embrace the dynamic tension between creative disruption and operational efficiency can create new models of extraordinary value."

To download and read the full report click here