This week my Palm Treo 650 died and I replaced it with an Apple iPhone. These first few days, I have to say I’m very impressed. It far surpasses the Treo 650 (which cost $499 compared to the iPhone’s $199). Also, by coincidence, this week I read a 2007 Fast Company article about Apple titled… Read More Apple iPhone
I just returned from giving a keynote talk at the Business Process Management Conference. Business Process Management, or “BPM” for short, emerged in the early 1990s as a trend best exemplified by the 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy. The basic idea sounds like common sense to me: instead of… Read More Is Innovation a “Business Process”?
Today’s conference at Washington University, called the Innovation Exchange, brought together top scholars and business leaders to think collaboratively about fostering innovation. It was hosted by our new Institute for Innovation and Growth. Keynote speakers included: Bill Peck (former Dean of Washington U. Medical School and founder of Innovate St. Louis) Carliss Baldwin (Professor at… Read More The Innovation Exchange
Innovation is the flavor of the month; has been for more than a few months now. Organizational learning is another management trend–it refers to the ability of an organization to learn–to become more effective over time, to develop new knowledge and retain it to respond to future situations. What both innovation and learning have in… Read More Innovation = Learning
I was sad to read of the death of Gary Gygax, co-creator (with Dave Arneson) of the legendary role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. I was first introduced to the game when I started college at MIT in 1978. There, I learned that many of my classmates were already seasoned players from their years in high… Read More Dungeons and Dragons
A long-awaited report on how to measure innovation in the U.S. economy has just been released by the U.S. Commerce Department. The report is called “Innovation Measurement: Tracking the State of Innovation in the 21st Century Economy”. I first learned about this high-profile initiative last October; a press release revealed that a panel of CEOs… Read More Measuring Innovation
I spent a few days last week in Oklahoma City, as a keynote speaker for an event sponsored by the Creative Oklahoma initiative. Believe it or not, but Oklahoma is working hard to become known as the “state of creativity” (and they’ve gotten a good start by securing the domain name http://www.stateofcreativity.com). Like many of… Read More The State of Creativity
The annual Booz Allen Hamilton report on the world’s 1000 largest corporate R&D spenders has just been published. As with previous BAH reports, the surprising finding is that the amount of R&D spending is not correlated with any financial measures of corporate performance. It’s not how much you spend, it’s how you spend it. In… Read More How Customers Drive Innovation
Today I’m sitting at Harvard Business School, participating in what promises to be a seminal conference about creativity and innovation–with business leaders including Kim Malone Scott (Google) and Scott Cook (Intuit), and top scholars like Howard Gardner (Harvard) and Bob Sutton (Stanford). The session opened this morning with four top business leaders, who were each… Read More Harvard Creativity Conference
This last week, I visited the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency based in Geneva. I was the lead-off speaker of a two-day conference called “Intellectual property and the creative industries.” By “creative industries” they mean money-making ventures based in the creative process: the primary topics of discussion were movies, music, and… Read More The Creative Industries Around the World
The Creativity Guru 