innovation

Peter Drucker saidthat “business has only two functions — marketing and innovation .” Marketing and innovation have one thing in common – satisfying the unmet needs of the customer. The customer, thus, is at the heart of ecosystem thinking. And the customer lies outside the business.

The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more

Went down a rabbit hole for cross-industry innovations (when one industry borrows from another). Here are 8 gems. 1. James Dyson made a bagless vacuum after seeing how sawmills used cyclone force to eject sawdust. https://t.co/jre4FCdaVj

A yearning for innovation requires real exploration. It requires a persistent search to try (and fail) to move your understanding forward with a new tool, a new technique, a new insight. Sadly, the first innovation often isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that are. This is an idea that Steven Johnson of Where Good... See more

Jobs: In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would... See more