Famous Failures

Here is a great little video clip on a favourite theme of mine.  We should welcome failure.  It is a natural part of the innovation process and not something to be feared or avoided.  Many of the people and products that we now applaud as great successes were once seen as failures.

Paul Sloane

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Innovation lessons from the World’s Craziest Restaurants

I came across this remarkable story about the world’s craziest restaurants.  They include a toilet restaurant in Taiwan, a restaurant in the sky in Belgium, a prison restaurant in Italy and a graveyard restaurant in India.

Restaurant in the Sky

They are all remarkable and successful because they offer the consumer a novel experience.  Many [...]

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Innovating for Cash

There was a lively meeting of the Innovation Unit today when Philip Kyte and Greg Venters of Arthur D Little led a workshop on Innovating for Cash.  They defined this as innovation that leads to quick wins by increasing short term revenues or by lowering operating costs.  So for example you could boost revenue by [...]

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The Only We Can Exercise

I was speaking at a Vistage event last week and one of the delegates suggested something which I would recommend as a source of innovation thinking.  Gather some of your people together and write the following phrase at the top of a flipchart, ‘Only we can………’  Each member of the group then has to complete [...]

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Alpha Geeks lead innovation

Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, argues in this article that it is alpha geeks not venture capital backed start-ups that lead key tchnology innovations.  And they do it not for money but for the fascination of it.

‘Forget Silicon Valley.  Traditional wisdom is that it represents the model for American innovation: a [...]

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