Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

So, here is the thing...communications is about sharing. We humans are “wired” to communicate. I read once (albeit about 10 years ago) that about 67% of what people talk about on mobile handsets is what they call “gossip.” Call it what you want; gossip is communicating and everyone participates in it. Hear me out. Take “THE media”, the big, scary media, they communicate to us inane things that we really don’t care about but yet they do such a good job of imbedding us with it via the many outlets that even people like me, totally devoid of any interest whatsoever in Tiger Woods and much less Golf, have me talking and writing about it. So there, gossip IS communications. So, back to Twitter; Twitter is about a new way to communicate and document. It is a new way to share with the World and a new tool for us to use judiciously. At first I was not seeing the value of Twitter but then I immersed myself in its potential and discovered that it was up to us – the human race - to use it in away...

Reflecting back on some of my writings about how Innovators have a distinct set of skills that are very different from what our MBA culture promotes, here comes affirmation of these thoughts from the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review and Mr. Christensen himself and his associates. The title of the piece is: “The Innovator’s DNA.” Yep, discovery skills are important and distinct and they are: Observing, associating, questioning, experimenting, networking. So, smash together Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole new Mind” + Frans Johansson’s book “The Medici Effect” + Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and you get the same insights. ( A lot more work of course, but fun!) Proof yet again that new ideas are nothing but packed vectors emerging from the greater collective ethos and there really are no “pure” ideas. Perhaps, that is, for the wheel J