Top 100 innovation articles for 2012

Happy 2013! I thought I'd start the year by looking back at some of the great innovation content from 2012. Innovation Excellence has profile the 100 best innovation articles from 2012. Click here to read their whole  list.

Suffice to say, there is a wealth of content here for any business wanting to improve, however even just the Top 10 prove interesting reading:

1. Beyond Stage Gate – Repeating Disruptive Innovation – by Jose A. Briones, Ph.D.
2. Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2011
3. The Rise of Social Innovation – by Nicolas Bry
4. Five Tech Trends Impacting Business Innovation in 2012 – by Tim Sweeney
5. Has Microsoft Leapfrogged Apple – by Greg Satell
6. 10 Success Principles of Apple’s Innovation Master Jonathan Ive – by John Webb
7. Tips for Crowdsourcing, Innovation, and Savings – by Jessica Day
8. Boosting Personal Innovation Capacity – Iterate! – by Dennis Stauffer
9. What’s the Difference between Creativity and Innovation? – by Paul Sloane
10. Top 50 Innovation Tweeters

It's great reading I hope you enjoy.

Companies that are terrible at innovation

Tim Kastelle, on his blog, dissects the types of innovation based on an Innovation Matrix that measures companies based on Innovation Commitment and Innovation Competence.

He argues some companies don't need to innovate, i.e.:

well-established firms in stable industries

monopolies and oligopolies

some startups

established firms that have forgotten how to innovate

I like his reference to Schumpeter regarding innovation in startups:

"..all new firms are founded on an innovation, but there are two groups that don’t: startups in bubbles and startups in trouble."

Click here to read the full article.

Innovation doesn't matter

James Gardner has provided as provocative post on the Innovation Excellence blog, reasoning that innovation doesn't really matter because it almost nevers pays off. Recent "great" innovators like Facebook, Google and Apple didn't invent anything new.

* * * *

One of the greatest myths of our time is if you create something genuinely new, something completely unprecedented, you’ll have a better than average chance of getting rich.

So ingrained is this idea that a whole generation of young university graduates have stopped seeking a steady career in the large safe corporations their predecessors held dear, pursuing instead the dream of the startup. For most, the dream does not work out the way they expect. Hardly anyone builds the next Facebook, or the next Google, or the next Apple.

But the reason for the poor success rate is counterintuitive and is something of a dirty little secret: despite what everyone says, genuine innovation hardly ever pays off.

Click here to read the full article.

Avoiding innovation's terrible toll

A really interesting article from the Wall Street Journal.

The article says corporations are more vulnerable than you think - if they are older than 40 years they are doing well, and importantly innovating well. The article discusses what has kept IBM alive for over 100 years and what is keeping Apple and Google at the top of their game.

Click here to read the full article.

A new sense of calm

Recent process innovations implemented at MAS Mechanical have enabled the business owner Max Smith to do the enviable - take a step away from the business and allow it to function independently based on the sustainable implementation of proven practices. Now there is a new sense of calm.

Click here to read the full article.

Willing to be weird?

A post from Dr Tim Kastelle:

I think that to successfully innovate, we have to be willing to be weird. We must be prepared to succeed unconventionally, namely:

1. Reward people that come up with the weirdest ideas
2. Be extra vigilant for conventional failures
3. Make it risky to not test out new ideas

Click here to read the full article.

Three business lessons to learn from Steve Jobs

To date many have blogged (debated) about Steve Jobs and his achievements to date. Here's an interesting post from a ReadWriteWeb blogger, having recently read the Jobs autobiography, stating the three key lessons to learn from Jobs's success - intuition, reinvention and focus.

More interesting to me was the theme that emerged from the autobiography about the creativity that occurs when combining the humanities and science.

Click here to read the full blog.