Innovator Inside

We’ve launched ICON. It has almost 200 companies signed up in less than 2 days. We’re feeling hopeful we have something people will really value. If you’ve already had a go of the tool, thank you. If not, signup is free, so please do try it. Today, I wanted to talk about the process of [...]

Idea management has gotten quite boring lately. Everyone, it seems has a tool. And they all do the same old thing. Put your idea in. Vote a few times.. Be irritated when no one cares. Repeat until you shut down idea management in disgust. I’ve been dark for the last month or so on this [...]

These days, my job at Spigit has me spending 50% of my time in London, and the rest in California at our head offices in the East Bay area. This is very interesting, because it really illuminates the difference between startup world in both places. Firstly, the obvious: London may be a hot place to [...]

I think the professionalization of innovation is something that companies must do sooner rather than later. One of the interesting things about working here at Spigit is you get to meet lots of different innovation teams, across many cultural, sector and national boundaries. Invariably, the innovators are people who’ve been thrown into the role from [...]

My new book Sidestep and Twist is now available in the United Kingdom, with release in the US later this month. We’ll be having launch parties in the UK in early February, and East and West Coast US ones later the same month. More details on those soon. You can get it from Amazon. It [...]

The other day, I had occasion to prepare an adoption forecast for a service, and, like any good innovator who knows anything, I formulated my answer using a nice s-curve shaped curve. S-curves are such a useful tool for forecasting the adoption of anything – particularly anything that involves communication and collaboration – because they [...]

Over the last week I spent time at Dana Point, in California, where I was attending Spigit’s annual Innovation Summit. It was an excellent event, and whilst I was there, I came across these things I thought were interesting enough post… and comment on. Why Jobs was no Edison  Some 130 years after Edison’s remarkable [...]

I work for a company that makes crowds for a living. Here are some of the things I’ve discovered (with the help of my colleagues) along the way: Crowds are only useful when the quality of the crowd output improves as the size of the crowd improves. It is easy to create big groups of [...]

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” —  Howard Aiken This quote really rams it home for me. It goes to the number one reason innovation teams don’t achieve the kinds of success they imagine they deserve. They fail because they’re not [...]

The other day, I gave a presentation on some of the material from my new book Sidestep and Twist. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you’ll know the basic premise of this book is most of the big hits of recent times haven’t been especially new, and they’ve used things other than features [...]