Listen to What Innovators Don't Talk About - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

While working away on my laptop at a hotel breakfast, I couldn't help but overhear the four gentlemen poring over an iPad two tables way. Their intense discussion revolved around rolling out their high-tech prototypes in a medical care complex. Since I've written about prototypes and prototyping, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. Forgive me. The foursome represented a mix of medical care complex personnel and what was clearly an entrepreneurial innovator with a potentially high-impact idea. I'll skip the technical details, but this was clearly a sophisticated group who were both smart and ambitious. The prototypes were their gateways to success. Their debates included whether it made more sense to

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The Cluetrain Manifesto, 10 Years Later - A Conversation with Doc Searls - Valeria Moltoni

This is the mother of all conversations, to borrow from a title to a post Doc Searls wrote, which I link to down below. He's among my personal heroes for thinking about the buyer's side - and doing something about it. Something hopefully radical and, if you're paying attention, really important. He writes about independence, and about providing tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. Personal tools for people to collect their own data, control it, share it selectively, assert their own terms of service (TOS), and give them means to express their own demand in the open market. In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto he writes about these points and says: base relationship-managing tools on open standards, open APIs (application program interfaces), and open code. It's what he calls the Intention Economy.

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Management by Imagination - The Conversation

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count"; "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"; "If you can't measure it, it won't happen"? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it. But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world

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"Turning Recession on Its Head: Is there an upside to the Downturn"

Bruce Nussbaum is now Contributing Editor for BusinessWeek USA but his prime interest still resides in Design and Innovation and in that regard his blog NussbaumOnDesign is always worth a read. A piece entitled "Turning Recession on Its Head: Is there an upside to the Downturn" caught my eye for two reasons. One, it is a conversation that is occurring in an opne forum on Facebook - social media promoting discussion again and two the Facebook page came out of IDEO's London office. If you are interested in following a meaningful conversation about design, creativity and innovation in the recession, this is a really good place to start.