Many creative corporate employees trying to innovate fail because they don’t fully grasp the social component of innovation. It is a social beast that must be fed and nurtured in many ways. It requires healthy relationships and many connections within your organization in order to help your peers and others recognize and act on the …
Feeding Innovation: Nurturing the Social Component Read More »
Frequently a great invention or a meaningful innovation requires input from an outsider with a new perspective. Those close to a problem, including or even especially the leading experts with years of deep experience, can easily become stuck in an intellectual rut that drives them to see the problem in their own incomplete way. Outsiders …
The Invention of the Magnetic Strip on Plastic Cards Read More »
Many large companies take a tortoise approach to innovation and stay as hidden within their shells as possible, even some who advocate open innovation. Tortoise companies may have creative R&D staff, including many scientists doing good work, but they keep these inventors hidden in the shell rather than encouraging them to publish or present their …
Tortoise Innovation: The Problem with Hiding in a Shell Read More »
Prisoners of Hope: How engineers and Others Get Lift for Innovating by Larry Vincent is an unusual book on innovation that I found to be a refreshing guide to strengthening innovation with great practical value. Part of what makes this book unusual and, for some, perhaps highly challenging, is that it is written from the …
Prisoners of Hope: Valuable Innovation Guide from Lanny Vincent Read More »
Allergan (NYSE: AGN), the major multi-specialty pharmaceutical company with expertise in ophthalmology and beauty, has been on a tear in the stock market, driven by its bold approach to innovation. The market cap, now $25 billion, has roughly doubled in the past year. I heard CEO David Pyott speak to Jim Cramer on Mad Money …
During the CoDev 2011 conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, I was impressed with a speech given by a local CEO, John (“Jay”) Rogers of Local Motors in Chandler, Arizona. This small company designs exciting new vehicles using design contests that are open to the public. Their rapidly growing community (12,000 participants so far) contributes designs and …
Local Motors: Successful Crowdsourcing as a Design Tool for Innovation Read More »
“Quorum sensing” refers to the abilities of some organisms, especially bacteria, to sense the presence of others and begin collective action such as forming a biofilm. It’s a critical area of research in immunology. There are also lessons from quorum sensing that need to be applied to business and innovation. Quorum sensing, in a sense, …
I am delighted to see Wired Magazine feature a story about the new book on the largely untold story of one of the original inventors of the computer. Nearly everyone has heard the standard story of the invention of the ENIAC computer at Penn State by a team led by John Mauchly and J. Presper …
The Invention of the Computer: Pulitzer-Prize Novelist Will Tell the Untold Story Read More »
I’m back from the week-long Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in Salt Lake City, Utah, where over 4,200 engineers from around the country and many other nations were gathered. Hundreds of technical papers were presented from researchers and leaders pursuing advanced in energy, biotech, materials, nanotechnology, chemicals, and related fields. …
In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, we explain how “Patent Pain” is one of the external innovation fatigue factors that can slow down innovation. This factor includes actions by courts and lawmakers that add to the difficulty and expense of protecting intellectual property rights. A new aspect of this problem is the recent explosion in risk to …
Used Patents: A Potentially Deadly Part of Your Portfolio Read More »