Tag Archives: Innovation

How to manage through disruption

in Innovation

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe, interviews Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia.

Mr. Elop has some great thoughts about innovation and about managing through disruption. It’s interesting because both of them worked at Macromedia before it was bought by Adobe. If you remember well, Macromedia used to make authoring tools for CD-Rom’s back in the day before the internet existed.

They saw that the internet was a potentially disruptive force that would undermine their business and so they had to make decisions on where to focus and place their bets. Their bet was Flash and they put all of the resources behind it. Flash went on to become the leading platform for creating dynamic content on the web.…

Reward insight or reward ideas? Both and…

in Innovation

This is a tricky question.

First of all, insights are different from ideas. Insights are more important than ideas. Breakthrough businesses are build on insights, not ideas. Ideas come after the insight. Yet in innovation circles we constantly hear that we should reward people for coming up with ideas. What about rewarding people for insights?

An insights is an undeniable truth. A pain that a large number of people have and agree on. A brainstorm to come up with potential solutions to that pain would then be called upon.

But let’s also consider that sometimes good ideas originate out of no insight whatsoever. …

Innovation posts of the week: 10 innovation myths

in Must reads of the week
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Ali Soufan 60 minutes interview

What F.B.I. Agent Ali Soufan can teach you about innovation

in Innovation

Ali Soufan 60 minutes interview

As someone who at some point thought about choosing between becoming a spy or a Navy SEAL, I couldn’t hold myself back from not reading Ali Soufan’s The Black Banners: The Inside Story about 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda.

Ali Soufan was the FBI’s top Al-Qaeda interrogator.

During his FBI stint from 1997 to 2005, Soufan was the lead investigator on major terror investigations such as the October 2000 attack on the Navy’s U.S.S. Cole which killed 17 sailors. He helped the agency investigate the attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the late 1990s, and was a key interrogator of al Qaeda detainees after the 9/11 attacks. You can also visit https://investigatorsaustralia.com.au/ for more info.

To become the top Al-Qaeda interrogator he bluffed significant intelligence from major Al-Qaeda operatives. His secret: Knowledge.

Knowledge of the enemy to be exact.…

Are you giving away too many ideas?

in Innovation, Questions

Should you give away ideas to potential clients before making a deal?

Ideas are a dime a dozen and coming up with them is really easy. Sometimes too easy. And as someone who is in ‘ideation mode’ all the time, I freely give them away to potential clients. A few of my partners don’t like this. It makes them uncomfortable because they think that we give away too much before we close the deal. It’s not strange to see that our proposals lay out an almost step-by-step strategy with as much details as possible.

The way I’ve always looked at it (and also because I think most of the proposal I’ve ever received all look alike and look more like a recipe for anyone) is that you make proposals with the intent of differentiating yourself too. With that mindset, your proposal should also ‘look and feel’ different.

But the issue is how much is too much?…

Innovation posts of the week: Breakthrough’s don’t pay

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