Category Archives: Innovation

Don’t Bring Me Chickens or Eggs — Build Me a Farm

Innovation managers love to hate the line “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” They’ll lecture you about root cause analysis. They’ll quote Einstein: “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining … Continue reading

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What If Failing Fast Is Just Failing Wrong?

As Lewis Carroll once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” I think of this wisdom every time I hear the gospelers of the “fail-fast-fail-often” creed. I suspect that their easy acceptance … Continue reading

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The AI Paradox: Why SMEs Might Be Losing Ground Just When They Thought They’d Caught Up

Three months ago, I declared AI the great equalizer for small and medium enterprises. Today, I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m worried we might be celebrating prematurely — and that the very technology promising to level the playing field … Continue reading

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Unlocking SME Innovation: Why AI-Based Problem-Solving is the Great Equalizer

In mid-October 2009, I was visiting with a client, a large, Midwest-based paint and coating manufacturing company. As part of their product development process, the company’s engineers built a powerful outdoor pump to paint industrial buildings. The pump worked beautifully … Continue reading

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The Brainstorming Renaissance: How GenAI Tools Are Rewriting the Rules of Creativity

What if the best idea in your next big innovation meeting didn’t come from your star designer, but from a chatbot? This isn’t a futuristic thought experiment; it’s happening now. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are … Continue reading

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The End of the Crowd? (Why AI Won’t Fully Replace Human Crowdsourcing — Yet)

AI has already claimed its seat at the innovation table — and it didn’t even knock. It barged in, armed with large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, reshaping how companies ideate, prototype, and solve problems.  With astonishing speed and minimal … Continue reading

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In silico Ideation: How Large Language Models (LLMs) Help Generate New Ideas

As with every emerging general-purpose technology, Generative AI (GenAI) is searching for problems to solve. Finding the most fitting will take time. I consider it pointless to look for the things that GenAI can’t do; instead, I prefer focusing on … Continue reading

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Unlocking Novelty: How Organizations Can Select Novel Ideas

You may insist, as much as you want, that “the ideas are a dime a dozen,” but if you ever laid a hand on a real corporate innovation project, you would know that every NPD process starts with an idea, … Continue reading

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Don’t Bring Me Eggs, Bring Me Chickens!

This image was generated with the help of Gemini Innovation managers hate the line “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” They insist that before the problem-solving process starts, a thorough analysis of the underlying problem must take place; collecting … Continue reading

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Size Matters

This image was created with the help of Gemini Of the many “rules” attributed to Jeff Bezos, his two-pizza rule is perhaps the most famous: every internal team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — ostensibly to make … Continue reading

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