Making Innovation Happen
Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 11:04AM The corporation isn't a sturdy species. In fact, only a tiny fraction reach the age of 40, according to a study of more than six million firms by management professors Charles I. Stubbart and Michael B. Knight. "Despite their size, their vast financial and human resources, average large firms do not 'live' as long as ordinary Americans," the authors concluded.
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:35PM Innovators aren’t just the geniuses who come up with completely original ideas. More often than not, they’re the people who tweak the ideas already around them, making new things that are more useable or beautiful. In a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research last spring, economists Ralf Meisenzahl, of the Federal Reserve, and Joel Mokyr, of Northwestern University highlighted the historic value of “tweakers.” They argued that the Industrial Revolution took hold in Britain because of “the supply of highly skilled, mechanically able craftsmen who were able to adapt, implement, improve, and tweak new technologies and who provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 09:15PM Since the mid-1960s, John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. Here, John Naughton introduces a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, whose website, Edge, is a salon for the world’s finest minds. In the attached article, he discusses Marshall McLuhan, elitism and the future of the internet
Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 09:24AM As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.
Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”.....More and to read the full article click here
Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 08:19AM Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.
