At the very onset of the book, I was met with my biggest challenge – teaching a concept that demands an untutored state of mind. My attempt to bring various non-business disciplines into the business world has been a stimulating journey. Innovation has become a generic and everyday term, in fact it is difficult to [...]

Organisations have traditionally been viewed through a mechanistic paradigm. This view holds that organisations are like machines and are composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. It is however, fast becoming outdated in today’s highly connected world. Modern perspectives of organisations are increasingly moving away from this mechanistic paradigm towards a view [...]

Services companies require different approaches to open innovation due to the different inherent models of sharing information during and after the creation of new service models. In a world where transparency is so important and pushing the boundaries of company secrets being exposed, how do we protect our inventions if these inventions are prominently in [...]

In an effort to explain the power of relationships and how information can lead to action, Malcolm Gladwell uses the example of Paul Revere in his much acclaimed book The Tipping Point (2003). As a real connector, Paul Revere managed to rally American colonists along the route to Lexington via the towns west of Boston [...]

In the modern economy where products and concepts can be copied easily and businesses will do almost anything to be better than their competitors, the question needs to be asked – what is it that gives a company a sustainable competitive advantage? The answer is deceptively simple: Culture with a capital C. It’s difficult to [...]

I have dedicated much of my thinking to what I perceive is happening in the landscape around me. Ideas of innovation seem to meet me at every street corner these days, so how do I make sense of what it truly means to innovate in a world where the term itself has become generic and [...]

If you have a business process that has been developed over many years, the people using the process and the people defining the process all get integrated into the technology that automates parts of it. Interfaces into the technology platforms are defined and developed based on business processes that require automated flow of information and [...]

Members of the Baby Boomer generation have experienced many types of technology from where the “Man IN the Moon” became the ‘Man ON the Moon” and when documents were duplicated using mimeograph machines (and stencils) to the present day where just a few clicks of a mouse produces as many copies as one wants, in [...]

SystemicLogic is in the process of finalising the 2010 annual innovation study. One interesting question that we ask our respondents is “Who do you share your ideas with?” The answers themselves are not earth shattering and are probably what you would expect; and that is that we primarily share our ideas with our: Managers Peers [...]

The formal structure, in the business innovation sense and at its most basic level, pertains to the formal systems of hierarchy set in place within a company. The man in the cubicle reports to the man in the white walled office, who answers to the man upstairs, who in turn falls at the feet of [...]